Over the past few months, I have been working on learning French. I am excited to say that I have successfully completed 3 units on Duolingo and I am now in the Emerald League. There are competitions among all Duolingo users and there are 10 different leagues you can compete in based on how well you are doing (measured by how many XP you have). I currently have 152 XP for the week and am in 1st place of the Emerald League (6th of 10 leagues). You make your way up to a new and higher league if you are in the top 7 of your league by the end of the week. This has also been something that has kept me motivated because I have began to realize that I love me some competition. See the pictures below for proof.

Here are some realizations I have had throughout this learning project:

1.As you may have seen in my last post, I have been able to learn a total of 191 words. This is something I am quite proud of! I have loved the feeling I get after learning a new word and it is amazing to think about the fact that I got that feeling 191 times since the beginning of the semester. At the beginning of the semester, I would say I knew maybe 30 words. I have truly grown my vocabulary so much in these last few months.

2. I love learning. I am committed to being a lifelong learner and this assignment made me realize that learning can be fun and enjoyable.

3. If I’m being honest, I still don’t think I’d be ready to have a full on conversation in French yet but I’m getting there. I have been able to understand parts of sentences and am able to understand the main topic of a conversations on the Duolingo Story feature but I am still by no means a veteran at this!! In fact, I still feel like a rookie and that is ok.

4. One thing I need to continue working on is speaking french out loud. I am excited to be able to show my French speaking friends what I have learned this semester and to try having conversations with them.

5. There are many different ways to learn something. Some of the methods I used worked better than others. I personally found that I gravitated toward Duolingo because it was at the tip of my fingers and I was constantly getting notified throughout the day to keep up my streak.

6. French is all around us. This was a very exciting realization I had. I know that choosing to learn French will be something that continues to benefit me as I get better and better with it. Seeing as though it is all around (on products, in TV shows I watch and on airplanes), I feel that this is a useful skill to have.

How did I get to this point? In case you have forgotten, or have not had the chance to read all of my blog posts up to this point, allow me to summarize them for you!

In my first post “Take me to Paris: An Intro to my Learning Project”, I declared where I was at with my french learning journey. I only knew very basic words and couldn’t formulate a sentence beyond greetings. I stated that I wanted to learn French so that one day I could add it to my Resume. I find it very cool that people have the ability to learn and speak more than 1 language fluently and I think this would be like a Superpower if I could too!

The second week allowed me to try out a new tool called “Skitch” which I was able to use to document my learning journey so far. In the blog “Skitch…Sketch or Fetch?” you can see how my experience went with trying this new tool and you can see that I had completed 1.5 parts of unit 1. You can also see some of the things I was learning in the examples.

The following week in the blog post titled “Duolingoing Slow and Steady” I was able to report that I had a 16 day streak on Duolingo and I made a TikTok where it showed me playing Duolingo.

In the “Expanding My Horizons” post, I watched a couple of YouTube videos where I learned a few new phrases. This was a new way of learning for me.

“Do You Know The Lingo” was my next blog post. During this week I realized that there was French all around me because I started noticing it on lots of products. Things like food packages and shampoo bottles have French and English words which made it easy for me to learn some new words just by using everyday products I have in my house. This was very exciting for me!!

“Brooke in Paris – A Netflix Series” : This week was big. I did a bit of exploring on Duolingo and learned a lot more about the app. I also discovered a new way to learn French. I was able to learn by watching my favourite show “Emily in Paris”. This show takes place in Paris and has many parts that are spoken in French. In order to fully grasp what they were saying, I changed the subtitles to French so that when they were speaking French I could read the words and listen to them at the same time. When English was being spoken, I could use my ears to listen to the English words and used my eyes to read the translations in French.

At this point I began to become unmotivated and started to rely on Duolingo again. That is why I titled my next post “If It Wasn’t for Duo…”. I ended up taking a screen recording of me doing a full lesson in Duolingo to showcase my learning. This is also when I realized Duolingo was starting to challenge me more.

In my final Learning Project Post titled “Spotify Wrapped WHOOOO” , I was able to showcase everything I had accomplished on that app so far. Duolingo sort of copied Spotify and made a year in review feature that showed a bunch of facts about my learning. Fortunately since I just created my account and downloaded Duolingo this semester, it was able to give me a pretty accurate representation of how far I have come over the past few months. Despite not taking into account all of the other ways I learned french words and phrases, I feel that because this is where I spent most of my time learning French, it gave me a real sense of how much I had accomplished.

Finally, I want to thank you all for being with me on this journey and I am happy to say that this learning project is not finished here. I am just as excited as ever to keep expanding my French knowledge in the future and you best believe I am going to keep my Duolingo streak going! 🙂