(no subject)
I've been struggling with my French for several years now. It's like this: I can comprehend written French (not all of it, mind you, because my vocabulary is so miniscule it's practicaly non-existent), but my writing is primitive, my listening comprehension skills are terrible, and I wouldn't be able to form coherent statements aloud on the spot if my life depended on it.
So I've come up with an idea. Why not try reading a book and listening to an audio recording of it at the same time? It'll improve my pronunciation and I can look up everything I don't understand as I go along, and of course, I'll gain some listening skills. I already did with English back in 2010!
Except a) my English back then was much better than my French now and I definitely didn't need to read the text along with the recording to understand what was going on; b) the book was Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, which I'd already read several thousand times in Russian; c) the audiobook was read by Stephen fuckin' Fry.
And now I'm attempting Le Comte do Monte-Cristo, which is obviously much more difficult and which I've never read before in any language. Also, I got the audiobook from LibriVox, so nobody can vouch for the pronunciation. (It seems perfectly fine to me, but then again, what would I know.)
Aren't I smart.