Preferably American English to French … but that’s just me.
I find much advice about language learning. Personal accounts, not so much. Though I’m sure they are out there.
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Olly Richards has some videos explaining how he learnt a couple of languages. Steve Kaufmann has videos on how he learnt French and German, maybe Japanese and other languages too. These are on YouTube. You might be interested in Vaughan Smith’s progress, a true language genius and quite unlike most of us, I believe his autism explains his ability. Alex Rawlings might have a video or two. I recently saw that Richard Simcott was interviewed about how he learns a language, he’s a true high achiever. Kató Lomb might be of interest, but I doubt there are any first person videos. She did write a book about her experiences. The Wikipedia entry might be of interest:
As Lýdia Machová has pointed out, each polyglot has their own method, there aint no one size fits all approach.
I wrap up my Lingoda B2.3 lessons in a few weeks and plan on taking the DELF B2 in December. While I did have some French exposure and experience before, nearly all of my serious efforts have been after the pandemic and nearly all of my acquisition and learning online.
@LeifGoodwin shares the experiences of some known polyglots. However, at present these unique humans might be sharing how they learn their Nth language( Simcott) or simply might be making popular commercializable content (Olly).
Further, I’d suggest best methods vary by certain factors…
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What in-person resources do you have access to? Classes? Friends?
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What financial resources do you have access to? Can you pay for online or in-person classes and/or tutoring?
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What’s your learning style? Do you prefer learning solo or with others? From a teacher or more on your own?
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What’s your motivation and goals? Why French? What do you like about the French culture?
I think if you filled in answers to these four questions, you’d get incredibly relevant input from the people here.
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I’m interested in first-person accounts. I had in mind those by people more ordinary than polyglots.
Unless I say so explicitly, I am never looking for advice here.
Maybe such as this:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=comment+j'ai+appris+le+français
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@jt23,
Well, I kind of thought about making a post about my recent milestone of 10 million words read, and how far it has got me but I’m kind of lazy in that regard, so I’ll maybe do it later around 15-20 M words read.
I think my “first-person account” will be interesting for all the French learners here, on this platform, since I’ve used almost exclusively input-method. So look out for it in the future.
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Looking forward to hearing your experience, as someone just starting out with Lingq for French myself.
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I’ve been studying French 4-5 hours/day for 20 months. Which is to say I’m not fluent, but I’m not a noob either.
It’s a been a rich experience in terms of the learning as well as the mental, emotional, psychological and cultural aspects.
I now have much more respect for those I’ve met who made the journey from their native language to English.
I’m curious what the journey is like for others.
Those are valid points.
There are videos in which various polyglots describe learning their first or second foreign language. For example Steve Kaufmann talks about French, and Olly Richards does likewise. Obviously many produce videos to publicise their own products, so a healthy scepticism is advisable.
These people might be uniquely gifted at languages, but they usually claim otherwise. Vaughan Smith is an exception, he is phenomenal.
My opinion is that achievement in second language acquisition requires determination, not natural gifts. I was very bad at French at school, with a mediocre grade after five compulsory years of study. I took up French again a few years later, moved to Montreal for two years, and failed to achieve fluency. Thirty years later I restarted French, using Duolingo for eight months, followed by Babbel for two months and then LingQ for over a year. I made massive improvements in my comprehension and understanding thanks to LingQ. I hope to do the same with German, and thus far the master plan is on track.
My secret language learning theory ™ is that you must first get a solid foundation in the language so that you are in the low intermediate level. How you do that does not matter, as long as you get there. You don’t need to understand much grammar, or have good pronunciation. Then you listen to as much input as possible, which allows the brain to learn implicity. The input can be comprehensible, semi-comprehensible or even a little that is mostly incomprehensible. You should do some study of the input, you might use Anki, you might only get the gist of some of the input, details don’t matter, hard work, attention and quantity matter. I suspect this is pretty much what most people here do anyway. There’s no magic formula, no one size fits all methodology.
They say subsequent languages are easier, presumably because you learn how to learn.
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I gotta say, same here. I now realize that people whose English I struggle to understand, who learned it as an adult, are WAY up there at a super advanced level and probably worked their butts off to get that far.
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Amen!
I’m sure glad I’m not learning English.