how I learned french & russian
Strolling D.C.'s Dupont Circle, I walked into the Alliance Française, ready for my French grammar class [The Alliance Française is a French learning institute with several locations throughout the US]. There were five of us that day in the second floor room. After class, I walked down to the library. It was filled with short stories, films, minature paperbacks, many volumes of "le livre de poche."
A little earlier, I had attended another class, this one conversational, at the Alliance Française in Los Angeles. In addition to practicing my conversational skills, I would listen to the podcast "Coffee Break French." In Wyoming during college, I remember walking back from my written rhetoric class, with the "Fluent" podcast in my ears. The host was interviewing another language learner. Around that time, I had discovered the online polyglot space, a community of enthusiasts self-teaching multiple languages.
Susanna Zaraysky's "Language is Music" completely changed how I saw language learning. Viewing the landscape of language through the lens of sound, melody, rhythm, similar to a song, helped me see that as a piano player. For example, the 3 elements of singing: pronunciation [articulation], phonation [tone], and breathing, are similar to how we form foreign words, how we articulate. Afterwards, I would learn words from lyrics, look at the structure of sentences in songs, and absorb the stress pattern, the syllabic structure. That's how I went about learning Russian. I started using the app LingQ, for both languages, inputting the language in my brain several times before actually following along with the text.
After listening to tons of French music, I chatted with language exchange partners on a site called "Conversation Exchange." I talked to a girl from Algeria, a guy in Paris, a girl near the Spanish border. When I decided to learn russian, after becoming inspired by Leo Tolstoy's writings, I got a Russian partner. We talked for several months. I then found another person.
I also watched the YouTube channel "Easy Russian" in many spaces while attending campus. I've never been attracted to reading grammar books, only when I've absorbed the language in a real world context first. That's how I learn now: seeing language learning as music, listening to these "songs" in different real-world contexts, especially when I'm moving [I would blast russian pop and french electronica while on the treadmill or the elliptical, when running in my suburbs and downtown]. I would look up the lyrics, memorize the list of words from a "common words" list found on Google, consult and apply my accelerated-learning notes. I would also follow the Magnetic Memory Method [a modern, modified version of the loci system or memory palace].
Today, it's much the same. When I resumed, what was different was that I signed up for the app "Tandem," instead of "Conversation Exchange." I sent audio messages to a woman in St. Petersburg, another in Moscow. I planned and prepared my memory castles, then placed them in an iCloud folder. Today, these lists are in the folders, "possiblefutures/french" and "possiblefutures/russian," waiting until I use them again, ready to use them with the techniques from "Language is Music," the methods of accelerated-learning, LingQ, audio and texts from podcasts, the "Coffee Break" series, and the "Magnetic Memory Method."