Coucou les French learners,
un grand merci, A big thank you!
Merci pour … Thank you for your wonderful comments on my YouTube channel. They encourage me daily to keep on producing videos with comprehensible and compelling French input.
To “rekindle your love for French” does motivate me to keep on delivering the GOOD French stuff!
Acquisition versus Learning
I do try my best to answer each comment but yesterday I just read one I had missed from 7 months ago. This particular comment caught my attention: “Thank you for video, but if I may, I would like to point out something. I think your lesson lacks repetitions. As a beginner in French I just can’t learn so many new words. And asking your listeners questions is considered a very effective way for learners to learn new words and phrases.”
Here is my reply: “Good remarks but the objective of watching my videos is to ACQUIRE French, not to learn new words. You should just enjoy the story. When you understand the story (not every words in the story), your brain is acquiring the new language effortlessly. That is why it is not necessary to ask you questions. Comprehensible input alone is sufficient. ENJOY!”
In his paper entitled: We don’t need no stinkin’ exercises: the impact of extended instruction and storybook reading on vocabulary acquisition, Jeff McQuillan explains and confirms how just reading and telling stories aloud “has a significant impact on a child’s vocabulary development (Mol & Bus, 2011). Children acquire words incidentally by being read to, and show growth in word knowledge even upon a single exposure to a novel word (Carey & Bartlett, 1978). In general, the more exposure to an unknown word children have, the more likely they are to acquire that word, without any explicit vocabulary instruction (Robbins & Ehri, 1994).”
You can read this paper along with other interesting papers on language acquisition in the Language and Language Teaching handbook.
And it just happened that when writing this newsletter, I got a brillant comment proving my point by viewer Chris Rout: “Thank you so much for your videos. I think that they are just fantastic. I really enjoy watching/listening to your stories and it is such a great feeling to notice myself understanding more and more.”
#inputaloneissufficient
Language comprehension
I also want to thank you du fond du coeur, from the bottom of my heart for subscribing to the membership on my website.
It does support the free videos on YouTube without ads.
It does contribute to French acquisition for all!
AND you get to boost your French journey for as little as as 4.75EUR/month.
Becoming fluent in French is the RESULT of language comprehension (listening and reading), not of direct instruction and “practice.”
#trusttheprocess
On the membership, here is an example of what you can read: Dimanche dernier à Paris and listen to (notice that the voice is not mine!):
You can download the files .pdf and .mp3 so that you can read and listen to French anywhere!
Be part of the French learner community and support each other. Become a member. Join us.
Le Challenge
How are you keeping up with le challenge du mois de Mai ?
C’est le vingt-troisième jour du May challenge #enmaifaidufrançais
Today’s video is about one of my favourite spring fruit: les fraises, miam !
If you haven’t started yet, no worries. START NOW!
If you want to watch something else than my videos, or if you’d rather read a book, START NOW!
I am here to help you acquire French effortlessly.
Happy French acquisition!
P.S. Did you enjoy the third video of the new series Au Portugal? (It is also a yummy one!) The scripts will be available soon on the membership 🙂