7 weeks of learning French

It's been 7 weeks since I started learning French and so far I have:

• Done up to the end of CD 8 Lesson 4 (of 8 CDs, last lesson is CD8/L12) of Michel Thomas French


• Done up to the end of Level II Lesson 6 (of 3 levels x 30 lessons) of Pimsleur French


• Done up to Week 7 Day 3 (of 7 weeks x 7 days) of Teach Yourself Starter Kit French


• Done up to the end of Lesson 15 of Coffee Break French (by Radio Lingua network)


• Did FSI - French Phonology - Chapter 01 1.1


• Started Assimil and did up to end of Lesson 6

Michel Thomas is coming to an end.. no.. I don't want it to end because I love his method of teaching so much. It feels like you have your own personal tutor so much. I don't think I'd get as much out of Pimsleur if I didn't do MT at the same time.

With Pimsleur this week - I found Lessons 1, 2, 3, 4 relatively easily and so far have had to play most lessons 1-3 times but when i got to Lesson 5 I had to play it 5-6 times before it sunk in.

I started the free FSI course. The voice is really scary. It sounds like something from the 30s or 40s during WWII.. like some kind of radio announcer voice. It's quite weird and funny though. The repetition was starting to get annoying towards the end but I guess I learnt something about pronunciation and learning to hear the sounds correctly.

I also started Assimil this week and I feel like the pace is too quick so I go over each lesson a few times, listening and reading several times (and repeating out loud) to make sure it sinks in. However, since I've only just started I already knew most of the vocab and grammatical structures but I'm sure it'll get much harder later on.

I did lessons 1, 2 and 3 straight after each other on the first day and my method was this:

1. Write out the story/dialogue (in French) and do the exercises (both written down, and orally).
2. Go to the previous lesson and looking at the French side only, translate it into English.
3. On the third day, write down the third dialogue, go back to the first dialogue (in French, from the book) and translate that into English, and translate the second one from English into French.

Hopefully that made sense. So you can see why I did the first 3 all in one go. And why I'm now up to lesson 6, because I was doing them in groups of 3s but now I'm just doing one per day, or maybe 2 if they are easy/short.