It’s official! I’m learning French.
After almost thirty years of living in Canada, I’m taking the plunge and applying myself to finally learn French. Over the years I’ve made a few attempts but none of them stuck. There was no consequence to not learning so I flaked out.
This time it’s different. I recently started working at Wave. A mobile money service that operates in a few French speaking countries. As part of my role, I’ll be travelling to these countries to do field research. While we have translators and it’s not a hard requirement to learn French, it won’t hurt. Nothing beats hearing from our customers first hand what they’re going through.
I’ve been at it for three weeks and am already seeing some good progress. I started out by downloading a few apps to learn. Most notably Duolingo. I’ve heard from some friends that it helped them learn Spanish. I also got Mauril from CBC and Babbel. Each one of them has been helpful in filling in some gaps and teaching me the basics.
My biggest challenge with French has been comprehension. For that I’ve made some changes to some daily habits to immerse myself a bit.
First, I tuned the car radio to the local French station so I’m listening to French whenever I drive around. It’s been great for hearing different kinds of French. From the formal presenters, to the fast speaking locals, and also the English accented politicians.
Next, I fine tuned my Instagram feed to serve up french content. This has been helpful for learning the basics, commonly spoken French phrases, and again for hearing French in different accents.
Lastly, I’ve been wanting to practice my spoken French but nobody at home wants to suffer through that. Apparently I’ve got a terrible accent. I’m not ready to go out into public for this either. After hearing how some people were using voice commands with AI, I thought I’d give it a try.
I started with Claude since it already sounds French. It was a complete failure. It spoke to me in English and had a hard time understanding me. I had to repeat myself a bunch and it didn’t capture all my words. Luckily, this happened very quickly so I tried something else.
I tried ChatGPT. What a big difference! Right out the gate, it replied to me in French. Very slowly. It assessed my level and adjusted accordingly. We exchanged a few phrases. It gently corrected me. It all felt very natural. The best part, ChatGPT doesn’t care what accent I have so now I have someone to practice speaking with.
All in all, I’m happy with the results I’m seeing and am excited to keep at it. My hope is that by the end of the year, I can hold a basic conversation and follow along in our customer interviews.