hey, let me get in on this business
My parents are quebecers who eventually settled in Eastern Ontario—the Frenchest part of the country west of Quebec—after the Montreal Star folded while they were on vacation and the Gazette absorbed the subsequent layoffs of anglo journos (my father having been one such at the Star). My mom is French, but he never wanted to learn, and has a whole lot of other problems, so we never spoke French at home. They instead relied on French Immersion classes at school to teach us. We would visit relatives and not be able to communicate because as @whatsarobot and @wickedcestus alluded to: the school system will put you through compulsory French classes that are, apparently, designed to waste your time and make you dread the language.
I think French Core classes were probably more basic and repetitive than Immersion. Immersion was more difficult and the teachers probably more demanding, and also angrier? Here’s where my experience maybe differs from a lot of people: I was being abused at home and bullied at school. I acted out and would have to deal with a lot of anxiety later in life (I’m doing much better now!). For me French class was probably traumatizing because I was always being shouted at by the teachers and expected to fight through the fear and reply in French in front of my classmates*. So that taught me that having to speak this language should be scary!
(But also, without a personal investment any language is going to be a chore to learn, no matter how well it’s taught, right? I think they could have instituted a school exchange program, where maybe groups of students from franco and anglo schools in the area could visit each other. Then maybe you’d have a friend to exchange slang with, and they’d be nearby! They sort of tried that in Grade 5, but with pen pals and from quite distant schools. It would not have been difficult to implement this with a school up the street or even next door, in that town. I don’t know what they were thinking.)
I’ve had francophone friends. I worked in a rural francophone town. I’ve lived in Montreal (and not in the Plateau). In every situation, it was so embarrassing to not be able to flop sweat my way through more than a few words, forgetting what to do with my uvula.
I got fed up with this (or more likely my life stabilized enough for me to pay it any attention) and about four years ago I started to immerse myself back in it again: did duolingo for a little while, set all my devices to French, still wake up to radio-canada etc. The first game I ever powered through in French was Pokémon X, naturally. It was arduous, but I did it. Now reading and listening to it is actually enjoyable, and the few times I’ve had the opportunity to use it since moving to Ottawa has gone ok but nothing too impressive. I moved here with the intention of meeting people and using it regularly, and if it hadn’t been for the pandemic then maybe I’d be even further along, aughhh!!
So that’s me and French. Here’s me and Japanese:
The first time I think I got it into my head I could learn this language was with a Tofugu video on youtube (I couldn’t find the original video, but I did end up watching this extremely dated vid about Chuck Norris, from which I learned or was reminded of the debut Kurosawa film Segata Sanshiro is based on, which I’d never seen, so I had to go watch that in the middle of writing this). The first resources I stuck to were Heisig’s Remembering the Kana and Kanji. RtKana was great and I don’t hear it recommended enough—maybe because there’s something better or because the kana are a one-and-done chore? I thought it was fun and the associations my mind made with his method stuck very quickly and have been long-lasting, even going long periods without sight-reading.
I took a lot away from RtKanji but my mistakes were probably in rushing through it and not having a plan to switch to study of the rest of the language midway through. I went at RTK1 twice in my life: once in uni, and the second (successful) time in fall-winter 2017. But as soon as I got to 巳 I started slacking on my flash card reviews and never recovered. I went onto the French translation of Tae Kim’s guide after that (given inspiration by Khatz’s article on the laddering method) and stuck with it into section 6 but fell off a few months into the pandemic. I haven’t been practising!!!
I did take copious notes from Tae Kim, and picked up a couple pads of wongoji paper to practise writing on. I know this is the least important part of learning the language—how to write it out by hand—but I love doing it. Rather than writing almost completely abstract shapes linearly as in the Latin alphabet, where height is your only real concern, you have to consider composition when fitting a character into its square. It’s very much like drawing in this respect. I used to do it on lined and graph paper before discovering manuscript paper, and the Yamasa Institute’s kanji dictionary helped by being the only one I’ve found to give examples of everyday handwriting. I wanted to figure out what shortcuts people use in scribbling the characters out and maybe develop my own handwriting style in the process.
And I don’t know if I’ve managed to do that, but google translate can parse it! Maybe that’s a good sign??
I mean to get back into it sometime soon. Maybe by trudging through a 3DS game in the language. I don’t know. I’ve been more depressive than usual lately and that gets in the way. wow this was long, anyway, bye!!
*maybe I should have more sympathy for some of my teachers, if what they had to deal with in the Quebec catholic school system is anything like what my father described: where you would be brutalized by vicious nuns swinging hockey sticks at you and I swear that is a real thing he told me about.
