WRITTEN TRANSCRIPTION OF THE PODCAST:

Hello and welcome to my podcast My Life and Other Funny Stories. My name is Dagmar Tomášková, I am an English tutor and coach and I created this podcast for English students who want to get better in their oral comprehension. As always you can find the transcription of this episode and vocabulary list in the notes of the podcast. 

Today I want to talk about my journey of learning French. I will cover this topic in two episodes because in this one, I want to show you my background and my plan that I created for myself and next time I will share with you the actual process – since it is always a little different in reality than in our mind. 

But remember- I am not here to teach you how to learn French – I will share with you my ultimate tips which are applicable to any language. So if you  take those principles and apply them on your own individual journey, you WILL improve your English. 

Let’s get into it.

I think it is important to mention the background story of my French- I started learning French when I was 15 and studying at grammar school. I started with French because we had to choose one of three languages – French, German or Russian. I was so over German by that point because it was torture in elementary school…so what did I choose? DId you say French? WRONG! My first choice was Russian and my second choice was French. But as there were a lot of people in the German and Russian classes, they put me into the French class. 

And thank God for that. I am so grateful that I started learning this beautiful, amazing language. So, anyway, even though I was a good student and always headed for straight A’s, I wasn’t really motivated to actually learn French. So I was doing all the assignments, learning the vocabulary but I didn’t do anything on top of that – it was a school subject for me. Nothing more.

I was flowing through the high school years but at the beginning of my senior year, I decided to do my maturita exam in French. That was very ambitious as my level was quite bad but I started to actually study and learn actively. During that year, I improved my level immensely and managed to pass my maturita but to be honest, any French real-life skills were still a mystery to me.

Then I went to university where I completely forgot about French for about a year but then I found out that I have to have a second language, apart from English, at B2 level to be able to go to the final exams, so I started to work on my French again and had a French language course and then a political subject in French. That gave me, again, the hope that I could actually get better at it. 

So when my master’s studies came, I decided I wanted to go on Erasmus to France.  I already needed level B2 to apply and thankfully my university French teacher wrote a letter that I had it. So I could go. I won’t go into detail about my Erasmus since I think I have already talked about it more than enough but long story short, I improved my French quite a lot. When I came back, it all went downhill. I had to start writing my thesis, finish my studies and work all at the same time and I simply didn’t have the time or energy for French. 

So for a whole year, I didn’t do anything. And in a year, you forget a lot. 

I felt so lost. I felt like I had forgotten almost everything, even the most basic vocabulary was suddenly impossible to remember.

So, like many people, last year in January I said to myself: “ENOUGH. You will not let the hard work and years of learning French go to waste. I want to get better again!”

Which is something a lot of people say to themselves. But what I knew, as an English tutor, was that I had to have an answer to three important questions:

WHAT?

WHY?

HOW?

What do I want to achieve? I want to get better in French again. I want to be fluent.

But you see, this answer is literally meaningless– it is SO, SO general. It means nothing. Let’s go deeper with that.

What does it mean to be fluent for me? 

It means not being afraid to ask anything anywhere in France.

It means being able to reply to any question in public and be completely self-sufficient. 

It means having a conversation with French friends over a glass of wine and laughing, understanding everything.

It means reading a French book and watching a French movie and understanding.

Second question: Why do you want to achieve that? I want to be fluent in at least three languages, I want to be able to live for some time in France. I want to create meaningful connections and I want to be able to talk to people whom I met in France in their native language.

Okay, this is more specific, nice. Now, onto the third question: HOW am I going to do it? How will I improve?

I knew that I needed to improve in these areas: grammar, writing, speaking, pronunciation and comprehension. The two most important were speaking and comprehension. But I wanted all of them. 

Because I wasn’t in any rush, I just wanted to work on all of them at once. I didn’t say to myself that I would be fluent by the end of the year. Because I know how hard it is to get it and get better in more areas at the same time. So I didn’t give myself any deadline.

With that, my one goal was to devote 20 minutes to French at least five times a week. That was realistic for me. Let’s look at how I put together the plan. Just to remind you- this was the ideal plan, I will talk about the changes and modifications next time:

1. GRAMMAR: I made a list of grammar topics that are problematic for me. Then I put together a folder where I would store my materials about different grammar topics such as tenses and other rules. I always found the rules on the internet, made notes in my notebook and then I found some online exercises and practice.
2. WRITING: I found a list of topics and then every time I wanted to practice, I typed into Google for example: family french conversation questions and I chose one and wrote a short text. Then I went to GPT and told it to correct me. I also downloaded an app called HelloTalk where you can chat with people.
3. SPEAKING AND PRONUNCIATION: The initial plan was to train on my own and just talk to myself and also call my French friend Shems here and there and chat. But later I found out that it was not enough so I decided to start French conversations with my tutor Eliška.
4. READING: I started practicing my reading with Easy Stories in French which were okay for my level. Later, I decided to challenge myself and I started reading Harry Potter because a few years ago, I read the first one and I wanted to come back to it. And I am still doing it now. Of course, not the same book but I’ve already read the first three parts and now I am in the process of reading the fourth one.
5. COMPREHENSION: Last but not least, I needed to practice my listening skills. I found French podcasts that were good for my level and I listened almost every day.

So these were the specific activities that I could choose from every day. And that is what I did- with certain changes and modifications. The journey was not easy but I was determined to persevere. And I did. 

But what were some obstacles? How did I manage to stick with it and never stop? How much did I actually improve in all of these areas?

I will answer all those questions next time! Thank you so much for listening to this episode and don’t forget that you can find the transcription and vocabulary list in the notes. Please give it a five-star rating if you liked it and I will see you next time, bye-bye.