I was pleasantly surprised by the weather yesterday. Now that March is here, it seems like spring is too. It was sunny and not raining for once, so I got to walk to work. I hope it stays this way and winter doesn’t come back because the sunshine gives me motivation to actually get things done. Plus I have less than 7 weeks of my job left, and then I go on a lot of fun trips this summer (Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Croatia, and Italy!)
I am continuing with reviewing the online language communities, though I have to admit I’m only focusing on 4 or 5 since the rest did not have much free content or they were simply sites for finding language teachers. I’m most interested in ways to learn vocabulary and pronunciation online for free, without necessarily needing a teacher or having to pay for anything.
And I am still working on a new informal French video, though I can’t decide if I should focus on more reductions in speech or informal vocabulary missing from textbooks. Perhaps I’ll just do both! The first video has been up for about 2 weeks and it already has over 1,300 views, so I hope I’m helping all of those people to understand spoken French.
The French Listening podcast now has 20 mp3s available, and I think I’m going to take a little break before I figure out what to do next. I’ve got lots of audio to transcribe for the next round – interview with David’s grandma about her family moving from Italy to France in 1931 to escape fascism and what Annecy was like during the war plus random conversations that are basically eavesdropping. I wanted to record natural speech without anyone knowing that I was in fact recording because people change the way they speak (they tend to use less slang and talk slower) when they know they’re being recorded. I tell them afterwards that I was recording, of course!
Lastly, I’ve decided to focus more on the multilingual aspect of the site and attempt to update the vocabulary lists as well as the comparative tutorials. I’m looking for a way to allow people to choose which languages they want to compare instead of keeping with the English-French-Italian-Spanish order that is currently available. Any coders/tech people know how to do this? Javascript maybe? So for example, if someone wanted to compare just English-French-German, they would just need to choose those languages and the page would automatically generate with only those lists.
Thanks to those who bought my French Language Tutorial book or sent a donation. I really appreciate your support!
