My goals

• I want to connect with people better - Whenever I meet new people, I try to guess where they’re from. If I know a few words of their language, I try to speak them, and I immediately see how they light up ¹. I get happier when I make other people happy 🙂.
• It’s a fun activity to do - It’s a hobby, and I look forward to practicing it, which is important.

Why French?

I decided to learn French because:

• I like how it sounds when people speak it - It sounds so melodic and romantic.
• I like to listen to songs in French - This is related to how it sounds. I became more interested in French when I got a recommendation for the song “Santé” from “Spill Tab” ². Since then, I started enjoying listening to French music with indie pop artists like Claire Laffut and Vendredi sur Mer , and music from the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s like Charles Aznavour , Sylvie Vartan , Marie Laforêt , and Joe Dassin ³.
• I’m interested in the French culture - I love traveling and getting to know new cultures. I picked French because French culture matches how I like to live. French people are known for their love of food, their good manners, their love for reading (9/10 French people read at least one book per year), and how they enjoy their leisure time (flânerie is the art of aimlessly strolling through the city streets).

In my journey, I have realized that:

• I can only learn the language through discipline - Like learning any other skill, it requires me to be consistent. This means practicing whenever I have the opportunity. Some days I might not feel like learning it, but I know that just trying for a few minutes will help, anyway, even if I don’t have the motivation to practice, I do it anyway.
• You get as much as you put in - No matter what method I use, I’m not going to learn it if I don’t practice enough.
• I want to be fluent in a conversational setting - I want to speak a language comfortably in a conversational setting, I’m not that interested in learning how to write it perfectly though it helps.
• Having an imperfect accent is okay - I know that I have an accent when I speak and that’s okay, my accent is what makes me unique. My goal is for the person or people I’m talking to to understand me, and if they can, then that’s it. Having an accent is not an excuse to stop learning other things though, I do put effort into learning new words and the gender of nouns.

The Power of Comprehensible Input

When I decided to learn French, I did what most people would probably do, search online for recommended methods and try them, like reading a beginner’s “Learn French” book, listening to audiobooks where a teacher teaches French grammar rules in English, or enrolling in a language school⁴. Anyway, after a few months of trying all of these methods, I got frustrated and felt that I was not making much progress.

One day, YouTube recommended a video that changed the way I thought about learning a language. It’s a lecture from Stephen Krashen on Language Acquisition and Comprehensible Input .

I think Stephen’s strategy makes sense. When we grow up and learn our first language, we go through a silent period where we’re primarily listening to what our parents tell us and how we see our environment being described before we can speak the language.

The following is a great example of comprehensible input.

Progression

Thanks to Stephen’s video, I changed my initial strategy:

• I focused on listening to and watching stuff in French.
• I listened to podcasts with an interactive transcription where I could see the meaning of new words.
• I spent less time practicing my speaking skills.
• I spent less time learning grammar rules like verb conjugations and tenses.

After a few weeks/months of trying this out, I noticed I was starting to understand new words here and there because it’s natural for the most common words in a language to appear most frequently in casual conversation. Then I realized that I no longer needed to think about the right conjugation for a word because it somehow just came to mind after lots of reading/listening.

After I understood a lot of what I read or listened to, I knew it was time to speak and to learn grammar properly.

My intermediate strategy:

• I started speaking as much as possible using Tandem, Preply.
• I started learning grammar properly.

I use Preply at least once a week, where I only focus on practicing my speaking skills. I go to a French meetup to practice in person⁵, and I practice at work with a Francophone friend during breakfast.

It’s very important to learn grammar for both listening and speaking. For example, in French, I’d always wonder what y and en meant in some sentences. After watching this video I learned that it refers to a previously mentioned place.

It’s actually not hard to find a program to learn grammar properly, following Iclal’s advice , I searched for playlists and found Learn French with Alexa ’s playlist perfect.

I reached a point where I’m actively practicing grammar, vocabulary (new and existing words) and speaking the language whenever I have the chance.

Next on my journey is a visit to France for some immersion time to practice speaking and listening every day.

Self learning tools

I use the following tools:

• Youtube
  • I look for videos in French that have subtitles in both French and English on a topic I’m interested in. Initially, it was very simple content about everyday activities . Now, I combine that and podcasts about topics I’m interested in.
  • My favorite channels are:
    • French In Motion
    • French With Panache
    • Easy French
    • French Facile 12
    • Learn French With Alexa
• Readlang
  • Readlang is my favorite tool for practicing reading and listening.
  • I like that the transcription is interactive, if I don’t know a word, I can click/tap on it, and it’ll highlight it and save it on its database (with the translation and the surrounding context).
  • It’s web-based, so I can access it from my phone and my laptop without installing any software.
  • It’s very affordable compared to similar tools like LingQ and also has a free version.
• Anki
  • To practice new words through spaced repetition. It’s a great tool to use with Readlang.
• Linguno
  • I use it to practice verb conjugation and refine my French. I wouldn’t recommend using it when starting out.

My learning process through podcasts

My current setup involves podcasts, Readlang and Anki:

• I search for a podcast on a topic that I like in the channels above and import it to Readlang.
  • Download the audio (I use yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 "<youtube-link>").
  • Upload the mp3 to https://readlang.com/upload and sync the audio with a Youtube video
• I start a lesson in Readlang and learn new words by clicking/tapping on them.

Spaced Repetition

I use spaced repetition to review words and phrases that I just learned or that I want to learn.

• In Readlang, I export new phrases/words that I’ve learned to an Anki-compatible file.
  • Go to https://readlang.com/words , select all words, and export them.
  • Export settings:
    • Content to export: Context (Anki cloze with translation), word frequency.
    • Delimiter: Semicolon
• I upload the file to Anki desktop and synchronize it.
  • Import file >
    • Import Options >
      • Note file: cloze
      • Deck: My French words and phrases
      • Existing notes: update
    • Field mapping
      • Text: map to “1: "
      • Frequency: map to “2:”
  • Click on Sync to synchronize.

Now the words are in my Anki cloud account. On my phone, I open Anki, synchronize the words, and have daily sessions where I practice the words I’ve learned and their meanings with enough context to make sense of them.

Automating flashcard enrichment with AI

I used to manually ask AI to generate lists of sentences for Anki, but I’ve since moved to a more automated workflow. I built a repo of Anki Skills that allows me to point Gemini or Claude at my Anki deck and let them add more stuff to my cards automatically.

The workflow is straightforward:

1. I add a simple word or phrase I want to learn to Anki (often just a “Basic” card with the word and its translation).
2. I run a set of AI skills that scan my deck for empty fields.
3. The AI agent fills in the blanks based on the existing content of the card.

My favorite skills from this setup are:

• anki-add-notes: It generates detailed grammar explanations and mnemonics for the word I’m learning.
• anki-add-sentence: It creates “i+1” sentences, sentences that use the word I’m learning but where every other word is already part of my known vocabulary. This ensures the context is actually comprehensible.
• anki-add-frequency: It tags the card with a frequency rank (1-1000). If a word is rank 900, I know it’s relatively obscure and I shouldn’t stress about it as much as a rank 50 word.
• anki-monolingual-hints: Once I’m more comfortable, this skill converts my English hints into simple French ones to force me to stop translating in my head.

If you use an agent like Gemini CLI, you can add these skills to your workspace:

npx skills add mauriciopoppe/anki-decks

This turns Anki from a simple memorization tool into a personalized, AI-driven language tutor.

The Ultimate Immersion: Traveling

I’m at a point where I could travel to France and immerse myself in the culture and the language. Immersion will definitely accelerate my speaking skills.

Conclusion

Learning a language by applying the comprehensible input method accelerated my progress. None of it would have been possible without trying whenever I can. Discipline and consistency are the key.