untangling the sound

A few months ago, I was talking to my mom about how I learned to read. She says I just kind of picked it up- I didn't learn with phonics or any real methods. So I think that's tied to my french pronunciation/listening woes. For a while now, I've been able to read french just fine- I read books at a speed pretty close to my english reading speed, I can poke around our french templates with no problem, and so forth. However, when a native french speaker says something to me, I can't catch the words. These are words that I could read with no problem... but they exist visually in my head, with no sound attached to them. Slowly, slowly, slowly I'm putting the sounds to the words. Recently I've been listening to streaming french news radio when I'm working on a slow task, that seems more effective than listening to my language lessons CDs. Big reason? Speed. The CDs purposely go slow. Real french is spoken as if the person grew up in NJ- too fast and all bunched together.

Anyway, I remembered this weekend that I hadn't touched this blog in a long long time, but I'd forgotten that it had been over two years. Wow. Hello blog, nice to meet you again.