I'm glad to announce that as of yesterday, I have finished learning the French-English dictionary that I had been studying since this past January.
Collins Essential French to English One-Way Dictionary
This dictionary contains more than 14,000 headwords and 28,000 translations. It took me exactly 144 days to study it from cover to cover. I spent roughly 2 hours a day, so it adds up to a total of about 300 hours of studying.
Naturally, my French vocabulary has grown substantially as I worked my way through this dictionary, and the improvement has been most evident in the level of comfort I feel in reading French books. Granted, there are still lots of words that I do not know when I read a French novel, but my level of comprehension is now good enough that I can read on and follow the story without feeling the need to stop to look up those unknown words.
Le Robert & Collins - Dictionnaire français-anglais - Niveau avancé
I've decided to continue with my studying of French vocabulary, and purchased this dictionary from Amazon France.
Like my previous dictionary, this one also comes in an E-book format. However, it contains far more words and phrases, so it will take me much longer to finish.
As I've just begun studying the first few pages, I don't know how long it will take me to go through the entire dictionary. Nevertheless, I no longer feel daunted by a big learning project like this, not least because my recent learning experience has taught me that, far from being monotonous and boring, studying words from a dictionary is actually quite pleasurable and intellectually stimulating.
I will keep updating on my progress in French here in this blog going forward.
Wish you all a nice and enjoyable weekend! :-)
