The one month French challenge

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Hello again people of the LingQ forum. Sorry for my continuous long posts but I always want to share my discoveries and activities with you all to see if any of you have input on them. Anyway, this post will be about my new language challenge, the one month intensive French challenge. This post will be structured into a few parts: why I’m doing this challenge, the goals of the challenge, how the challenge works, and week to week progress checks.

So why am I doing this challenge? Well the simple answer is so that I won’t be stuck at the beginner stage in French for a long time. Instead, I can get that stage out of the way and behind me as quickly as possible so that I can move on to actual real-world native content. I was becoming increasingly more bored with my previous language, Spanish, so I decided to move on to a new language. I picked French for a few reasons. The first is that French is a beautiful language with a rich culture. The second reason is that I have a ton of friends that speak French since they went to an elementary school in which they were immersed from kindergarten to eighth grade. And the third reason is that since it is so similar to a language I already speak at a decent level, it probably will not be very hard to learn, therefore increasing my motivation to learn other languages because I’ve already learned two, and I mean, what’s another one, right?

After this month of learning French my main goal is to conquer all beginner material and be able to listen to/read native content fairly easily (obviously not everything, mainly just the simple news articles and some podcasts). I’d like to jump from A1 (absolute beginner) to B1 (early-intermediate) in a relatively short time, which means I will have to study not only a lot, but very efficiently. Hence why my goals are so outrageously large. My goals are (in order of importance):

  1. Read 350,000 words on LingQ.
  2. Increase known words to 8,000 on LingQ.
  3. Make 15,000 LingQs.
  4. Listen to 40 hours of French.
    Now if you’ve ever made goals for any sort of language learning project, you might realize that these goals are actually extremely large for merely a month of learning the language. And I agree (and am kind of frightened). But, I have set myself these goals for a reason, and that reason is to jump start my French tremendously, and to motivate me to go all the way to fluency in both French and Spanish.

So the challenge works like this: Every day I will wake up, listen to French beginner material or podcasts on my drive to school and listen to French music or whatever I can do during school hours. After school I will get home and do whatever necessary tasks I have to do for that night (non-French related) to get them over with, aka homework, chores, whatever it may be. Then, I will begin to totally immerse myself in French. From the time I finish my work to the time I go to bed, everything (except the obvious interactions with my parents/friends) will be totally in French. I predict that using this strategy I will have about 5 hours of French study per day.

Week to week I will have different progress checks, mainly for the words read statistic as that is the most intensive one and requires the most amount of time. My goals from week to week are:
Week 1: Read 80,000 words on LingQ (11,500 a day) and get 1,500 more known words.
Week 2: Read 85,000 words on LingQ (12,200 a day) and get 2,000 more known words.
Week 3: Read 90,000 words on LingQ (13,000 a day) and get 2,250 more known words.
Week 4: Read 95,000 words on LingQ (13,600 a day) and get 2,250 more known words.
The reason I increase the statistics every week is because, as I get more advanced in the language, my reading speed will increase, making it easier to read the insane amount of words I want to. So obviously these statistics are very high as I have said before, but I think this is what it will take to achieve what I would like to achieve in this short amount of time.

Thank you all for reading about this challenge I created for myself. If any of you want to come along for the journey, feel free to let me know! That would be awesome and definitely would increase my motivation. Also, if any of you have successfully (or unsuccessfully) done a challenge like this, tell me! It would be awesome to hear about your experiences with a challenge this intense. Also, feedback is always appreciated. Thanks for reading, have a good day!

-Parker

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I wish you a lot of succes with this enterprise, Parker! I suppose that you have set yourself this challenge knowing yourself and having experience with language learning as you have learned Spanish. I think for me a challenge like this would be too stressful … I don’t set goals for myself that I must have reached at a given moment, I just study regularly and am satisfied with the result. Indeed, it takes time before I can read interesting stuff, but I enjoy the adventure.

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It’s a very interesting challenge and I wish you a lot of success and, more important, a lot of fun in the process. I do understand the need to leave boring beginning content behind ASAP
It’s certainly a lot of effort and I don’t see myself going for such a huge load of work but my goals and especially my lifestyle’s very different to yours.
So just go for it and keep us posted

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I still can’t go over 6,000 or 7,000 words read per day in Italian so those numbers are very impressive.

The only advice I can give you is to watch a TV series in Spanish on Netflix (Estocolmo and Club De Cuervos are amazing) in the meantime because it will give you the motivation to keep going in French. Works for me anyway.

Good luck!

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Although I wouldn’t like to disencourage you nor come off as negative or too blunt, I have to say that I find your challenge sheer unrealistic and prone to burn you out for the following reasons:

1 - As Benscheelings wisely hinted at, you just can’t measure the time you’ll need to reach certain level, moreover, it won’t let you get pleasure from the process and you’ll eventually get burned out.

2 - As you’ll already know 150h is nearly nothing in terms of learning a language as you’ll already know, it doesn’t matter how close it is to the one you already learnt. So for example, It took me 6 months to get a B2 in Portuguese which is much more closer than French to Spanish and I was studying pretty hardcore like 4 hours a day every damn day.

3 - Long story short, you can’t choose the outcome of your efforts, goals don’t work that way. You just can put in as much time as you can an hope for the best.

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You seem to forget that French has a ton of shared vocabulary with English. You have no idea how many times I’ve come across words that are the same in French and English but are completely different in Spanish.

The fact you have the audacity to write that “goals don’t work that way” is preposterous. How in the world can you make such a claim?

Worst case, it’ll take him longer that he thought it would. That’s the absolute worst that can happen. What gives?

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I hope that you will succeed. I set goals for myself too. It is motivating. You also encurged me to share my goals on Forum. I wish you a lot FUN.

By the way could you inform us about your progress and which methods the more effectives are for you.

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My approximation of the level I HOPE to be at by the end of this challenge is obviously not set in stone, just what I expect to accomplish. As of now, French is incredibly easy and I am understanding a TON of what I read/listen to here on LingQ. I have made tremendous progress in these last 4 days alone and I don’t really see that slowing down. Now I am not necessarily disagreeing with you, I made my goals seem unrealistic on purpose because even if I don’t fully complete them, that is still a tremendous amount of French content read and listened to for one short month. The reason I don’t think I will burn out is because this challenge is only a month long. During a normal 90 day challenge if I were to set goals near the same as these, I don’t think I would ever finish (at least I never would have with Spanish) because it would simply be too long. Also, this is a new and exciting language, one that I want to speak with a passion. I love languages, and although my goals seem insane and unrealistic, I believe that by the end of this month I will be happy with my results.

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Basically the only thing I do is read/listen here on LingQ. I challenged myself not to look at grammar rules for this first month because I think that would ruin the experience a bit for me. I’m glad to hear that it motivates you! That in turn motivates me too haha. Good luck with your language learning!

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Hi Parker! First of all, I’d honestly like you to get the most of your challenge. Now I get you a little better, all of that seems ok to me as long as you were willing to make some shifts in your daily routines if as days pass you feel overwhelmed and unable to keep up with the amount of words you want, and as you said, you get satisfied by the end of the month whatever the outcome is.

Good luck and stay motivated!

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Sure, I take into account that English and French share many words that you won’t see in Spanish. That’s way I chose Portuguese as an example of a language that shares more than 80% of words with Spanish, has much easier pronunciation and orthography.

I claimed that goals don’t work that way just because one month is nothing in language learning and I’m not new in this field. Sure, he might be a genius but that’s not the norm.
May I ask you how many hours did it take you to reach 10.000 words in Italian here on Lingq? It may help me know more precisely the time the OP would need to meet his claimed ¨2. Increase known words to 8,000 on LingQ. and 3. Make 15,000 LingQs.
As let’s face it, if he is to put in 120 hours of lingq (4x30), it adds up to 7.200 minutes ( 2 lingqs per minute and a word known per minute)

If it will take him longer, he may lose motivation, get burnt out or drop the whole thing, it depends.

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