Progress

I tell my wife that I'm not making as much progress with French as I'd like, and that is true.

I spend about four to five hours a day on it (of which perhaps three hours is actual work, and two or so is what can I find to distract me from this?), but I do not have the skills yet. I am beginning to conclude that learning a language isn't like building a house, where you can approach it in an orderly, optimal fashion. At least, it isn't for me. I review the French in Action videos (one per day); each is a 26 minute video, and I spend about two hours on it. I run through a section of Rosetta Stone, which now seems intolerably slow to me (though I know that one of their core principles is repeat, repeat, repeat, it gets old). I listen to the Book2 phrases project when I'm at the gym, for about 20 minutes. And before I go to sleep, I leaf through a French language review book.

I know that I'm slowly getting better, but it's not like being able to say To be able to speak fluently, even with limited vocabulary, I have to be able to do A, B, and C; so far, I can do A and part of B. It's more like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, and hoping to eventually see a pattern. A little grammar over here. Something resembling a possessive pronoun down there. A couple of words. Words, especially. I cannot say how many times I've muttered something that sounds like French, but isn't, just to keep the feeling of progress going. The Book2 phrases for a while used Elle et lui a lot, and I would chant that phrase as if it were my mantra. Elle et lui. Elle et lui. Elle et lui. Still, not as much progress as I want. I want to be able to string together sentences, and speak.

On the other hand, I just switched my bookmark for Google Translate so that it now comes up to the 'translate French into English' page, rather than the reverse, because I'm more likely now to have a phrase I want to try out -- does this even make a phrase, let alone, does it make sense? -- than to have a phrase in English that I want to translate into French. So that's something.