Welcome!

Hello everybody!
It's post number one, the start of this exciting journey into the French language! Although, it's technically not *the start* for me. Back in 2003, I gained an A level in French at grade B, which wasn't too shabby considering that I'd been a bit of a slacker during my college years... However, I had always had a passion for the language, being immensely interested in learning French during the five years of high school where we were taught how to speak French. In the intervening years, though, all of that seemed to fall by the wayside, as life took over, and opportunities for speaking French dwindled to nothingness.

All that has changed for me, though, as I started back in the autumn of 2019 to re-learn the language, almost on a whim when I needed something to do when I was staying up with my new baby daughter. I found that I actually remembered more than I realized - particularly, things like pronunciation and grammatical points - so the task of learning anew wasn't quite as daunting as it might otherwise be! This has proven to be very helpful, of course, as I'm primarily using online sources to teach myself, and doing this can be quite difficult if you don't know if what that website is telling you is true.

My blog is not a language course - let's just get that out of the way here, now. I'm not going to claim to be able to teach you how to speak French, when I am, myself, still learning. However, I thought it might be interesting to present my own language journey in this form, and you can either follow along with me, or jump on each of my mistakes and judge me, as you see fit! Along the way, though, I'm sure there will be scope for mini-lessons, as I pass on to you guys what I have learned during the week. Hopefully, these will become more authoritative as time goes on!

The Goal
My aim with learning French is to become fluent - that should be everyone's aim with learning a language, I suppose! However, breaking that down into bite-size chunks, I'd decided that, if all I could do was write a couple of paragraphs on a Monday, detailing what happened at the weekend, that would be okay for now. From there, I'd decided that I want to take the series of DELF exams to demonstrate my growing proficiency. Even though I have the background with French as mentioned above, I'm still going to start at the bottom, with the A1 exam, as I want to get a feel for how that side of things works, as well as giving myself the most thorough grounding as I can.

So I guess there will be some sort of structure to my journey, as I progress through the syllabus there, but I do tend to learn things in a fairly haphazard way, coming across bits that interest me that are probably far above my current level! Learning a language is all about learning to express and communicate, though, and I am always trying to learn how to say what I want to say.

But I hope it will have a lot of interest, and will maybe even inspire you to learn the language, too! I'm intending to write a post at least once a week, where I look back at how I've been doing in that week, and what I've learned etc. Maybe, once this lockdown is over, I'll be able to pop across the Channel and visit France, trying out my newfound skills on the unsuspecting natives! Everything that I get up to with the language will find its way here, though, and I hope you find it interesting, maybe even a bit useful!

On y va!