en français maintenant!

One of my new years resolutions was to finally and definitively learn French. I had downloaded Duolingo in September, but had only used it one or two times. Duolingo is a language learning app which was voted Apple's App of the Year, and Google Play's Best of the Best. It really is quite an excellent app. It goes through level by level, learning things such as food, animals, adjectives, possessives, plurals, etc. There are bars below each completed level which shows its strength in your memory, and the app encourages you to go back and practice weak skills (the strength bars fade over time). However, it is also very good at working previous vocab and skills into the new lessons as you unlock them, and also incorporates new lessons into the 'weak skills levels' when you go back and do them. Within the levels themselves, you will read the french and translate it into english, translate the french into english by choosing from a list of words, and vice versa, translate from french to english without a list, and vice versa. You also will have french read to you and have to translate it, and be required to speak french into the microphone to check your pronunciation.

While I am obviously doing French, Duolingo also does Spanish, German, Italian, and Portuguese. It is a really good app, and I recommend it to anyone trying to learn a language. I use it for about ten minuets every day, which I've been doing consistently for about ten days now, and it is really exciting how much vocab is both coming back to me and how much I am remembering.

I was planning on asking some of my French friends if they would mind being speaking buddies with me, but my other friend Rachel beat me to it, and a group of us formed a French Club (called Omelette du Fromage). We have had two meetings on Wed night (though that will have to change, as Rachel and I are in doing our live project from 9-5, which is exhausting) in a cafe, and while the only persons to show up thus far have been myself, Rachel, Melissa, and Alix (with Alix thus bearing all the burden of the only native French speaker, and only real competent French speaker, though Rachel is much better than me, having lived in Paris for a year) it is really fun, and though I can't really keep up with Rachel, much less Alix, it is fun and helpful to hear it spoken. Plus we meet in a cafe and have coffee and cake so that's always a good time ;)

Look at that dapper little owl (I got enough points from levels to buy him that outfit - there's fun rewards like that for getting more levels).

I don't know if its just the vocab that I've done so far or what, but the sentences they have me working with have been quite morbid at times (at other times, they have me saying je suis un douphin).

Learning the verb seul (alone) was especially depressing (in response to me complaining that it kept telling me everything was alone, and questioning why the ant was alone, Alix responded "TOUT LE MONDE EST SEUL ET TRISTE" - EVERYONE IS SAD AND ALONE. Cheers Alix).