It is believed that there are over 75 million native French speakers and about 235 million people use French daily and are fluent.
I am not one of them.
I have to admit up front that my French is very poor. We are headed to Nice in 4 months and I’m not super confident I will be able to get around on just my French yet. I have a lot of plans for things I want to do, and I don’t want to use English as a crutch. It is going to be “très intéressant.”
It’s not that I can’t learn a foreign language. I had to learn 2 already for work. They were both Asian languages and had no base in French. French is a Romance language, so it isn’t close to the languages I learned. But the aptitude is there. I just need to buckle down and get started.
To me, learning a foreign language comes down to listening, reading, and speaking. For my trip coming up, I want to vastly improve my reading skills as I feel that having a larger vocabulary will improve my situational awareness more than anything else quicker.
I decided that reading the Nice Matan online newspaper in France would kill 2 birds with 1 stone. I can learn French and at the same time learn what is going on in Nice.
This is the website:
I also use Google translate on my cellphone.
So a day studying for me consists of finding a story on Nice Matin that looks interesting and printing it. I start at the headline and work my way through the story. Words that I don’t know go into my vocabulary notebook. So far, that is really helping build up my vocab.
I also built flashcard with the 500 most common French words. Between the 2 study platforms, I think I am getting better.
The real test will be when I am on my own in Nice and I have to use French. Adventures await.
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