Hacking my life: A year of immersion in foreign languages

If it's possible to learn a programming language with the resources of the Internet, is it also possible to learn a foreign language? My New Year's resolution (2016) is to finally try and expand my vocabulary and ability in real-world languages by using the tools available to me on the Internet and without adding any time specifically dedicated to language learning. Yes, I've tried Duolingo and it's brilliant but I want something less abstract from life and which is inbuilt with even less friction, something that slots in place of what I already do.

So I've started hacking my life to make learning more everyday.

Step 1: I've deleted all UK news apps from my phone and downloaded foreign ones instead. I've installed Le Monde, Spiegel Online, SZ.de, Republic.it, ARA.CAT, and changed Huff Post to the French edition in the app's settings. I've also downloaded the France 24 news broadcast app.

The first thing to note is that typically news apps for tablets like to charge for content and lay it out in a more print centric way. So if you've the money to subscribe, feel free to do so, but the phone versions usually provide web-level content without a charge.

Foreign television is more of a slippery subject, just as BBC iPlayer restricts content to the UK, so foreign TV networks do the same for their respective countries. And the basic ways of disguising geographical location seem less effective now than they may have been in the past. So unless you want to look into cloaking your location and routing your access through a server native to the country's network that you're trying to access then it's a bit of a non-starter. Of course this doesn't prevent you from buying foreign films and searching out foreign language YouTube content, but since I tend to consume most films and television in the company of others, unless they are onboard for watching unsubtitled content then it would involve me adding time into my life and that's not really in the spirit of the hack.

So I start out staring at pages of foreign journalism and I've cut myself off from the UK news aside from what I get from people, twitter and so on (I live in a TV free household, so it's not happening there; and I rarely listen to a radio). Let the games begin!

I've been dipping in and out of languages (French most often) since school, but my vocabulary has always been incomplete and I lack confidence in stringing together sentences. So my notes will often (always?) appear beginner level.

Vocab:

aliment - food (n., masc.)
mondial - worldwide (adj.)

Incidental finds

So the first find I make in researching what I'm reading is a page about the ordering of nouns and adjectives and while the page itself is indeed informative, actually it's the comments that stand out and the concept of BANGS - Beauty, Age, Numbers, Goodness and Size - these are the exceptions to the rule that adjectives are placed after nouns in French. Hooray! Something memorable to guide me!

Conclusion

I don't believe this approach will make me fluent, after all I just made it up, but it will give me an ongoing constant exposure to foreign languages rather than just what I'm exposed to on holiday. So I hope that by the end of a year it has had some effect. And if there's enough interesting (semi-tech related) stuff connected to it, then I will continue to blog about it.

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