Review of The Novel "Flirting with French"

It has been a while since I last posted a review of a language-related book, which made me want to read a book for pleasure even more. The novel “Flirting with French: How a Language Charmed Me, Seduced Me & Nearly Broke My Heart”, written by William Alexander, had been sitting on my shelf at home for quite some time, because I had never gotten a chance to read it in college. Despite being a slow reader, I read a lot of it in just a few days, as I was instantly hooked.

If you are looking for a good read that makes you laugh, smile, and even ponder about your own life, this is just the book for you. The entire book is about William’s experiences wanting to become more than just a Francophile. His biggest change is having to learn the French language in order to truly become French.  As the inside flap of the novel says “Alexander eats, breathes, and sleeps French (even conjugating in his dreams). He travels to France, where mistranslations send him bicycling off in all sorts of wrong directions, and he nearly drowns in an immersion class in Provence… While playing hooky from grammar lessons and memory techniques, Alexander reports on the riotous workings of the Académie française, the four-hundred-year-old institution charged with keeping the language pure; explores the science of human communication, learning why it’s harder for fifty-year-olds to learn a second language that it is for five-year-olds; and, frustrated with his progress, explores an IBM research lab, where he trades barbs with a futuristic hand-held translator.”

If that description still has not gotten you excited about this novel, I do not know what else will. Before delving deep into the storyline, I did not have many expectations of what this book could offer, because I had wrongly assumed that I was very knowledgeable about the subject, but even I was wrong. This novel combines scientific evidence and facts, real life experiences, history, culture, linguistics, and modern language into a mere 260 pages. You not only learn about the history of the French language and how it has evolved over time, but also about the culture that is associated with it, which ultimately determines how language is used. He also did a significant amount of research about how he would go about self-teaching French at “such an old age” by consulting with many polyglots and language experts. You even learn a thing or two about how linguistics, therefore getting a small taste of what that field entails.

No matter how old you are, what prior knowledge of French or other languages you have, or lack thereof, I recommend this book to any reader, especially one who is interested in languages as much as I am. I will warn you that it may be hard to understand some of the nuances, words, phrases, or jokes that Alexander mentions throughout the book, as they are written in French, but do not fear if you have never had contact with the French language. He italicizes everything that is written in French, making it easy for you to look up what he is saying if you so desire. If you have studied French before, or, better yet, speak it well, you will find this book to be very enjoyable and entertaining. It may even help you brush up on your French.

I hope that you enjoyed reading this post and that you give this book a try. I promise that if you have accidentally or purposely come across this post, or even this blog, you will not be disappointed. Happy language-learning!

Foreign Language Vocabulary Builder Using Anki (Application)

I have been waiting months to write this post, because I wanted to make sure that I gave you the best tips and that I genuinely knew how to best use Anki. In case you have never heard of it, Anki is an application, which you can download online for free, or on your phone for a decent price. I first found out about it when I read a book that gave practical tips on ways that you could start making a better use of time when learning languages. Although I have not been able to use it every day, due to being a full-time student and doing a lot of extracurricular activities, I have used it for a total of over a year, so I can confidently say that Anki alone is one of the most valuable tools of which I have taken advantage over the years. I have not only increased my vocabulary, but also now know how to teach myself abstract words that are harder to master.

The way that it is used is very simple. When you open up the application, you have three tabs from which to choose: Decks, Add, or Browse. If you click “Decks”, you can directly click on one of your decks and start learning a fixed number of cards a day. For example, in my deck named “Deutsch”, it currently says that I have 30 new cards and 0 new cards. This means that, based off of the amount of cards that I want to learn per day, I should review all 30 of those cards today.

If you click on the tool icon to the right of where it says “New”, you have 4 options: Rename, Options, Export, and Delete. If you want to change the name of one of your deck of cards, simply click “Rename” and type in what you want that deck to be called. In the options tab, you can choose “Default” if you feel that you can study the amount of cards that the program is defaulted as. You can also choose “Show new cards in random order”, or “Show new cards in order added” under “Order”. Lastly, you simply choose how many cards you want to learn a day in a certain graduation interval (ex: 1 day), as well as change the easy interval and the percent of your starting ease.

I usually learn 10, or 20 cards a day, but what is great about this application, is if you ever feel that you cannot learn, say 20 cards a day like you originally set out to do, you can adjust that every day if you feel like it is necessary to do so. Anki is an application that you can adjust based on your particular needs and does not make you do something that you do not want to do.

Now that I have covered the basics as to how Anki works, you are probably wondering how I actually use it. Although I will try to do my best to explain how this application works, please make sure to watch the video that I attached above, so that you know how to properly use it step by step. Otherwise, you will probably be very confused and will not understand what I feel like any language learner should know how to use. The first step to adding cards to a deck that you name is to click “Add” and to click on one of the decks that you have, so that you are assured that the new cards that you will add are placed into the correct deck.

Then, I go to www.google.com/images and search for an unknown word in its original language (keep in mind that this step is absolutely crucial if you want to get the most out of this application). For example, if I did not know that “la Estrella” were “the star” in Spanish, I would type in “la estrella” and would find the image that most appealed to me. In other words, I try finding images that are not only visually appealing, but that also help me remember what the word means without translating it from Spanish to English. I then pu the word in its original language where it says “Back”, or I will copy and paste a phrase that is attached to an image and leave the word that I am trying to learn underlined like this: ___________.

Although this process can be time-consuming, what is great about it is that there is truly no wrong way to do it. You do not have to add 100 new words every day. Instead, you have to be consistent and try to use it every day when you are starting if you can. If you cannot, then try using it several times a week. It should not take you more than 15 minutes to study the amount of words that you asked Anki to show you, and it is a really fun and interactive way to expand your vocabulary. Instead of simply using the traditional notecard method that can be tedious to write and use, you are using, reading, and saying new words in your target language. This forces you to switch from, say German mode to English mode.

What is most important about this process is that you search for words, or even phrases of the words that you want to learn in your original language. Avoid translating words as much as possible, and only do so to quickly check if you know the direct translation from your target language to your native language, but avoid putting in any words, or even images that contain words in your native language if you want to expand your vocabulary by twofold, or threefold.

I hope that you found this post practical and helpful. Have an amazing week and continue enjoying summer!