New blog entry here: http://haisell.net/2016/01/24/french-week-3/
Week 3 target: 2932 known words.
Week 3 result: 3213 known words.
Things starting to get much more interesting as I come to the end of week 3 of my French adventure. Moving up to Beginner 2 material in the LingQ library has made reading more enjoyable and so I have been doing a lot more of it. Some great stuff in the library and just this morning I took my first look at this exciting stash of TED talks in French. This is definitely at the limits of my comprehension abilities, but is quite a fun challenge, and I find it wonderful that I can already start tackling some “real world” content at the end of my first month with French.
Two random thoughts:
The Mist Lifting. I remember Steve Kaufmann somewhere describing how the first few weeks of learning a language feel like stumbling around in the dark, or through the mist, Then bit by bit the mist lifts, and things become clearer. Definitely starting to feel some of that mist clearing. I am beginning to make out shapes, forms, patterns, and instead of doing that timid little shuffling motion you do in the dark, I’m starting to take confident little baby steps.
Bubbling up. You know when you’ve been playing too much of a computer game when you close your eyes and see pixels dancing behind your eyes. You know when you’re doing “massive input” when words and phrases in your target language start bubbling up at random. I’m in no rush to start producing French, but it is fun to see what the brain does when left to its own devices.
Week 4 target: 3738 known words.