Language Goals: Mini-Modules

I'll confess that after I finished writing my French love letters for Jake I slowed down a bit on the French practice. Okay, I slowed down a lot. All of a sudden I had no tangible goal to reach for. The letters gave me a reason to keep practicing and learning new words and sentence structures. But oncee that goal was accomplished, what was I supposed to do next?

I tried setting goals like, "have actual conversations with French people" or "watch/understand a movie in French sans English subtitles" but these seemed so distant from my current level. Then I read a few articles online and between this super cool article about realistic language goals and this article about language learning frustration I was able to refine some of my own goals for both the long-term and the short-term.

My two ultimate (long-term) goals are to be able to pray in French (targets thinking) and fluidly converse in French (targets spoken communication). My medium-term goals include understanding the gist of the news in French (targets comprehension) and find a penpal to write to (targets written communication).

While establishing these overarching goals, I realized that the main obstacle keeping me from making more progress is a small vocabulary! Now, I had a good small goal to work with which would support me in achieving my larger goals. And the mini-modules were born.

Instead of memorizing some random list of vocabulary that may or may not be useful to me, I decided to create my own lists based on personal interests. I'd already done this to an extent with my letters. I needed to narrow my focus so I wouldn't get bogged down with excess vocabulary that isn't immediately useful to me (like knowing the rooms of a house). Plus, since the word lists are based on my interests, I can get excited about studying them instead of dragging my feet!

Here's how I did it:

•  Brainstorm a list of topics to study
• Write down as many related words to each topic (do not include words you already know)
• Separate the words into their parts of speech: nouns, verbs/adverbs, and adjectives
• Look up each word and pronunciation; add to virtual flash card deck (I like Cram)
• Memorize one word list (part of speech) per day, reviewing the previous days' words
• After all three parts of speech are memorized, practice using the words in basic sentences
• Finally write a short paragraph about the topic and post on Lang-8 or BonPatron for correction.

Here's a concrete example. One of my topics is "Soccer" so I wrote a huge list of every soccer-related word I could think of (or that I might use when talking about mon sport préféré.)--goalie, team, sprint, competitive etc. etc. Then I divided my words into nouns, verbs, and adjectives. On Monday I translated and memorized the nouns; Tuesday the verbs; and Wednesday the adjectives reviewing the previous lists as I went. On Thursday I took all the words and wrote sentences with them.

Ex. J'ai donné un coup de pied à la balle dans le but, mais le gardien faire obstruction au but.
(I kicked the ball into the goal, but the goalie blocked it.)

Finally on Friday, I wrote a paragraph with the words and posted it on Lang-8. And voila! Mini-module complete! I anticipate some topics (like "church") taking longer than 1 week to complete but for the most part, I am tackling 1 topic per week. With an average of 30-50 words per list, after 10 topics, I"ll have a good 300-500 additional words learned and I"ll be able to talk about the things I am interested in! Is that cool or what?