Learning Journal #10

[Wyatt Jackson]

Learning to read and write in french has honestly not been my focus for this semester. Since I really didn’t know many words besides ‘oui’ and ‘bonjour’ coming into the semester, my learning plan focused on acquiring a knowledge of the french grammar and a basis of vocabulary necessary for future attempts at reading and writing. Writing is definitely more difficult because of the nature of creating the language rather than interpreting it when you read. With both reading and writing, I have found it difficult to understand the use of the different accents because I have never encountered them in any language before french. One example of a french accent is the cédille, which is only used on the letter c. It’s used to indicate a soft c sound (an s sound) in words like ‘garçon’. In theory the accents make sense, but since they are such a new concept to me and I rarely ever think about using them in writing, I will probably forget to use them many times before I know just which words they belong on. Another issue I have found is in understanding the way that pronouns attach to the verbs they refer to. When reading I come across a word like ‘m’aider’ (help me) and have to recognize both the verb and that the ‘m’ refers to the pronoun for me. They are similar to contractions, so it’s not like I have never seen words like these before, but I have had trouble understanding them. One thing that is much harder about learning a language independently rather than in a classroom is that I have to only use online resources while trying to figure out information on when to combine words, when not to, and any irregularities with the rules.