365 Days of French

Bonjour mes amis!  Today, I am celebrating a giant milestone that I set in my personal goals... I have successfully hit 365 days of learning French!!!

Ok so if we're being technical, my one year anniversary was actually last Thursday since I first started using Duolingo on February 16th last year.  But my app thought that I skipped a few days, so it "froze" those.  Today, I officially hit the 365 day mark!

I am so proud of myself.  I studied French every single day for an entire year.  Even on the days that my app "froze" my progress, I still studied it.  (A few of those days were Disney days and since we're night owls, I did a few of the lessons after midnight... But I also did a lesson the following day- even though the app had already counted it!)

I feel like I've made great progress over the past year.  They changed the overall layout of the app a few months ago.  So with the new update, I'm starting Unit 9 of French Foundations 1.  There are 17 units in this section, so I've still got a ways to go.  I did stop with learning new content over the busy holiday season, but I'm getting ready to dive back into new material.  (I feel like I haven't soaked in the most recent lessons as well, so I've been doing a lot of review and challenges to get more familiar with it.)

Overall, I think that I'm still in territory that I learned back in high school French.  But it's been so long that I'm still remembering everything.  The grammar is getting a bit more complicated too, so I've wanted to wait until I could really focus on learning it.

I'm also hoping to start integrating vocabulary flash cards and my text books into my learning.  I also haven't physically written anything down in French yet, so I also need to start practicing that.  The other thing that I'd like to work on is using the symbols to indicate accents more.  I haven't been using them since my phone autocorrects a lot of it for me.  I know where most of them go, but I haven't been typing them into the app, so I need to get much more familiar with that!

I'm also considering downloading Babbel to accommodate Duolingo.  I know that they are rival apps, but I really just want to learn French.  I've heard that Babbel is much more conversational, so I'm thinking that combining the two might help me progress faster.  But I'm very happy with how I've been learning French from Duolingo so far!

I just found out a few weeks ago that my father-in-law Rick is using Duolingo to learn Spanish!  He must have heard about it from me, because Eliot's family hadn't heard of it when I was using it during our California trip last March.  I'm glad he's also learning a new language.  I'm trying to convince Eliot to do it with me.  But since he's dyslexic, he has a hard time reading to begin with.  He keeps joking that he's barely got a grip on the English language, but I bet he could do it if he really wanted to.  At this point, Eliot is stuck listening to me babble to myself in French pretty often anyways!

It's been a great year of learning French.  On to the next 365 days!!!  °o°