I'd probably jump between service based positions gear towards helping others/community even if they resemble a job.
Cobbler, Librarian, Prepare food in a school, stage crew, idc just something relatively physical and with an end product/objective and for the support of others/something. It would probably change every 3 - 6 months or so.
Could you expand on your learning practice - resources, online lessons, etc? I'm interested in see what led you to becoming relatively proficient in what I would personally a consider a rather fast pace.
I started with what I call “bootstrapping” the language, which is learning enough to understand at least a few sentences of unbroken spoken French - this I accomplished with listening to the first 2 seasons of Coffee Break French, as well as grades readers. This I’d say took around 6 months.
The next phase after that was expanding vocabulary and ease of expression. This is when I started listening to the Innerfrench podcast which is a fantastic resource - the first few episodes are much slower than recent material, but even that took time. This was the same time I started consistent Italki lessons. I find trying to start lessons before this point is difficult as you can’t really hold a decent conversation yet. You really need a base.
I’d say that phase lasted… another 6 months? It was around that time I switched jobs and in between spent 6 weeks by myself in France, which as you can imagine was a supercharger of learning. I slept like a baby every night after the mental exhaustion of trying to keep up.
After this point the key has really been lessons, lessons, lessons, and more lessons, at least as far as mastering output goes. You need as many opportunities to practice as possible, and one thing I found that was key was finding tutors who have different favorite subjects. I have one with whom I speak about my daily life, another with whom I discuss the news and society, and another where we watch a movie or read a book and discuss it each time we meet. This is also the point I moved up to real French literature, beginning with Camus but branching out to many other authors I now like quite a bit. Reading is quite challenging since the breadth of vocabulary can be astounding, but the key is to look up whatever you really can’t infer.
At some point in the last year I’d say all this got me from B1 to B2 in the CEFR framework, at least in all skills but writing.
Happy to expand on anything if you find it interesting! I think 2.5 years was probably the fastest I could do this all without a gigantic time investment or moving to a Francophone country.
Edit: Are you learning French or another language?
Yeah - so this same list can be marked true for places in and around HCOL areas of CA, NY, Insert any other "desirable location." Your sentiment towards the Midwest is de-constructive.
Ubuntu LTS. It also serves for my wife and (small) kids so something easy that works out of the box.
It's great because it gives the kids a computer that's 'theirs' but I can manage their freedom to the level that they're ready for (access to internet etc). And the oldest one (9y) already started to meddle with shell scripts so the experiment seems to work =)
The various Discords associated with the IT subs are miles ahead in general conversation and overall discourse. Unfortunately its live chat so keeping up with the constant conversation is tough, at least for me it is.
