zheng w. verhaal

Bonjour, je ne parle pas français ! Moving to Paris, what scares me the most is not that I need to start a new job, make new friends, get used to a new city etc, but learning a new language - French! Honestly, I know very little French, except a few words like "Bonjour" "Ca va? " -- the language sounds so foreign! It took me a long time to get use to Dutch, an even longer time to speak and write Dutch, therefore I am totally panicking. I remember how I learned English back in China: hours and hours of training, exercises, endless movies and books! Stepping into the new digital era, I want to use a new way to to speed up my learning process, so an app! I dismissed Duolingo almost instantly due to the fact that I tried numerous of times in the past but all failed. I want to take this seriously find something can teach me well and provide me a good foundation for French. After some research, I chose "Frantastique" - a dedicated app for learning French! No, it's not for free. The first 7 lessons you can try, but after you need to choose a payment plan. A 25-euro bill for a month, not too bad if you can manage to complete 3 lessons per week. The materials are super cool, it's not some cheap stuff that is cobbled together! Every lesson has a short cartoon clip, real person voice over the cartoon characters - Victor Hugo for instance. Each lesson is customized (of course by computer) just for your level, meaning if you know some French already, your lessons will be different from mine. The lessons are about French culture, food, music and more. For example, one of the lessons is about "La moutarde" well who doesn't know that French are proud of their mustard?! After watching the clip, and listening to the conversation, you can "display" the scripts, from which you can select the word that you not familiar with. I have to say that in the beginning, I was afraid that lessons could be boring, conversations would start from the scene that 2 people met in the bar blabla, but totally opposite: it's so much fun to watch the dialogue and watch how the story unfold! There are exercises and corrections after each lesson, and a dashboard to show your statistics, i.e. your level, vocabulary, grammar, etc. It's very easy to see your own progress and find your study routine. You can download the app on your phone or login on the website to get your lessons. Just to give you an idea in terms of time, I would say you need about a good 45 minutes to get through one lesson. So far, money well spent! I am happy of this selection because I am really learning something, oui :)