A quick review of my plans (no more French classes!)

My little foray into improving my French did not last long. I sent the following email this morning [translation at the bottom of the page].

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Un rapide aperçu de mes projets

"Chère Annie,

J'attends notre cinquième cours cet après-midi, mais je pense que ce sera le dernier pendant un moment.

Cela n'a rien à voir avec ton excellent enseignement! Je suis impressionné par ton travail acharné et ta préparation - tu es toujours incroyablement serviable et sympathique.

Voici ce que je pense. J'ai commencé ces leçons avec toi pour deux raisons. Premièrement, je voulais vérifier mes propres compétences en conversation (pas aussi bonnes que je le pensais!). Deuxièmement, je voulais évaluer combien d'efforts et de temps seraient nécessaires pour atteindre un niveau de base de compétence parlée.

Il semble clair que je devrais passer une heure par jour, presque tous les jours pendant au moins un an, pour atteindre le niveau minimum qui me conviendrait le mieux. Malheureusement, je ne peux pas maintenir ce niveau de travail. Cela prendrait la place d'autres projets que je veux faire.

C'est donc à contrecoeur que j'ai décidé de suspendre mon étude du français pour le moment.

Meilleurs vœux,

Nigel."

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I'm not really surprised. I have a history of throwing myself into things and then deciding that long term, they're just not sustainable .. and then just dropping them. Is that bad? Don't think so. Otherwise I'd be stuck my whole life doing just one thing.

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I asked Annie this afternoon where, in terms of her school-students, she thought I was. She reckoned at AS level (one year into the sixth form). That is roughly the amount of school study I did back in the day.

I shared with her this calculation:

• ten new words a day with almost perfect recall is an additional 3,000 words over a year. That isn't going to make colloquial French speakers effortlessly understandable;


• half an hour of me speaking French to Annie once a week equates to 25 hours a year. Hardly the route to fluency in speaking.

And even this low rate of engagement requires perhaps an hour or so of study a day: working on exercises, checking grammar, looking up words and phrases, reading French text, translating dialogues from English, listening to French broadcasts. Other topics are being neglected. Truly there is no royal road to foreign language competence.

I must say Annie took it well.

----   Here's the translation ----

 A quick review of my plans

Dear Annie,

I look forwards to our fifth lesson this afternoon, but I think that that will be the last one for a while.

This has nothing to do with your excellent teaching! I am impressed by your hard work and preparation - you are always incredibly helpful and sympathique.

Here is what I think. I started these lessons with you for two reasons. Firstly, I wanted to check my own conversational skills (not as good as I thought!). Secondly I wanted to assess how much effort and time would be needed to get to a basic level of spoken competence.

It seems clear that I would need to spend an hour a day, almost every day for at least a year to reach the minimum level I would be pleased with. Unfortunately I can't sustain that level of work. It's taking the place of other projects I want to do.

So reluctantly I have decided to suspend my study of French for the time being.

Best wishes,

Nigel.