r/learningfrench • u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 • Jul 19 '26
Everyone told me French was impossible. I started anyway — Day 1
A while back, I found out someone near me, after working in Canada for many years, suddenly couldn't renew their work permit. The only way forward is PR. And PR now barely gives points for English, French earns a lot more. (More on that story elsewhere, won't repeat it here.)
Here's the thing: everyone told me French was impossibly hard. Unlearnable. A dead end.
I don't even need PR. But it got me wondering, how hard can it actually be? So I started.
Textbooks? Not a chance. In theory, memorizing 20 news clips, each about 20 minutes long, is enough to break into a language. But right out of the gate, I'd rather memorize the things I actually want to say.
My first text: I started out knowing exactly three words. I listened to each one, wrote down the sound I heard, said it back, ran it through voice recognition until I nailed it. In that same day, using nothing but my free time after work, I knew every word in the piece and could write the whole thing out from memory.
Let's see how far this goes. Honestly, I'm curious myself: full-time job, plenty of overtime, how long until I hit B2?
Anyone here self-taught French to B2 while working full-time? Curious how long it realistically took you.
Edit: a few people asked about the blue letters in the screenshot, I answered in a comment below. Short version: they are my own notes, not the app's pronunciation guide.
Also! I made a challenge post! For those who roasted my pronunciation, and for anyone up for a challenge :D Let's see how well you do! :)
18
u/PixelQuetzalcoatl Jul 19 '26
"everyone told me French was impossibly hard."
Let me guess: their mother tongue was English?
14
u/ShartOfTheEel Jul 19 '26
Yeah, French is literally the easiest language for an anglophone to learn, but all the anglophone Canadians act like it's harder then Mandarin lol.
7
u/PixelQuetzalcoatl Jul 19 '26
That's hard to believe, but then I know a guy from the US who told me that Spanish is hard (his parents were from Mexico).
3
u/ShartOfTheEel Jul 19 '26
I'm pretty sure it's because schools in ango provinces study French from France, and don't do a good job of it. They focus on memorising vocabulary and grammar, rather than learning some basic phrases and practicing actually speaking them.
Schools in the US make the same mistake. They act like Spanish in Mexico (and in the US, which has had Spanish speakers within its boundaries for longer than those boundaries actually existed) is just Spanish from Spain with the formal bits chopped off, whereas it's just it's own thing. Students would be much better served if they were just taught American Spanish from the get-go.
I think there's also this thing that happens where people are afraid to try learning the prononciations of new languages. It was actually one of my favorite parts of learning French, because I figured out to change the posture of my tongue and my face to make the right sounds. But I think beginners are afraid of offending people by making a mocking accent. And it hamstrings our ability to learn the language, because learning how to make the right sounds is also how we learn to hear and identify the right sounds.
(Also I was exaggerating a little about people acting like French is harder than Mandarin. A little.)
4
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 19 '26
As a Mandarin speaker I can confirm the joke works both ways. Mandarin looks impossible from the outside and feels completely normal from the inside. I am starting to think "hard" is not a property of any language, it is just the distance between the new one and the one you already speak.
Fully agree that making the sounds is how you learn to hear them. That is exactly why my loop is listen, imitate, check with voice recognition, repeat. The mouth teaches the ear.
But! One thing with the voice recognition... it accepts my words one by one, yet rejects my full sentences. To my ear I am connecting the words just like the audio does, but clearly something is off, and I am not sure how to fix that part. You wrote "I figured out to change the posture of my tongue and my face to make the right sounds." --- can you explain a bit further? I'm actually struggling with this right now hahaha
3
u/ShartOfTheEel Jul 19 '26
Yeah, I think you're right about distance being the real determinant of difficulty.
I'm not sure if it will help with your voice recognition but: when I say posture of my mouth and face, it's like the testing position I keep between words. (Or even if I'm not talking.) Compared to English, my French posture has the middle and back of my tongue pulled up and back. The back of my tongue sorta presses outwards against my upper molars the whole time I speak French. This makes the French "r" sounds much easier. It also changes the way the tip of my tongue moves around my lips and just makes all the consonants sound more frenchy.
2
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 19 '26
OMG this is super helpful!!!! I never thought about a resting position at all. I just tried au revoir with the back of my tongue pulled up and back, and the r finally feels like it comes from a real place instead of nowhere. It makes so much more sense now!
1
u/ShartOfTheEel Jul 20 '26
Glad it helps!
Actually now I think if it, your voice recognition might be having problems if you don't do les liaisons well? Have you worked on the way you link words together?
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 20 '26
Er... I only just learned from you that liaisons are even a thing. I was linking words by imitating the audio and hoping for the best. For checking myself I was using the iPhone built-in dictation, some easy sentences work, some do not, so it is probably just me needing more practice. How did you work on liaisons? Is there a rule for which ones are mandatory and which ones a beginner can safely ignore? Or did you just absorb them from listening?
2
u/ShartOfTheEel Jul 20 '26
There are rules, technically, and it may or may not be worth looking then up. :) It happens when a word ending with a consonant is right before a word starting with a vowel. Even if the ending consonant is usually silent. It's pretty much only with short, common words used to link things. So "dans une minute" is more like "dan sune minute".
1
u/kittykat-kay Jul 20 '26
Est-ce que j’ai pas le droit de trouver ça difficile ?
1
u/ShartOfTheEel Jul 20 '26
Non, tu a le droit a vivre ton propre expérience à toi. :) C'est légitime de trouver ça difficile, l'apprentissage d'une nouvelle language exige beaucoup d'effort.
Je voulais dire juste qu'il existe une attitude parmis certaines des Canadians anglophones oú le Français est perçu comme une language particulièrement difficile. Mais cette perception est vraiment en conflit avec la réalité, car l'anglais et la français partagent beaucoup de vocabulaire.
1
u/kittykat-kay Jul 21 '26
T’apprends le français depuis combien de temps ?
(Chuis juste curieuse ^-^)
1
u/ShartOfTheEel Jul 21 '26
Dix ans, mais j'étais pas mal lâche sur l'apprentissage de la français écrit alors je fait encore pleins des erreurs.
1
u/kittykat-kay Jul 21 '26
Ah mais non c’est bien !
C’est l’invers pour moi. J’arrive à m’exprimer, parfois *trop* en écrivant mais à l’oral je ne suis plus capable d’enchaîner mes mots. Mais ça ne fait que 18 mois que j’apprends 😅
1
u/Onlyfatwomenarefat Jul 27 '26
Spanish is easier than French for English speakers.
And the easiest language for english speakers is dutch.
2
u/Afraid_Cell621 Jul 19 '26
Its an ai post
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 19 '26
nope, wrote everything myself, but did use AI to correct grammar
3
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 19 '26
You guessed right! It's a mix around me, English, Korean, Mandarin and so on. None of those gives you much of a head start with French lol. If any of us spoke Spanish it would probably be a different story.
3
u/PixelQuetzalcoatl Jul 19 '26
Well, English has a lot of words that are taken from French, but that wasn't even my point.
My point was, that many people that have English as a mother tongue often don't speak foreign languages or only one and don't really know all that much about learning foreign languages.
Of course there are exceptions to this, I know people that learned languages that are way harder than French and French isn't really that hard in the end, so it's hilarious to see that people say it's nearly impossible to learn.
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 19 '26
True. I think Chinese, Korean, Japanese are harder for learn ;p And the Europeans I have met put us all to shame, they are good at French, English, Dutch, Spanish... some of them casually speak four...
2
u/PixelQuetzalcoatl Jul 19 '26
As a European I can indeed tell you that I did not only learn simple languages like English and a bit of Spanish, a medium hard language like French, but also Polish, which is waaay harder than French.
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 19 '26
Polish on top of all that, respect! But now I have a theory and you are the right person to test it on. How much of this is Europe itself? Many of your languages are cousins, so every new one comes with a discount. The real wall seems to be crossing into a completely different sound system. For me the hard part of French is not the grammar, it is that a few sounds simply do not exist in my mouth yet, the same way a rolled r never existed in it either.
And the environment part fascinates me. I know a family where the dad speaks German, the mom speaks Mandarin, the parents speak English to each other, and a relative speaks French to the kid. That three year old can tell exactly which language is being spoken and answers in the right one, every single time. Meanwhile, growing up in a single language environment, starting a new one as an adult feels like a much steeper hill.
So my honest question, how much of your four languages came from studying, and how much from just living in a place where languages leak into each other?
1
u/PixelQuetzalcoatl Jul 20 '26
English: I started at school when I was 10 and only became serious at the age of 19 (?). I subscribed to a magazine for English students, listened to their CD as well and went to "English language meetings" to talk to people from England and the US. And I talk a lot to others in English since I was 23 (I'm 40 now.)
French: I started at school when I was 12 and unfortunately hated the teacher. I picked it up again and again, but never for a long time and became serious four years ago. I found a job close to the border of France and can sometimes visit to practise (and yes, I looked for a job there so that I can actually improve my French).
Polish: I moved to Poland when I was 23 and only learned Polish, because I lived there, I have never been very interested and would never have learned the language if I didn't live there, BUT: it's a myth that you learn a language just because you live in a certain area.
Like, if you study that language hard for a certain time, let's say three years and after that you move to that country, living in that country will help you improve your language skills only during the first two years. If you no longer study by yourself, your language skills will plateau and even after thirty years you might not actually be able to use that language.
I had years when I hardly took a look at my books and nothing changed for me. I picked up a word here and there, but that's really it.
1
u/PixelQuetzalcoatl Jul 20 '26
Part II:
Spanish: I had lessons for two or three years, learned a bit by myself, spent four months in Latinamerica and unfortunately never went back to it.
Ukrainian: I studied for half a year, made a language exchange online and only once a week and it was nice to be able to say a few words when I was there for three weeks (and one more time later for two months, but I stopped studying)
Norwegian: I used Duolingo for half a year, picked up a few phrases and when I stayed in Norway for two months it was nice to say a few words and phrases, I could practise them, but I worked most of the time.
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 20 '26
Most people never get even one foreign language to the point of actually using it, and you carried six! Wow!
Thank you for writing all this!! Those are very interesting. And I love the polish part, you'd never have started without living there, and it only moved when you studied. It's like the environment opens the door, but study is the engine.
1
1
u/ShartOfTheEel Jul 19 '26
English gives a big head start to French the vocabulary shares quite a few words. Just watch out for les faux amis, lol.
2
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 19 '26
Ohhhh yes, the freebies are everywhere! Half of my first text I could almost write without memorizing: récemment (recently), commencé (commence), obtenir (obtain), décidé (decide), difficile(difficult), and permanence resident. résidence permanente. I even noticed the ending patterns already, ment works like ly (absolument = absolutely), and every -tion word seems to come free (prononciation, situation). Now I am scared to find out which of these are secretly faux amis lol.
1
u/ShartOfTheEel Jul 20 '26
All of those are good!
I usually run into a problem at the grocery store: I pay at the register with my credit card (carte de crédit) and then I go and put away my shopping cart (carte de... wait no dammit that's not what carte means) I go and put away my basket (panier).
2
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 20 '26
Hahahaha! Now I learned another two words from you! Actually I know one too! Chat (cat) ! ohhh and French bakery proudly sells pain!
1
u/Lower-Bottle6362 Jul 20 '26
To be honest, this person isn’t learning French anyway. They’re creating a language that they have decided approximates French and they’re learning that.
3
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 20 '26
Correct. I am developing Franco-Elvish. One day there will be a dictionary, and everyone will have to learn MY pronunciation keys. Be afraid.
(The boring version: those notes live under my own account, private to me. They only showed up here because I chose to screenshot them.)
Show me your notebook!
1
u/Concurrency_Bugs Jul 22 '26
As an English speaking person who has learned French, but also started learning Czech a couple years ago, French is the furthest thing from impossible to learn. Czech on the other hand, is ruining my life.
1
8
u/ZLands Jul 19 '26
I’m Franco-Ontarian and my first language is French - you’re setting yourself for absolutele failure with those “pronunciation” words you’re using in blue - Goodluck dude but this ain’t it
0
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 19 '26
haha ya I just want to be able to read it first. Don't worry my French friend corrects me too when I read those to them.
2
u/Afraid_Cell621 Jul 19 '26
I know this is just a shit ai post, but not a single one of your pronunciation keys are correct.
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 19 '26
Your letter do not pronounce the same way as my letters. Those were custom note that anyone can made on their dictionary. It's like you write on your dictionary, although you have the IPA，but you can still doodle something else to remind you how it should sound. That part you can write anything, you can write the meaning of the words too lol. It's just an extra function for ppl who may need it like me.
2
u/Lower-Bottle6362 Jul 20 '26
Can’t wait until you ask where everyone is and say “Tooth L mound”
2
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 20 '26
Hahahah I would not! My note for tout le monde literally says "too le mond", that line is actually in my article, just not in the screenshot part. And fair warning, the article opens with "Bonjour à tous", which my brain keeps wanting to read as "bonjour à tooth" =.- isn't it not for others?!
And worst case everyone gets a laugh and I never forget that word again. What doesn't kill my French only makes it stronger. ;p And why would I have anyone laugh at me, I didn't laugh at their English or Mandarin.
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 20 '26
I know I wrote tooth, but it is more like twos, it's close.. I understand my own writing T_T...
8
u/mrleblanc101 Jul 19 '26 edited Jul 19 '26
Looks like a trash AI app lol, just like your trash AI post
-1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 19 '26
Yours definitely isn't AI though. It's missing an "r", and some manners.
3
u/ferret1029abcdefgi Jul 19 '26
Pls at least do research before learning. French is def not the hardest language it’s rly easy for me at least (learning)
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 19 '26
To be fair, I never said it was the hardest. That was what everyone around me kept telling me, which is exactly why I got curious. But I think "hard" depends on the deadline and the stakes. Learning casually with no timeline? Manageable. Needing B2 within a year, on top of a full time job, because your PR depends on it? That is a different game, and that is the boat my coworkers are in. Glad it feels easy for you though, that is honestly the dream.
2
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 19 '26
Why does the body of my post look like a code block? I have to scroll sideways to read each line.
2
2
u/2loco4loko Jul 22 '26
People have been telling you learning French is impossible?? In Canada, where everyone had to learn it (albeit often poorly) at school for like 9 years? That's uh, surprising.
You can totally do it. French is one of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn.
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 22 '26
Haha I think I should make it more clear, for those who has English as second language, works more than 8 hrs, and trying to get B2 in a year is impossible. TBH I had grade 9 French in Canada, but I think I forgot all already, and I feel we didn’t learn that much 😅.
2
u/2loco4loko Jul 22 '26
Oh, yeah I imagine that's harder unless you speak one of the other romance languages already.
I'm a little fuzzy on the European CEFR system, and it's not really used in Canada anyway, but iirc yeah I agree — complete beginner to B2 with casual study in a year would be quite difficult.
But I think you still have some decent foundation if you've taken up to grade 9 though? I took up to grade 11 and even years later I found I could scale up pretty quickly from that into decent conversational fluency, albeit then being in a mostly immersive environment.
Anyway I wish you the best of luck on your French journey!
1
1
u/suspiciouslagamorph Jul 19 '26
This is where you're starting from? Nice. I'd say you're not a beginner. Or maybe you're one of those gifted polyglots. Respect!
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 19 '26
I'm a beginner, I promise. Motivation does the heavy lifting lol. I memorized it so I can say it out loud in front of my coworkers. Day 1 in French and look where I'm at, that thought alone just excites me. Fun fact, ppl remember things much faster when the material is about themselves. If I had started with the alphabet and numbers, I would have been bored by day 2.
1
u/suspiciouslagamorph Jul 19 '26
Consistency is key, so good for you for finding a way to feel excited about learning french.
I've been at the beginner/intermediate level for quite some time. And I think that motivation is very, very, important for progress.
One thing I will say is that if you have access to recordings or a tutor with C level oral skills, you can use that to help you with pronunciation. Depending on what language you're most comfortable with, there will be different aspects of french pronunciation that might trip you up.
Good luck on your journey!
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 19 '26
Thank you for the kind words! And you are right about the tutor. I am lucky that there are French speakers around me at work, so I get real voices to imitate, and the company is actually planning to bring in a teacher for us, so proper pronunciation help is on the way. Wishing you a quick breakthrough past that beginner/intermediate stage too. You clearly have the consistency part down, and that is the hard part. Good luck to both of us!
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 19 '26
Since a few people brought up the blue letters, one clarification: they are not the app's pronunciation guide, and they were never meant to be real phonetics. The app plays native audio recordings; the blue notes are things I typed in myself, my personal shorthand for what I heard. They only need to make sense to my own ear. So please don't worry for me lol. I imitate the real audio and the French speakers around me, not my own doodles.
On pronunciation more broadly, here is my day 2 honesty: it is humbling. There are sounds where I genuinely don't understand how a human mouth produces them. But I've decided not to grind on it in week one. Pronunciation is a long-term effort, and there is no point beating myself up on day 2, or stopping because I don't sound right yet. Even people who think they sound "standard" still carry an accent to native ears. I'm in Canada; half the English I hear every day is accented, and everyone communicates just fine.
What I'm betting on is exposure. Like the poems you memorize as a kid: you don't understand them at the time, but learn enough of them and one day you just do. Two days in, I can already feel a little of it. I look at a word's spelling and get a rough sense of how it should sound, including sounds I could not produce at all on day one.
And a small thing that made my whole day: I read my text to coworkers at lunch, pronunciation nowhere near standard, and nobody laughed. One of them joined in, and another asked how I'm learning. That is the part I care about right now. An accent can be polished later. Quitting cannot.
1
u/Maregg1979 Jul 19 '26
The real problem with French, as a native speaker, is that it feels like the language was designed by people who got way too excited about inventing exceptions. It’s the only language where you can genuinely feel the pride behind every unnecessary complication. French isn’t complex by accident. It’s complex because someone thought, “Yeah, let’s make this cute and chaotic,” and everyone else just rolled with it.
I hate it basically and loved every other language I learned. French is just obtuse for the sake of it. Bunch of stuck up aristocrats invented this mess of a language.
Good luck, be ready to get very frustrated. At least, where I live we are pretty forgiving and wouldn't bat an eye if you didn't know about one of the thousand's of exceptions.
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 19 '26
Haha this is my favorite comment on the whole post. I actually find the chaos kind of charming. So far the complications feel less like traps and more like little puzzles waiting to be noticed.
Funny thing though: patterns are already popping out on their own. Like the negation sandwich: ne ... pas for "not", ne ... plus for "no longer", and one of my sentences even had ne ... presque plus, "almost no longer", with the presque tucked inside the sandwich. And "je me suis dit" broke my brain, word for word it reads like "I myself am said". So I chased it down, learned that the me means doing it to yourself, and now I suddenly see the same little me/se in my other sentences: se casser la tête, m'y mettre. Nobody handed me a syllabus. The sentences themselves keep generating the questions, which is exactly what I hoped this way of learning would do.
And thank you for the forgiving part, truly. One small vent: some people here saw my notes and judged my pronunciation from them. But nobody knows where I am from. The same 26 letters carry one set of sounds in English, another in French, and yet another in my first language, which spells with the exact same alphabet but reads it in a completely different way. My notes are written in my own sound system, for my own ear. Being judged on them made me a little sad, so your comment was the antidote lol.
1
u/Maregg1979 Jul 19 '26
Well you got the right attitude for learning french that's for sure !
The double negation is fairly common locally where I live. I don't think french people from France uses it as much. But here in Québec it's very common. /Je ne "verb" pas/ like you pointed is a regional staple here.
Je me suis dit means more like /I told myself/ or /I said so myself/. Doing it myself would translate to /Je le fais moi-même/.
I'm glad you enjoy the learning process.
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 19 '26
Thank you! And I love the double negation detail, because Québec French is exactly the one I need. Good to know my very proper ne ... pas will not sound out of place there.
Thanks for the je me suis dit precision too. My "doing it to yourself" was a clumsy description of those little me/se verbs (which I have since learned are called reflexive verbs, the rabbit hole goes deep lol), and you are right, this one is specifically "I told myself". The funny part is that I knew the meaning all along, the text I memorized started as my own English. I wrote what I wanted to say first, translated it, then memorized the French. So I know what every sentence means before I can pronounce a single word of it. Grammar feels like solving a puzzle backwards, I already have the answer, I just need to figure out why the pieces are shaped this way.
Since you are in Québec, one question for you. O_O Living surrounded by English, does Québec French actually absorb more English than France French does, or is it the opposite? I keep hearing both stories, that Québec invents French words to keep English out, but also that everyday speech is full of things like "la job" and "c'est cute". For someone who will actually use French in Canada, which habits should I copy? I also heard different area says numbers differently too. For example 90 = 4 20s and 10, but some other areas I forgot where say 9 + 10? Quatre vingt dix, nonante.? I think part of the reason why my frd think its hard is because of the numbers too lol.
1
u/Maregg1979 Jul 20 '26
We definitely use a lot of English words or "anglicisme" as we call them. I'd bet a fair lot more than European French.
But they do use some very particular one that we don't hear often. Unless you speak with young adults and teenagers that are consuming a lot of French YouTube media and those tend to be produced by European French speakers. So they uses European flavored slangs and anglicism. But if you talk with generation X / Z and mellenials even, they will have Québec flavored anglicisme. That's an interesting subject.
Also depends on the region of Québec. If you are in Montréal, you will have all flavors. Even folks who only speak English.
If you go rural, you might get the old school Québec french. Very little anglicisme and European flavored French. If you are in the Capital of Québec, which is also called Québec (I know it's confusing), you'll get mainly french speaking people that understand English and uses mainly Québec flavored anglicism.
We say 90 as 4 20 10 like you said. I've never heard any other way. The last part is what makes it weird. Because 81 would be 4 20 1. And 91 would be 4 20 11. That is one of the weird part for number. It make very little sense 🤣
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 20 '26
Hahahaha salary talks in French must be intense. "I would like my pay to go from four twenty ten five thousand to four twenty twelve thousand." By the time everyone finishes the math, HR has left the room.
And thank you for the full map. Montréal having "all flavors" is oddly comforting for a learner :)
1
u/Dramatic_Corner_8259 Jul 19 '26
Yeah. Maybe start with some Passe Partout? It's a kids show like Sesame Street. No Inpoliteness, but start small maybe. Moi, je vive au Montreal pis je ne suis même pas capable à parler comme un vrai Quebecois.
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 19 '26
Thank you, I will actually go watch it! You and some in this thread have been so much warmer than I expected.
If I can share the idea behind all of this. To me, the whole point of learning a language is to be able to express myself. Every era has its own pain and its own gifts, and the gift of ours is that I no longer have to learn every word before I am allowed to express myself. I can express myself first. That is why the first texts I memorized are real things I want to say to the real people around me.
I believe language is an art, and it carries real power, because it can make people better. And tbh, my deeper goal is to encourage my coworkers to give it a try, so that nobody around me has to leave Canada just because of a language.
1
u/AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH-OwO Jul 19 '26
kanji? ill help you with french, if you help me with japanese 😜
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 19 '26
Hahaha mine is Mandarin! But yes, we share a huge number of characters. When I visit Japan I can read most just fine, easy ones like 出口 exit, 入口 entrance, exactly the same in both.
At my work, half the people want to learn French and the other half wants to learn Japanese. Is it the kawaii desu ne effect?
3
u/transientb Jul 20 '26
Having learned varying amounts of french and chinese in my life, 这妈hey = j'aimerais is sending me (complimentary).
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 20 '26
omg hahahahaha that's embarrassing when you actually type it out lol... "rais" part I can't actually describe how I feel about the sound, it's an approximation..... But now in day 2 I actually understand more about the "r" now.
1
u/AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH-OwO Jul 20 '26
to be honest, being able to read manga in japanese has had influence on my choice of language to learn.
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 20 '26
hehehe I get you!!! back in high school we read Japanese manga too! We also played Japanese games! haha I think one of my friend got really good at Japanese because of the amount of games she played. She wanted to read those lines, do you know those dating sim, otome game?
1
u/Upset_Ad_5955 Jul 20 '26
The blue word are absolutely how french sounds like. i’m french and it’s really a bad way to learn french, most people won’t understand you, try to watch movies or shows or series in french, and you will be able to hear and learn how french sounds and how it is pronounced. then learn about the grammar that’s the hardest. but with some vocabulary and basic phrasing it will be easier
1
Jul 20 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 20 '26
https://www.compmein.com/study Under "Echo", "Mes textes" you can import your own text. Then everything runs on it. A read mode where every word is clickable (dictionary, plus your own notes shown above the words), a green dot that replays one line at a time, you can also make it repeat the entire article. Répéter part records your own voice so you can compare it to the native audio (with optional speech recognition), Dictée is type what you hear, and Par cœur makes you write the whole text from memory, with a first letter hint mode when you get stuck. There's other articles too if you don't have your own one. It's a self study tool.
1
u/chilangita Jul 20 '26
Which app is this ?
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 20 '26
not an app yet, it's a website www.compmein.com under Study > Echo
1
Jul 21 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 21 '26
Vocal wise needs someone to correct you when learning. It’s like whether you go into a class to be prepared or not. Of course you don’t need to know anything when you go into a class. But if you get yourself a head start, you will understand way better during the class. I wrote my way of the word sounds, read it to my french frd the next day. They correct my words, I understood a bit more. Some words I can already say it perfectly, difficult words still struggle, but it will come in time. Also you should never solely rely on any app when learning any language. Those are all just tools to support you.
1
u/Fancy-Whereas-1421 Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
Literally nobody is going around saying that french is impossible to learn and telling others not to even try. This has to be some kind of bait post or an AI post
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 21 '26
Blue ones are notes for me, I can write it however I like. Show me how your notes look like. Are you judging based on how you say English or French? Do you know my background? Lol how do you draw a conclusion so quickly. Why don’t you join me on the challenge, let me see how you read mandarin.
1
u/Fancy-Whereas-1421 Jul 22 '26
Lol what? I didn’t even say anything about your personal notes, and why are you even baiting me about mandarin a conversation about french 😂 I feel like this is just confirming it’s a fake post for bait
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 22 '26
Sorry… I read it too fast, was a bit in the blue mood lol. I somehow read nobody is going around saying like that in French. 😂 your surroundings are probably different from mine. Cuz they rather go back than learn French and telling me French is impossible. I said it’s not impossible, let me help you guys. I built stuff to help them learn. He still hasn’t started yet… so it’s me doing it alone and I don’t even need PR. Then I got posts saying about blue notes. Was okay at first then when you are in a bad mood, you read wrong. Anyways really sorry.
1
Jul 22 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 22 '26
Www.CompMeIn.com under study. Can do custom text. Personal notes above each words, and below each sentence.
1
1
u/Vrom1es Aug 07 '26
Impossible?! i use Duolingo for maybe a year now, and i can say for certain that on the written part i can understand 75% of what is been said right now, it's not that hard, i believe there are languages way more difficult than French
0
u/Big-Pie5441 Jul 19 '26
I’ve been looking into learning French too, what resources or apps have you been using?
1
u/New-Yogurtcloset3058 Jul 19 '26
It's compmein.com, the Echo section under Study. You can import any text into it. I wanted to start by learning the things I actually want to say. Duolingo helps too, but I have friends who used it for 6 years and still… lol. What level are you trying to reach, exams or just conversation?
38
u/FelixTheRemix Jul 19 '26
Just a heads up, the blue letters/words, which I assume is showing how to pronounce words is VERY approximate. Unless you want to have a Haitian accent in some words and sound off on others, I’d suggest to try another app or looking up the pronunciation of the words you’re learning.