French in Action

Obviously I have spoken very little French since I came home. Once in Seattle I went to a coffee thing to speak French with some other francophiles for about two hours. Another time these two French guys bought some produce from me at the farmer's market and we spoke for a few minutes. That's pretty much it. Oh, and I also speak French to my cat sometimes. She responds similarly to me when I speak French and English, so I'm pretty sure she only speaks Cat but I'm also pretty sure that she likes being spoken to at all because she's an attention whore.

Anyway, I really need to keep up my skills for multiple reasons:
1) I love languages and I really like French a lot. In fact, sometimes I find English really annoying and I feel a little jipped that I'm anglophone.
2) I'd eventually like to be fairly close to fluent in French and I'd also like to have some working knowledge of German too. To do this I need to practice and study and make it a habit to stay focused on these things.
3) One day I would like to be qualified to apply for a job as a professional in Europe or in French Canada. At the very least I would like to be qualified for a job in the US that requires me to be bilingual or at least proficient in French.
4) Next year I'll be clerking for a judge who enjoys speaking French too. He hired me so he can have someone to speak French with. Since this is about 90% of the reason he hired me over other candidates he'd be pretty peeved if I have forgotten all of my French by next Fall. So you see, my current job depends on this too.

So now I finally get to my point: I need to study more. I've been spending some free time working out of my Practice Makes Perfect French Grammar book. It's helping a little bit and showing what a terrible speller I am in French. I also really enjoy French movies and plan to buy a few I've had my eye on as well as snippets of French on TV, because there's pretty much no French TV here.

Then I read on a blog for language nerds about the French in Action reunion. French in Action is a learning series for levels I and II with all 52 episodes now available online! I scanned through the topics presented in each of the lessons and most of the skills taught I have some abilities with already. However, this is just what I remember from high school and skills I picked up while living in France. I probably make tons of errors when I speak on a lot of topics and I'm sure there are tons of holes that need filling in.

So I've decided to do one lesson per day for 52 days starting October 1. Hopefully the lessons aren't too long and hopefully they will help me to remember some little grammatical rules that have fallen by the wayside. This, in addition to the occassional peek at my Practice Makes Perfect book and some conversational practice when it's available should lead to me at least retaining what I have learned thus far.

As for German, I have no idea when I will get to really dig in and start learning my basic grammar and vocabulary. Maybe if I had a study buddy or a class to audit that would help...hmmm...