Photo by Saint Sab on Unsplash

Bonjour! Welcome to week two of my French Journey! This week was all about review. I decided to start using Duolingo and made a schedule to start practicing once a day. My goal for each day was categorized “Serious” and I am trying to reach 30 XP each day. Duolingo also allows you to keep streaks, so I am trying not to break mine. For every session you complete, you get 10 XP. The sessions take about ten minutes and are not a big-time commitment.

Since this week was review, I achieved gold status in three topics: Basics, Basics 2, and Greetings. The basic levels were pretty easy. A lot of the information was not new since I had completed some of the levels in Duolingo before and I learned a lot of the phrases in elementary French. Some of the phrases and words included in the Basic package were:

  • Greetings:
    • Salut | Hi
  • Gender
    • Femme | Woman
    • Homme | Man
    • Garcon | Boy
    • Fille | Girl
  • Articles
    • Le/La | The
    • Un/Une | A
    • Je suis | I am
  • And Others!
    • Un Chien | A dog
    • Un Chat | A cat
    • Un Cheval | A horse
    • Une Pizza | A pizza

Subject two was Basics two. Once again, these phrases and words were easy to learn. Some of the phrases included were:

  • Verbs
    • Je parle | I speak
    • Tu parles | You speak
      • The ‘s’ is silent! 🤫
    • Il/Elle parle | He/She speaks
  • Nationalities*
    • Espagnol(e)** | Spanish
    • Americain(e)** | American
    • Francais(e)** | French
    • Mexicain(e)** | Mexican
  • Language
    • Anglais | English
  • Names
    • Je m’appelle | My name is
    • Tu s’appelle | Your name is
    • Il/Elle s’appelle | His/Her name is

Subject three was greetings and they were harder to learn. When looking at all the different subjects in French, they all looked the same and most of the greetings were similar so I often got confused. Words and phrases from this session included:

  • Bonjour | Hello, Good Morning, Good Afternoon
  • Bonsoir | Good Evening
  • Bonne Soiree | Have a good evening
  • Bonne Nuit | Good Night
  • Salut | Hi/Bye
  • Ca va? | How are you?
  • Merci Beaucoup | Thank you very much
  • A Bientot | See you soon
  • Oui, et toi? | Yes and you?

If you want me to put my skills to the test, here is a video of me trying my week one vocab!

 

That was about it for this week. It is very interesting to see how French differs from English. If you are curious where the cat and the croissant came from, that was one of the practice phrases in Basics.

A Bientot!

* If I am saying ethnicities, (for example, a Spanish woman), we would put the nationality after the gender. For example, “Une femme espagnole” instead of “Une espagnole femme”.

**The ‘e’ is added to make the word feminine. We would write “femme americaine” in stead of “femme americain”