So for those of you who are new to the master class today, my name is Natalie and I’m the director here at the VICI Academy. I ran this nice nine day French master class together with my colleague
Laura, who is a French and English coach. She also happens to be the manager of our French office
and today for this session only Lana, who is also one of our longstanding language coaches, will be
joining me, and we’ll actually run most of the session. So we’ve been organising and we’ve been
running this master class for four days now. It is a nine day master class now it is a French
masterclass simply because this is my language of predilection. However, I have said from day one
that this truly is a master class that any language, learner or lover can attend, because we’re
actually going through language learning strategies rather than speaking about the language in
particular, we’ll do that a bit later on and towards the end of course.
So on day one, we looked at just a quick recap on day one, we looked at 2 strategies to tricking your
brain into learning the language. So we looked at your personality in colours. That was a really fun
exercise to do. Then we look at the type of learner. That you are to really help you understand how
you will best absorb and memorise and retain and use and analyse the language that you are
learning. On day two, we looked at the concept of blended learning and how amazing this is to
really make your language learning journey exciting, varied, but also pretty efficient. And then
yesterday we looked at a plan. Yesterday we showed you a blueprint on how to plan your language
goals, regardless of where you are starting at and regardless of where you want to go to and today,
we are kicking off with a session called five ways to live your language. So what does that mean?
Well, we’ve gone through strategies. We’ve gone through planning and all of this has to be
meaningful but fun and we think that your language also needs to be part of your routine. But
when it’s part of your routine, it kind of needs to be effortless you don’t want it to be a burden.
OK, we’ve given you the big, solid groundings, the big pillars with the strategies with the planning
then to build a routine around your language studies is something that you can do that you ought
to do that really encourage you to do but this can be done with a lot of fun. However, if it’s not
something that you’ve done before, you may wonder how it’s possible to do it, and that is why
we’re here today. Now the first thing that I want to do is I said to my team when I was preparing
for this master class, the content of this master class, I said to my team we have a private Facebook
group just for the team of language coaches and so I put a post saying if I said to you tell me ways
to live the foreign language that I’m learning what would you say? And I’d really like to share with
you just casually what they have said, because I actually think that it is quite meaningful. So let me
I thought I had facebook open, but I don’t, but that’s OK. Let me open Facebook and let me show
you so groups. It’s a little bit slow today. Oh, there, we. Go and there we are. OK, so let’s see. OK,
there it is. That’s me. That was me telling everyone not to knock on my door every day for 9 days
between 12:00 and 1:00 because I’m wearing my master class. So, there it is I said if I ask you to
lose weight, to list a foreign language, I have it you can bring into your daily life to help your
learning. What would you say? Quite interesting. So let’s have a quick comments.
Just we can’t see Facebook. Oh. You can’t see my Facebook page. Ohh. I did say to deny that I
wasn’t very good with. I think I know with. See there it is there. It is. How about now? Yeah. So this
is our team here, and this was the question that I asked everyone and I whilst I was preparing for
the content and I thought I’d love to see what people have to say. So this is quite interesting guys,
because these are really spontaneous answers. You know, when you reply on Facebook, you don’t
give it too much thoughts, very spontaneous from our team within our private group. So this was
not really for students to see, but I found the answers were really interesting, so I wanted to show
you well, we’re gonna put Lana to the side because Lana’s who one of our main presenter today,
Maria said fall in love with something or someone. That’s a really good advice. Then, Latifa said,
watch movies in Netflix in their original language or without subtitle, keep chatting with friends
and I have that target language being part of a club group, for example on social media, cause I
think she loves that. Alice says I agree with falling in love with the place or friend or person, friends
or otherwise. That’s a good idea. Forcing yourself to communicate in the words and where you
know, putting yourself in a new situation where you have to listen and speak to the people. I
particularly love that one. One of our old students actually, really love sewing so she found a
sewing club when she moved to France and said that she spent hours there. Just listening to what
was happening, because when she moved out there, her language was very basic. So that’s a very
good idea. Just sit there, listen, observe. Joe said I’m a big advocate for Academy English versus
slang, more likely to encounter slang in spoken English outside the class so cringe because I’m not
a fan. Watch soaps and reality TV, the downside is doesn’t portray English people at their best.
Love this example because I often say that 20 years ago when I moved to the UK I didn’t know was
soap operas, were it wasn’t a thing in France at the time and I lived in Manchester. So for those of
you who are UK based, who understand what I’m talking about, I started watching Coronation
Street and it was completely alien to me. But it was everyday life. People who looked like me and
who had a real Mancunian accent. So I sat there with a cup of tea every day for about half an hour
and I did actually, learn quite a lot of English from it. So I just wanted to share that with you
because I thought that that was quite interesting to see what the team was saying. And I think that
the idea here falling in love with someone with, you know, with something, with watching movies,
with joining a club face to face or a group on Facebook. This is really what we want to talk to you
about today. But we want to give it a little bit more depth to what we’re going to do is Lana is now
going to be our main presenter. She’s going to tell you a little bit about her background, which I
think is very interesting, her experience with foreign languages which is absolutely, extremely rich
and phenomenal. And then she will give you her insight based on this as to what you can do if you
have any questions on the BBC article that we have sent to you yesterday and that we’ve added to
our Facebook group because we thought it was very relevant to today’s topic, then please ask
questions at the end either to Lana or myself or Laura, and then I’ll take over after Lana and I will
put a little bit of structure into all of this. We promised five ways to live your language, so at the
end of Lana’s presentation and any of your potential questions, then I will go through the five if
you like different sections that we identified, does that make sense? Yeah. OK. Right, Lana, ready to
take over? Ohh we could. Ohh there we go. There you are. Yeah. Lovely.
Happy to hear. You can hear me. Great. Hi, everyone. And I’m happy to be here and actually
honoured to be here and talk about the topic, which I feel very passionate about and yeah, so it’s a
great privilege for me to be talking with you and share my experiences. So basically, as I mentioned
on Facebook, if you read the the post of like from yesterday I mentioned that I was born in a
completely multilingual multicultural environment. So I am originally from Russia and I was born in
1986, so it was still the Soviet Union, you know, with all this, with consequences, political, cultural
consequences, where there was still, like, the wall was like kind of flowing already when I was
growing up, like the growing I mean, in the communist world, but still the world stayed in a lot of
people’s minds you know, and in my family it’s just it was just me now it’s just me now who has a
passport like passport to travel to other countries. So growing up, so we’re just small language in
my family. We never travelled abroad, we never spoke other languages, we’ve never been
discussed other countries you know, so I’m saying that to show you that it is possible to become
multilingual or bilingual as an adult because I learned basically I have learned in my life several
languages, not to brag, but yeah, just the total simple language that I learned in my life foreign
languages, but I learned them most of them but in my adulthood, as an adult, not as a kid. So
when I was very young, nobody talked to me in any language or nobody you know, I never had,
like, foreign friends coming to visit or whatever. So it was really like completely again monolingual
but I was very drawn actually I was magnetised I don’t know if this word exists with English,
because although with our Soviet country and like, there was no really much maybe interest in
foreign relationship with Western countries. We still had English classes and of course in the 90s
the English music, the British music, the American movies started to, you know, come and I was
completely fascinated with the sound of that language, both British and American accents. And
to the point where I would be like listening to Spice Girls like completely not understanding what
they were you know, thinking about. But having like really, really fun and enjoying myself or
sometimes like would be repeating some you know, some lines from the movies or some, you
know, explanations that they produced, you know, like movies and they say typically oh my God.
Ohh, and I used to kind of unconsciously repeat that after them and I imagine. That I kind of
could speak sort of that language. Yeah, that was as a child I was kind of finding my way because
there wasn’t there were no resources really in the 90s. There was no Internet anywhere, right?
Like my English teacher was not really good at written language example the lessons were really
read and translate, so there was no speaking, no one know any kind of human touch, but in
which actually what happened was that a lot of my classmates, they developed resentment
towards English and they hate it, they absolutely didn’t like it. And then of course this is what I
actually come across now, as sometimes as a training language training coach that people come
to me and they still feel that resentment because as a child in their childhood they have really
bad experience with their language studies language lessons but that wasn’t my case,
fortunately. Unfortunately, even though like yeah, it was well, boring I still, like, loved English and
in the back of my mind probably I hope that one day I will pursue that. I mean, what I didn’t
know what I was going to pursue the other, I studied I moved on to study linguistics. Naturally,
well, maybe not naturally but that doesn’t mean that’s how the last time to speak. All this
language, it’s no way and so at university, my language classes were much better, I mean English
classes were much better, more, a little bit more conversation, but still, a lot of grammar, a lot of
reading a lot of you know, translation to and that to the point where I came to the states after
four years of university, four years of university and in total, I think that that was 13 years of
studying English I came to the USA as an exchange student to work at Dunkin’ Donuts as a you
know crew member and my first days were absolutely like on on another planet. I kept like
asking myself, is this really the language I had been studying for 13 years? I couldn’t really
believe it. I couldn’t understand people you know and at that point, this is where I really started.
To be like aware like of the you know, deficiencies of language, education system, traditional
language, education system because here I was, I took like I took classes for 15 years and I
couldn’t speak I couldn’t function in the language. That was really persuading and I think I keep,
like kind of carrying on this, maybe personal frustration and kind of implementing that in my
lessons, I mean not for switching, but I mean I’m trying to kind of teach my learners how to use
the language, not just to learn all the rules and filling, the gaps and blah blah blah, but also use
so that they feel comfortable in real life, and this is something that, for example, have been able
to implement and I have seen really great results where people not just learn language but also
like use it like as a function, yeah for example to buy an ice cream or I don’t know make a speech
on LinkedIn whatever it is. So yeah, basically what I also wanted to add to my experiences and
then we can I will move on to some kind of more specific examples of living the language, right I
as a student I sometimes because it was the beginning of 2000s, you know, the Internet was still
kind of fundamental, but I hadn’t like a tremendous curiosity about the world around me, and I
would be, you know, looking for pen pals from different countries, you know, to get to know
people from different countries again for English. But you can also do that for French. Because
French is also spoken in so many countries, right? So French also gives you like really solid key to
the world out there and then I even made some friends some real friends that I met like face to
face after exchanging several emails over, I don’t know, several months maybe or so. And that
was all of those things they were really like starting to kind of feed my my passion and also my
my interest towards languages and also I joined Post Crossing project which I’m I’m still a part of.
It’s basically you sent a real written postcard to a random person around the world and then also
you get also a postcard a random postcard from a random person in the world so this Is really
fantastic and so then coming back, they’re coming back, moving on a little bit to some specific
examples here because here today we’re talking about living the language and some of the
things that I do for example, I make a shopping list in that and these are that for language and so
this way, even if you for example you don’t know how this particular item is called in, for
example, French in this case of course, you can always look it up and just put it in your list or you
can write it down and then include an emoji or a picture to help you to understand yeah,
because visual cues they are always helpful and then I also what I also do is that I use the
Internet to kind of fuel my curiosity we all know that Internet is a minefield it’s it can be a
blessing, it can be a curse to both, but that’s actually so yeah, you have to be careful about what
you consume on the Internet. But my point it’s it’s something that a lot of people and coaches
also trainers, whatever, say that watch movies and you’ll read articles or listen to programmes,
watch BBC, we’ll talk about or some other channels and I agree with that, but for me, the main
point is that you have to be really interested in what you are watching, so let’s do watching or
listening or reading OK, let’s do a little just a little quick exercise. Can you write down in the chat
3 topics that you love or when you really like talking about just 3 topics from the top of your hat.
Embroidery crochet reading, great gardening, cooking, travel, books, music, food. Awesome. Any
other topics?
Tai chi. Wow. That’s cool. Theatre. Yeah, I like. This is such a variety of topics. That’s really cool.
Great, sports, all of them. Why reading? Wow seems like reading is reading it’s writing leading
reading, yeah. Yeah, all of film, French culture. Bogan, English. French, Spanish. And Dutch every
week. Wow, that’s oh, my God. That’s also ordinary cooking above all, alright. Great. So right, so
you’ve written this 3 topics and the idea is to find quality content on the topics that you really like,
OK and of course, if we’re talking about French here mainly, that should be in French. OK. Of
course, in case your language level allows you to do that and I think if you have your basics cover,
like if you at least have a 2 like. You know, aiming to be B2/B1 this is where you can really start to
you know original authentic context content, yeah. So basically you can think of, you know,
podcasts again we will repeat, but still what you can do what I always advised to my clients. You
just go to any podcast app or you just go to Google and you say for example so here we say we
have a very good example, Tai Chi. So you, you you type Tai Chi probably I don’t know what is Tai
Chi in French? Is it the same?
Same yeah. So it’s going to. Be the same word and then you can put something like the name of
French in French.
In French, then. Though so that it can filter out better you know the results. And then from the
results that you were given, you start to like you see, the titles of course you can start to filter out
the things that speak to you, not because you see Tai Chi. OK, I need to consume it now because
maybe I don’t know they talk about 5 things to prevent injuries. When you do tai chi and this is
something that you were really interested about, OK? You go ahead, you click and you listen. To
that you know or if they talk about why tai chi’s so great for you and you already know that. So
maybe you can skip that so you keep looking and also you keep discovering more content. It can
be podcast, YouTube, blogs, social media, Instagram, LinkedIn, you know, all this Facebook,
whatever it is, but also not only do you need to, you know, consume like, listen, read and watch,
but they did also if you really want to you know kind of see your progress in the language. That it is
to produce like the language, and by produce I mean speaking and writing, OK. So what you’re
going to do is basically going to leave a comment to a post, yeah, if if it’s a post, you’re going to
send in a question because a lot of bloggers, a lot of I don’t know people who who post content
out there they they welcome to really send in their questions so you don’t have to be shy, send in
your question even if it’s going to be with the help of google Translate or dictionary. It doesn’t
matter what matters most is that you really have to like the this, this this channel or this post or
this you know account and you really have to be sort of like a fan so that you have this motivation
to follow and that will organically make you learn the language the language will come to you so
this is the idea and or for example if you feel shy because that’s what I understand and just an
example, I wanted to talk about with my one of my clients, she works at IT and she’s sort of like,
introverted and so she’s not really like, very outspoken and you know very supportive person. So
she she she still feels sometimes kind of intimidating by intimidated by sharing things online. But I
told her that you don’t have to really, like, write long essays. You don’t have to so, you know,
produce perfect things compositions. You can start with just a simple, you know comment like
great article. Thanks. You know or better yet, you can use the phrases or the words from that
article or podcast again, or whatever in your comments. So I don’t know, I’m sorry, my French is
just it’s non existent, but if we’re talking for example English and I don’t know so Imagine that
learner is reading a comment an article about IT education for kids, and and there she finds an
example of a word of a phrase I don’t know IT education it’s a really good example, but it and so
she can think of her question, maybe how to use that example, yeah, IT education or in in her
comment or her question or reply, yeah if it’s a comment to another comment, yeah. So this is
something that we have been doing with her several times I just first told her OK. First I told her
OK, so you’re going to go there is an online debate platform, which is called Kia Law. And I just
checked it, it has the French version, but I think all the debates are in English. I can write you the
the website so that you can check, and what’s great about this platform that it’s completely ad
free, there are no pop ups. There’s like, it’s not social media, it’s just the Today platform and so I
started with that, I told her, look, it’s OK you don’t have to produce perfect text. Let’s start with
something simple. You choose a topic that you like and she liked the topic. She chose IT education
for kids again, as early as three years old because she has to two boys and she works at IT, so this
was a blend for her and I told her just leave one comment start with one comment. And it can be
as short as you get as as you want, OK. And then next time I told her, OK leave the next comment,
leave a little bit bigger comment. OK, so we’re just increasing a little bit the output step by step,
but again, it’s just in the end, it’s about making this habit of. Using the language because. A lot of
times, yeah. When we don’t live in the country where the language is spoken, we think like I don’t
have anywhere to use the language, right? And this is really it’s true, but it’s not really true and
nowadays, thankfully, there are platforms, quality platforms and really content that you can find
and you can engage with you can learn you can feel like a part of the community. It’s just a matter
of pursuing your interests and the patients, but also critical thinking. Yeah, that’s very important.
OK. And another example I wanted to give like using the content is that I had an entrepreneur
French interpreter. He had his own agency, I think was broke or State agency. And so I found for
him really like, interesting a YouTube video how to make LinkedIn work for you, because as an
entrepreneur, you know he needed to, you know, introduce himself to networking and LinkedIn.
He mentioned before that he used LinkedIn so I thought that he could really use LinkedIn to his
benefit to expand his networking, and he watched the video. And then I asked him, OK, So what
would you be? What would be your 3 takeaways? What do you take away from this video? OK,
what are the things so you can start following implementing From that video? OK. And that was
something that really worked for him. Another example that I can tell you how it’s a personal
example. So for example. Or examples. I’m sorry I repeat myself. On some occasions I had
interviews in my other foreign languages for some projects in Spanish and Swedish, and there were
specialised kind of projects or short term gigs, whatever and they’re not in the strongest languages,
to be honest, Spanish with it so of course, it was terrified. It was like what am I gonna do?
But I took it as a challenge and what I did was that I looked up in order to, you know like brush up
on my specific vocabulary as I was looking for some kind of specific words or phrases instead of like
going to Google Translate or dictionary and translating. I went on to the specialised websites with
similar profiles and and and looked up specific words from the same field that I was looking for qnd
I wrote them down so in the end I had all the vocabulary that I needed and that was organic,
natural and that was something that, like the interviewer, could, you know, understand what it was
saying. Yeah. Even though that my I was not very confident in this languages, but I was at least
confident in the Calgary. And what else I can share with you? Just interrupting you really quickly. I’d
love to ask cause when we were preparing for this class today, Laura, we were just casually
chatting last night, and Laura mentioned a couple of really good examples as well. Some of those
students. So Laura do you want to share with us, please..
Hi definitely I was so interested to hear about your background Lana as well. I hadn’t realised it’s
like you hadn’t grown up more doing more and everything. So it’s definitely an inspiration, I think,
to hear Lana speak so fluently and so amazingly, and to know that you can achieve that as an adult.
So I myself feel much more confident about what I can do. Now, so thank you, Lana. But otherwise,
yeah, everything that Lana has said really is it’s exactly that is very great. So I was just talking to
Nathalie yesterday about a few examples of my own students. So I have one student who works for
a company called Harvey. So sells products sort of well-being products online and have like a huge
international corporation. So she works for the French company, and so to help her exactly what
Lana has said, I very much encouraged her to join her life groups in English and to be able to
interact with other people from the same company but we’re in different countries because things
like that are very rare, revolve around social media. So we really got her to work and interacting
with people on their Facebook accounts, in the groups that they had online. So again, this was
something that was not only great for her, her language skills, but for her professional skills as well
in another language, so if anyone is thinking of learning French professional courses, that is a really
great example of how you can really not only build your networking and your professional skills,
but do that while you’re working your language skills and another one I have is I have a client at the
moment, he’s very young. He’s very young, he’s in his early 20s and like many people in the early
20s, we spend a lot of time scrolling on social have come out with interesting facts that will tell me
from random videos you’ve seen about random things because you spend a lot of time on the
Instagram. I don’t know what it’s called, but I don’t really use it, but the part where you go and you
can explore and it just gives you content that you might be interested in. So anyway, when I saw
when he told me exactly how much time he was spending scrolling and doing mind numbing
scrolling and not interacting in anything, I sent him a list of Instagram accounts to follow that were
based around either things he was interested in or the things he was mindlessly consuming
anyway, so really to push on what Lana has said, it’s completely that is all about integrating the
things that you are going to consume anyway in the target language. So exactly what Lana said, so
making sure that, yeah, anything you are going to be doing in your daily life, especially let’s all be
honest, we can all probably spend a little bit less time, whether it’s on social media, whether it’s
just on TV, Netflix. I don’t know. Everyone has their thing. We all have something that we think,
yeah, probably be more productive that time, and that’s the beautiful thing about making
languages integrated in your everyday life, just as Lana said to us, it is
finding where you already spend that time and putting it in in your target language. And that
is something that everybody can do that we can all really do, really.
Really. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. That’s what I also wanted I just, you just reminded me that
everybody of us spend some time, you know, in queues, you know, waiting for somebody or
someone or, you know, washing the dishes or doing some kind of monotonous work. So instead of
just letting this time go by without anything productive, we could also do something, and one of
the easiest ways, for example, to listen to podcast. Yes, or if it’s possible to watch a video or a
movie, whatever you have that you can squeeze in, even if you have 5 minutes. Because sometimes
well, really like they’re like maximalists they think ohh I need to spend every day 30 minutes or two
hours listening or doing something. No, even 5 minutes or 10 minutes make a difference, but
again, I still like all the time. I just can’t help but remind people that the content should be of your
interest, not just, you know, language rules or pronunciation, which is fine, but it should be beyond
the language too and more to that. So the topic of your interest basically, yeah.
Thank you, Lana. Thank you so much. And I I’m going to follow up with a recap of five things that I
think that you can write down along the lines of what Laura and Lana have said just so it’s nice and
structured in your mind, but before we go to that, do you have any direct questions for Lana and
what she has said so far? I’m sure she can reply. I know some of you have sent a little messages in
the chat. I’m sure she can reply to that in a while I think. So if I may, what I’d like to say is I think we
can all agree here that the keyword, if you want to live your language, the language that you are
learning is engage. Engage, engage, engage. That is the keyword. But you need to create conditions
around that. So engaging with the language on a daily basis should feel really quite natural and
effortless. This is the key. Here, remember that you can engage physically and mentally with that
language, whatever it is, for you to keep that motivation going. So the five ways that we as a team
have identified in order for you to live your language and again to summarise what Lana and Laura
have said, number one is anything that is topic based. So if you’re interested in fashion then I saw
that someone, I think it’s Laura is reading Vogue in several languages. Great. You’re interested in
sports, in wine, in food, in cars, in travel. Just pick one topic two or three. But work your
engagement around a topic. You can do it. Based on an environment. So when you go to the gym,
a dog walk, we talked about Tai chi. One of my clients when I was still coaching, adored yoga and
she was really quite an advanced learner. She was telling me how she was doing yoga every
morning. I told her to put the yoga videos in French and she doesn’t need the instructions
anymore, she knows exactly what a downward dog is, and she knows that. So I said, put the videos
in French. You are watching the videos because you want the motivation of being there every day.
You want someone to give you the rhythm of the class. You certainly don’t need the instructions in
your native tongue, you can listen in French, she said that made a huge difference to her learning.
So think about something that could be based within your environment. If you go for a dog walk
every day, is there something every day that you can do like a podcast along your dog walk where
your brain identifies dog walk to French the minute you get the dog out, your brain will start to
switch into thinking in French. #3 is technology based, so we all know now that we use an awful lot
of technologies. The girls have mentioned it. Can you change your phone into French? Are you able
to navigate around your phone if everything is written in French? If so, go for it. Apps, you know,
we all know that you could have an app and spend 5 minutes on the train if it’s a short train
journey that you do every day to put it to good use. We’ve spoken about social media, Facebook
groups, I mean Facebook groups are literally the thing of the century and we communicate with our
students more on Facebook, I believe than anywhere else. They’re in our Facebook group, they ask
questions, they watch video, they digest our content, they’ll then they’ll send us a a private
message. So Facebook group, find one of interest and quite frankly, you never even have to
engage. I think Gina talked about crochet. You don’t even have to engage with people until you feel
confident doing so. Watching and reading the information is going to be very interesting and useful.
Then #4 is relationship based. Your children, your niece, nephew, granddaughter for some of you.
Who are your language partners? Can you associate? Learning French or any other language that
you’re learning with a person. It can be someone you share your language class. It’s it can be a
cousin who lives in a foreign country. It can be anyone, someone who’s close to you. Not
necessarily. How about having a language partner? It could also be an accountability partner. If you
decide to study together and that is hugely powerful. So we have topic based. Environment based
technology based relationship based and the last little nugget which is more like a bonus nugget.
This one is time versus mindset. How about one minute a day? Have you ever heard of the one
minute rule? I think both Lana and Laura said you don’t have to do it for a long period of time but
even 10 minutes or 5 minutes can seem like a long time when we have a very busy schedule and
we have to think about work and children and the dog and bills to pay and whatever there is. I
don’t think I’m very wrong by saying that anyone can do something for one minute a day. Again, if
it’s not really, you don’t worry about it but why not give it a try? Out of all of these things that
we’ve mentioned, is there anything at all that you could do with just one minute a day? The way
your brain think, I mean this one minute technique works for loads of different things, the whole
idea behind it is for people to think well, of course I can do that for one minute. I mean, who
doesn’t have one minute? And nine times out of 10, people actually do it for 5 minutes or 10 or 15
or 30. But it all started because they’ve told themselves that they could definitely make time for
just one minute of a little French thing that they wanted to do that day, and you can choose
whatever that is.
So, Please remember that it’s all about engaging on a daily basis with something to do with the
language. It’s very personal to you. It needs to be natural. It needs to be effortless. We’re not here
talking about studying the language. We’re not here talking about learning rules putting some
structure into it. No, none of that. Living the language is very much adopting it on a daily basis,
something that’s going to bring you joy, but that’s really gonna make you go further along your
language learning journey. Again, it can be. A mental involvement but it can be a physical
involvement as well if you like to go for a jog in the morning. Think about topics. Think about
environment. Think about technology, think about relationship and think please about the one
minute rule. And the last thing here, which is really quite crucial and and Lana mentioned it as well,
is input and output. Remember that sometimes it will be your own input, sometimes it’s an output.
When you listen to a podcast whilst you walk in the dog, it’s an output. When you listen to the yoga
training session in French, that’s an output. You’re the receiver. Trying to do little things that are an
input because these variation in actions with the language are going to help you tremendously. You
may not realise it at first, but trust me, it builds up to something really quite phenomenal. So an
input could be the the little comment on LinkedIn or on Facebook. I love the LinkedIn one because
we train a lot of professionals, and all of them go on LinkedIn. That’s an advice that I’ve given
before and as Lana said, it could just be that’s a great article, thank you for sharing. That’s an input.
Do you have any questions? And Tina, definitely singing edit cat songs counts. You’re welcome to
practise. We’re on day four. We’re going to day 9. If you want to come back and sing one of them
the stage is yours. And whatever bring you joy. That’s absolutely right.
No, I’ve been there actually, songs is is a great way and not just listening to the song, but you can
find the lyric video on YouTube for example. So you can read and listen at the same time and there
are if you often just search lyrics and the name of the song you’ll find annotated versions of the
lyrics as well, which is always really nice, so people have commented what they think the lyrics
represent and things like that, which is actually a really nice way of sort of engaging with the
language a little bit further than just listening to this song as well. So it’s definitely something I’d
recommend as well.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Does anyone have any questions but also any little tips that they
themselves perhaps want to share? Thanks Usha, I’m glad that it was very helpful. I think that you
know we we perhaps all know or can all guess about this what’s important is to think about it in a
slightly more structured way. So, you’ll come across things where you go: Ohh I never noticed I was
doing this like I really like as Gina was saying, I really like French songs. So you may not always think
that you’re putting on fresh songs, just trying to learn it’s just a a nice little pleasurable thing to do.
But if you in mind think about the you know the topic and the environment and the technology
and the relationship, all these different type of environment that really helps you to pinpoint what
is actually right for you, what works really well, and actually Gina just said, I always found that
overcoming your shyness and just talk stranger works wonders. True, you definitely have to be, you
know, quite comfortable doing that. But actually this is the entire point, the entire point. And if you
start to speak to people on LinkedIn in Facebook group, even just a little bit, it’s OK, isn’t it? You
know, there’s a there’s a Facebook group called Everything French. It’s a wonderful little group
where people share brilliant things about France. I came across it in a very long ago I think it’s only
been set up about two years ago. It’s got beautiful pictures of France all the time. It’s it’s very much
a feel good figures per group. They talk about food, culture, history. There’s three or four people
who run it. They’ve got an amazing knowledge of France and being in this group, it is an English
speaking group, but quite often people will ask little French question or they’ll try to comment on
like when it was the 14th of July French national day. Quite a few tried to comment in French about
it. There won’t be a safer place for you to do that if you are quite new at learning French because
everyone there will be very, very understanding the name of the group is called everything French.
If you can’t find it, Sarah, let me know and and I’ll I’ll copy it, cause I I’m part of it, but it is really,
really good.
Sorry, Natalie, there’s I just looked it up there’s about three groups called Everything French
OK, I haven’t got my phone with me, show me, I think I’ve just seen it. It’s the first one, just a nice
little icon.
Thank you. Thank you.
It’s the first one, yeah. No more questions? Is anyone brave enough to tell us something they are
going to implement?
Yeah, I think, yeah, I think all of this is interesting, Natalie. Yeah, definitely topic brand topics like I
haven’t are varied interest. So yeah, I’ll definitely be looking up things in French for my gardening or
my Tai Chi. Yeah, yeah, that’s like I actually, I said that some some very useful tips. But I mean,
there’s a lot of tips there that I can really take on board. So yeah, yeah. Thank you.
Brilliant. And you know, don’t don’t think that you’ve got to do all of it so you know, just starting
with the one minute is amazing. Moving on to the topic is fabulous I know that a lot of the
students who join our French programmes and up having little French body, we encourage that a
need for a lot, sometimes when we know the students personality quite well, we say I or or or. If
you have some, we know we have something in common interest, family and social background
will say I think so and so could be your accountability partner. You can, you know, you can work
together, you can help each other when you work out on your friends outside the class. So don’t
do it all at once. But there’s a lot, an awful lot that can be done, but it’s very much what we’ve said
all along in this master class is about having something structured. It’s about having something
that really means something to you and something that is achievable. You know it is achievable. It
is digestible because if that’s the case it will then form part of your routine and your language
studies will become part of your lifestyle and then it’s just extremely enjoyable and you keep with
it, and you get progress. Yeah. So, well, I just wanted to say thank you very much. The the Master
clas is about to end, you are very welcome to stay for a little bit longer. You’re very welcome to
contact us privately and ask any questions. So we’ve, sorry, we’ve gone through day. 123 and four
now. We’ve basically covered most of our blueprints, if you like most of the solid learning
strategies that we share with our students have pretty much been covered. So if you think that
you’ve learned enough and now you can go off on your own and you feel very confident that
whatever you’ve chosen to learn French, you can get on with it. Then I’m conscious of your time
and you may not want to be there for the the remaining days that we have planned, we’re running
throughout the weekend and until next Tuesday. If, however, you think that the info that you’ve
had so far are very useful, but that you’d like to progress because you’d like to work with more
professional like ours, then please stay because the next few days are gonna be really quite
practical. The next few days we are going to present our French ambition programme, which is
brand new, that we are starting out as an online programme that we’re extremely proud of. We’ve
put years of research into it. I think that all that we’ve done in the French department so far, which
has been the king language variety for the last 14 years, all of that has been great, but I think the
French ambition programme is really the best of all that we’ve done. If you think that. You’d really
want to find ways of working with the team of professionals to either Kick Start your friends to this
or really really take them to the next step, then please stick around. Stick around because we are
going to talk about that in more details in. The next few days you are going to meet some of our
students. They will explain to you their journey here we are doing hot seats. I think that’s on
Sunday. On Sunday we’re doing like a customised learning journey for you. So you come with
where you are, where you’re going, you can ask us questions. We’re going to answer all these
questions for you, etcetera. OK. So that’s just what I am, you know, wanted to finish this class with.
I really, really hope that the first four days, which really are the main pillars of of the grounding, if
you like, for all our students, have been extremely useful. But if you really want them more, more
if you’re really fired to speak French very well, then please stick around. We will still be here every
day at 12:00. O’clock UK time until next Tuesday.
OK.
Well, thank you very much everyone. And as always, e-mail, WhatsApp, Facebook, whatever. I’ll be
there to answer your questions. Take care everyone, and thank you very much. Au revoir, merci