This week I’d like to share more about the app I’ve been working with and focusing on- Doulingo, our French local newspaper and Screencastify . It has been my baseline as I’ve explored more apps, resources, and tools to learn French. This week I learned about travel. The last topic was art (colors) and future topics include food and treats! But for now, I’m off traveling in French!

First, I’ll travel locally. This is the local French newspaper I wrote about last time, that I’ll keep exploring. It is in Canadian French, and my app is European French, but I’ll try to not get too confused. This is the screencastify video I took this week to show you how I can use the newspaper to learn French and keep improving it with more interest, community, English-French connections, and just have more fun while learning it.

The screencastify wouldn’t upload as a video or HTML (has this happened to you? please share what you did! I found a solution as I uploaded it as a Viemo link, but there must be a more simple solution. Anyway, here is the final video! Wehooo!

Than, I’ll travel further as I learn travel words in French in case a trip will be possible at the distant future! For that, I appreciate working with Doulingo for a few reasons, and mostly for the details in design, simple and useful features and content.

First, it covers the base of speaking, listening, writing and reading.
Second, it allows for your chosen time windows- you can set a 5, 10. 15, 30… or any amount of time for daily practice.
Third, it has goals and tracks your days of practice, reminds you of it, and had helps keep on track. It also has little points and treasures to find like a game, but as I’m not much into gaming I let this part go. But if you’re into it- it’s there!
Fourth, it covers the basics very well. It has lessons and tips with the rules to learn. I explores more apps and videos, and they help, but this has lots of comprehensive information I’m using daily, that seems easy to get also when compared with varied resources. I did add some youtube videos to help me out, but they helped me add and stick to the base Doulingo gave me.
And last, it has a lovely design and simple tools to use it when you can and can’t make noise to adjust the class accordingly.

I’m learning now masculine and feminine differences, reviewing common verbs, pronunciation. This is how my lesson the other day looked like. For masculine and feminine, it had the differences, examples, and rules for words that start with a vowel.

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It then continued into some verbs (reviewing Aller) and how to conjugate it. I later continued to practice it (again with the special vowels- they always through me off but I guess not just me as the app keeps giving it as examples and reminders!) and moved on to the verb Avoir. I use google translate to see what the verbs mean if I don’t know.

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The lesson than continued to pronunciation and gave me an audio to check it out, and examples of how to say “G” in different words. This is the kind of details I may catch when listen to French songs/ friends, but won’t know how to differentiate it or tell the difference on my own. It made so much sense to read it!

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I like how Doulingo helps with all four aspects of learning a language (speak, write, listen, write). This makes me type in the translations, and the better I get the longer the sentence gets. After this 2 words translation I got a 4 words sentence to translate, and so on.

It also helps with listening and then speaking, and has an “I can’t speak/ listen now” button which is great as I can practice when I am waiting in line but don’t want to make noise. This feature was such a motivator- as I can practice of I have 10 minutes between errands, without worrying about the sound.

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I than has some more verbs (I appreciate that it was broken with a speaking part – switching between listening/ speaking to writing and reading helps me a lot to stay focused. This is something I learned about how I study better through the app! This may also be why I do better on classes with both zoom/ reading than just the reading and independent 100%.

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And last but not least- the game points and daily goals target! It does make it look more cheerful and fun 🙂

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This week I focused mostly about this, and will keep up with the daily work and pronunciation until I feel better and go on the podcast again!

One more thing I like is that the characters in it are from all ethnicities, this makes it feel a little more inclusive and fun. All in all- a great app! I needed to go back to the basics lately- and now feel that I am ready to keep exploring!

Thanks for tuning in, and see you next time!

Maya