Last week, I had a very busy and stressful week, so it was a huge relief when I finally finished my work on Friday evening. From the office, I walked over to Raffles City Shopping Centre, where I had my eyebrows trimmed at a beauty salon, before heading home.
Back at my apartment, after dinner, I studied some French words from my dictionary as usual. To assist with my studying of the dictionary, I recently started using ChatGPT to look up the meaning of those words and phrases that aren’t explained clearly enough in my dictionary.
To my pleasant surprise, ChatGPT has greatly enhanced my learning experience, providing me with explanations that are not only detailed but also plain enough to understand. The answers provided by this chatbot are clear to the point that leaves little room for ambiguity for me. I find this truly liberating as any lack of clarity in definition of words leaves me feeling puzzled and frustrated.
By the way, I have been learning French off and on since 2003, which makes it more than 20 years up until now - well, actually, it’s not quite true, as I tried learning French for a few months in 1986 when I was 12.
Back then, my father recommended that I study this language through a radio French-language course, which aired for 20 minutes daily on NHK, Japan’s public broadcasting system. I eagerly complied with his suggestion, since the notion of learning this Romance language sounded kind of cool to me.
The mellifluous sound of spoken French really enchanted me, but unfortunately I had to cut my French studies short after only four months because I had to move from Japan to China to study in a middle school in Shanghai.
As I got busy trying to adapt myself to living in a new country and had to contend with learning Chinese, I completely lost interest in learning French, except when my yearning for the sound of French was briefly rekindled when I heard the French lyrics of the song Michelle by the Beatles.
Fast forward to the year 2000, when I was already back in Japan, a chance opportunity to listen to singer Lisa Ono’s rendition of the famous French tune Un homme et une femme at a Tokyo CD shop revived my longing and admiration for the language of Rousseau.
I didn’t know it back then, but it was evidently my destiny to get reconnected to this foreign tongue. In 2003, one year after my migration to Singapore, I picked up a French textbook at a local bookstore to revisit this language at long last.
Since then, I’ve been learning French, albeit sporadically, for more than two decades. Inevitably, my drive for learning French wanes whenever I get busy with my other pursuits, like learning English, Italian or world history. Despite my inconsistency in dedication to studying, French continues to hold a special place in my heart, so it’s unlikely that I will ever give up learning it completely.
This time, I find myself learning French with enough passion and dedication to challenge studying a whole dictionary. As of today, I am about eight percent through it. It remains to be seen whether I can persist until I reach the end of this dictionary, but no matter what the end result may be, I won’t have any regrets for having tried at least.
No comments:
Post a Comment