12 weeks of learning French

12 weeks! Gosh, I'm almost at the 3 month mark too now, almost a milestone. I think I did quite a lot this week plus I started FSI. With FSI I'm going to use it as my Pimsleur substitute as an audio-only program. You mostly only have to read the text in the first part of each lesson (1.1, 2.1, 3.1, etc). The rest I use as an audio 'test' where I have to fill in the blanks before the second person. Before I figured this, I was just reading along with the text in the PDF (which wasn't really all that helpful, except maybe for pronunciation). Now that I realised I don't need to look at the text, I can actually use my brain to figure out the patterns in the drills and come up with the answers myself!

I am also doing 2 Assimil lessons per day because I want to progress as fast as I can. Pimsleur started teaching the past tense which was a little scary and I started hearing words and phrases that I had no idea how to spell, including

"J'ai été élevé..." which means "I grew up in (a place)". I googled various possibilities and I didn't know what they were saying. I thought it was 'était' and 'alaver' or 'elaver' or 'laver' in the end I had to ask!

So far I have:

• Done up to the end of Pimsleur French - Level III Lesson 10 (70 of 90 lessons)
• Done up to the end of Coffee Break French - Lesson 30 (of 66 lessons)
• Done up to the end of Assimil - Lesson 41 (of 113 lessons)
• Done up to the end of French in Action - Lesson 10 (of 52 lessons)
• Done up to the end of FSI - Lesson 11 (tape 2.5) (of 189 lessons)

Oh and also... I have been speaking and typing to a real life French guy I 'met' through LiveMocha. I even had a Skype video conversation which was pretty embarrassing because I was so nervous and so slow at talking so now I just prefer to type to him. LiveMocha is awesome as now I have my 'team' of teachers who correct my work and that I know do a good job. I've even had some write (all in fluent French) great slabs of grammar notes and pronunciation tips for me! Hahaha. I've been learning so much from doing the written exercises on there.. so I recommend you give it a shot.

And after trying to come to grips with that nasty passé composé I finally feel like I'm getting somewhere. Yay! I re-read Le Chat au Chapeau and actually understand it a lot better now.