I’ve had some moments of doubt this week pondering if I can ever get past only being able to name things and memorise whole sentences. It’s speeds up the learning process at the beginning, but at some stage you want to express genuine opinions or say how you feel, naturally, rather than delivering a script. I think I haven’t reached that stage with French yet.

I’m getting to the point of ‘Tarzan French’ (a name used in the ‘Language hacking’ book), where you simply use whatever words you’ve learnt so far to convey your thoughts, even if it’s completely not grammatically correct and you’re just smashing the words together. Par example: ‘lady - work - in the restaurant’ for waitress or ‘a place - cars’ is a garage etc

The good news is, from next week I’ll have 1:1 conversation classes with a French native speaker. I found her on www.tutorful.co.uk and it’s a great site if you want to find a tutor for languages, piano lessons.. or basic gardening. You name it. My teacher is a girl from Toulouse and she’s studying in London. I’m more than happy to have lessons with a student, they’re not ‘institutionalised’ liked proper teachers plus she’ll earn some pocket money.

I’ve also started using Instagram a lot. Not just the fact I post French related photos and introduce you to French words myself, but I found many great feeds where people record videos with ‘lessons’ and ask you to comment in French, or you can find accounts full of phrases or words with a proper ‘French voice’ saying them out loud. Honestly, it’s so easy to learn a language in the 21st century if you only want to (patience, discipline and hard work are separate things to keep in mind, the tools you’ve got in your hand). You don’t even have to travel anywhere from your sofa.

Week three had its ups and downs. I took a break on Friday, I just couldn’t focus and was too tired from the whole week. It’s better to take a break, otherwise you’ll get annoyed at yourself and give up the whole thing! And that’s NOT want we do on likeachallenge.com