When I was in 10th grade, I was 16 years old and it was the last year that I took french classes in high school. In my two final years in high school I took different classes and did not study french anymore. I'm 25 years old now working full-time and studying management and finance part-time; recently I have started to learn french again, because I wanted to be able to communicate the basics in french when on vacation or to understand a french movie without translation. Because I'm quite busy every week I wanted to invest around 10 minutes every day in this project.
1) I took the approach to open up an account on 'duolingo': https://www.duolingo.com
Duolingo is a website that enables you to learn several languages like french, german or spanish.
The leaning modules are divided in several units. You will start with the most common words and small conversations, the difficulty increases with every unit; you are taught the basics in grammar at the beginning, also increasing in difficulty with increasing unit levels.
At the end of every learning section, you are awarded a certain amount of credits, influencing your ranking compared to other students.
In my opinion, this ranking system can help you to stay motivated, when you are constatly confronted with the progress of other language learners ;).
2) Although learning grammar and vocabulary might be a vital aspect of learning a new language, listening to convesations, especially about topics
you are interested in, is also important in my opinion. I prefer watching french movies, with french subtitles, because I faced difficulties understanding the dialogues without subtitles in the beginning. Another way to listen to conversations are french podcasts on youtube.
Right now I am investing around ten minutes per day in learning units on duolingo and I'm watching french movies and podcasts around 1-3 times a week; I have started to see an improvement in my ability to follow french conversations, movie lines. My goal is to be able to hold a conversation in french, when on vacation (I went to Paris in July last year :D); but the most important part for me is to stay motivated during learning.
