This is it, the last daily report of the French Revolution, my 30-day project to learn about languages and language acquisition by teaching myself French. Actually, yesterday was Day 30, but I didn’t get around to writing up the final Daily Report until today.
I’ve learned a considerable amount about language and language acquisition, and I hope by sharing the journey, I’m providing some of that value to the world.
STUDYING SOMETHING YOU’RE NOT ALL THAT INTERESTED IN
I never really was all that interested in French. I feel like that really had an effect on my studies over the last 30 days. I was mainly just studying French as an intellectual exercise, to learn more about language acquisition in general, and for training self-discipline. I’m not really into French movies or French culture, and so when I wasn’t studying, I wasn’t getting much exposure. My subconscious mind probably didn’t devote much time to analyzing the French I had studied because I wasn’t really all that enthusiastic about the language.
In retrospect, I can’t recommend people study something they’re not interested in. It’s a good way to train your inner autodidact, which training requires teaching yourself things, but you should have things you’re genuinely interested in which can train autodidact just as well. The French Revolution project was a better use of my time than just vegging out would have been, but I could’ve probably used the time more effectively.
UNDERESTIMATING SPOKEN FRENCH
While French grammar is very easy, I underestimated the difficulty of spoken French. I came as a successful Japanese self-teacher, and everyone always makes such a big deal about how hard Japanese is supposed to be, but one of the things about Japanese is it’s extremely easy to pronounce. Easier than English, even, if I weren’t a native English speaker already. French pronunciation is a real pain.
In fact, French pronunciation is harder than the Japanese kanji writing system that everyone makes such a big deal of. Kanji has an air of difficulty surrounding it, even though it’s really not that difficult. In that sense, it’s comparable to calculus, computer programming and air traffic control. The difficulty behind kanji is a myth. Maybe kanji is time-consuming, but that’s a lot different than being difficult. The truth is that kanji is time-consuming but very easy. French pronunciation, on the other hand, is legitimately difficult. Not only is it difficult, but there are far fewer resources to help you learn it. For Kanji, there are whole communities, but for French pronunciation, there’s nothing but some scattered about.com pages and their equivalents.
Probably the reason so many people learn (or attempt) French pronunciation, while so few learn (or attempt) kanji, is precisely because of the misconceptions about difficulty. No one ever goes around making a huge deal about how hard French is (like they always do about Japanese), and consequently people aren’t afraid of French like they are of Japanese.
There is some logic to French spelling, which I’ve been gradually getting accustomed to, however, it’s still difficult just in a sheer mechanical sense, like doing complex tongue exercises. It’s hard enough to just make the sounds correct, much less do it thoughtlessly while expressing complex ideas.
This whole exercise has given me some more insight into the fallacy of ranking languages according to difficulty hierarchy. Almost anyone will tell you Japanese is far harder than French. Standard rankings put Japanese among the hardest group of languages for an English speaker, and French among the easiest. And yet, that’s such an oversimplification. It might be true about grammar and writing, but it’s so far from true about pronunciation.
WHAT WOULD I DO DIFFERENTLY
What would I do differently if I were starting this project over from scratch? I’d immediately change the emphasis of my sentence flash cards from reading comprehension to pronunciation. Reading comprehension is just plain easy. I was placing emphasis on reading comprehension because that’s where it should be placed for a Japanese learner, but for a French learner, the priorities are totally different. I’d also make a new deck for listening comprehension. Of course, one of the problems is that it’s much harder to find sentences with audio files, appropriate for pronunciation or listening comprehension flash cards, than to just find plain vanilla written sentences.
With Japanese I was spoiled because the hardest parts of Japanese have been carefully broken down by very intelligent people, and there are very systematic, deadly effective techniques for learning things like kanji and Japanese grammar. With French, on the other hand, because everyone underestimates the difficulty, the pedagogy is about 100 years behind JSL pedagogy. Since no one has devised a systematic, cutting edge method for learning French pronunciation, I’d include the devising of such a method into the 30 day project. In otherwords, if no one else has done it, that leaves me to do it. Instead, I just went with what was out there, which quite frankly, sucks ass.
THINGS I LEARNED FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Of course, I learned a whole lot about the French language. I learned about French grammar, vocabulary, sound system, spelling, even history. This in turn gave me some new insight into English. I have a lot more insight into the pronunciation of English words with French etymology. For example, I understand now why a word like “lingerie” is pronounced the way it is.
In terms of raw linguistic skill/ability, if I had to name one single thing, the biggest thing I learned from the French Revolution is how to hear and pronounce nasal vowels. This not only increased my understanding of French and English, it even helped me a little with Japanese.
I learned a lot more about Spaced Repetition Software, expanding my SRS experience from just one program (Mnemosyne) to an additional program (Anki). This gives me a rare insight into SRS’s since most people tend to be disciples of just a single SRS (not counting specialized one-use SRS’s like RTK or iKnow). Spaced Repetition Systems like Mnemosyne and Anki optimize the learning and memorization process, as well as the maintenance of already learned knowledge.
Believe it or not, I think I learned more about blogging by doing this project. I’d already done a 30-day article every day challenge, but it was unfocused and the topics drifted here and there. I rather like this 30-day super focus on one topic, and I’ll do another one soon. I’d start on one right away, if it weren’t that I’ll be taking a Florida trip with my girlfriend soon. One interesting thing is that by doing these daily writeups, I was actually better able to write about diverse “micro” observations. During my previous 30-day article writing challenge, if I’d made, say, an observation about how the gyms are packed after New Years (like I wrote about yesterday), I’d have had to make it a whole article on its own. It wouldn’t make sense to put it in any of the other articles, since they were mostly standalone. With a 30-day challenge though, there was a certain freedom to write about my day to day life, which suddenly gained a certain relevance it totally lacks when I’m writing standalone articles. This, in turn, injected some new personality into Glowing Face Man which it lacked before.
I learned about countless French learning resources, many of which also cover other languages. If I were to start, say, a 30-day German Blitzkrieg today, I’d have a lot more tools in my belt on Day 1.
I expanded my music tastes by listening to some good French music. I’d like to thank everyone who recommended various French musics in the comments.
I got some idea about how to study pronunciation. With Japanese, I never really had to study pronunciation, except for a couple isolated sounds. Evidently, I didn’t learn the best ways to study pronunciation, since my French pronunciation is pretty sucky. But that’s okay, because this is my first encounter with a difficult pronunciation language. Years from now when I’m an experienced polyglot, I’m sure I’ll look back on my current pronunciation-learning methods and laugh. You gotta start somewhere, though.
I learned about the International Keyboard settings which let me type all the fancy é, è, â, ç, ï type characters. I wish I’d known about this when I was typing Pinyin for Mandarin 101. Back then, my method of typing was to open the Wikipedia entry on “Pinyin” and start copying-and-pasting!
I learned about xenoglossy when people brought it up in the comments after I mentioned an experience where I felt a strange understanding of Romanian while I was very sleep deprived. See the writeup for Day 10, as well as the comments section of the same.
I experimented with Timeboxing, which, incidentally, has now been added as an automated feature into Anki. How convenient! It seems the Anki maintainers have been keeping an eye on these writeups, since I was using their software, and many of my comments actually prompted updates to the software.
I learned more about the whole Spaced Repetition/sentence mining process. I became more aware of certain things, like strategies for rating cards, turning points in a daily review, and such. Lots of little things hard to articulate individually. It’s hard to teach all these minor tweaks; you just have to do a French Revolution (or Japanese Kamikaze, or English Empire, or whatever) on your own.
Finally, I learned a little about my own ego and fears as I realized people were starting to view me as some kind of French guru, when in fact I’m really pretty bad at French still. I was actually resisting publishing audio of myself speaking French. Well, I’m a little justified since I’ve been focusing more on input and almost not at all on output, but still it doesn’t explain the strong resistance I felt toward recording my voice for scrutiny. I still resolve I will publish some actual conversation recording for my French, no matter how bad it may be. Hey, my girlfriend like my French, and that’s good enough for me 
ARTICLE ABOUT OPENNESS
The resistance toward publishing audio (by the way, I did eventually get around to publishing a clip of me reading the Lord’s Prayer, you can listen to it on the Day 29 writeup) made me think a lot about openness in general. Check out my latest major article, Openness. For awhile, people were overestimating my French skill, and I was actually buying into that false mask, I was letting it go to my head. Openness is when you open up and show you true face, without hiding behind egoic masks.
LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE
The French Revolution puts me in a unique position to study and write about language maintenance. Most people who write about a language are passionate enough about it that they continue to study it, making maintenance something they can’t talk about firsthand. Since I have no intention of studying French any further, I can shift focus to language maintenance. With Spaced Repetition Systems at my disposal, I will be able to maintain what I have learned in a very cutting edge way, and by writing about it, I’ll let you share in what I learn.
The Previous Day in the French Revolution was Day 29. You can also go to the Table Of Contents or the Introduction. I won’t say it was always fun, but usually when it wasn’t fun, I stopped and did something else, which is one of the many benefits of being a self-teacher. Anyway, thank you for accompanying me in this French Revolution.
Learning a specific thing, like French, is just that. But learning things in general, that’s a skill on its own. In fact, it’s a metaskill. Read more about Metaskills and what the difference is between metaskills and regular ordinary skills. By studying French, I’ve been training the metaskill of autodidactism.
Throughout the French Revolution, the main study technique I’ve been using is Sentence Mining. It’s very powerful, although I’ve been mistakenly mining sentences for reading comprehension. Sentence mining can also be used for pronunciation, which is where I should’ve done the bulk of my mining.
One thing I should’ve done differently was get more exposure to spoken French. Read about the Golden Rule of Language Learning, which says that any way of studying a language will eventually work, provided you have that one magic ingredient: exposure!
For some interesting reading about grammar, check out my article on Ergative Verbs. A verb is ergative if the subject and object change roles depending whether the verb is used transitively or intransitively. The article focuses on English ergative verbs, but ergative verbs are present in many languages.