Just Keep Learning French Words!

Today is a public holiday in Singapore for Christmas. Since I woke up in the morning, I haven’t gone out yet, and have been browsing the Internet for no particular purposes. I really shouldn’t be wasting my time like this, so I’m thinking of heading out later to a neighborhood cafe to do some reading.

A few days ago, I celebrated the one-year anniversary of my learning project of the Larousse French-Chinese dictionary, with which I have been studying French vocabulary intensively. As of now, I have studied 450 pages out of the total of 765 pages, representing the completion rate of 58.82 percent.

I haven’t tracked the exact number of words I’ve learned, but assuming 20 words per page, it must be in the neighborhood of 9,000 words. If I go by proportion, I should be able to learn around 15,300 words by studying the entire dictionary, a very substantial figure.

This might sound like an ambitious endeavor, but I’ve done similar things in the past, where I studied an entire dictionary on two separate occasions in French alone. If I include English and Chinese, I’ve already studied several dictionaries in their entirety during the multiple decades of my language-learning journey.

In terms of developing my ability to understand a foreign language through reading and listening, intentional studying of vocabulary is an extremely powerful method. Previously, I used physical and digital flashcards to memorize words. However, nowadays, I try to commit them to memory by simply reading over the dictionary entries in a particular section several times.

The new method is surprisingly efficient, because I can save a substantial amount of time and effort by skipping the creation of flashcards, an extremely labor-intensive undertaking. However, the effectiveness of memorizing words with flashcards differs from one individual to another, so I won’t refute the utility of this method for every learner—if you find it useful and sustainable, by all means go for it.

Among the three major pillars that form the basis of proficiency in a foreign language—grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary—vocabulary is the most challenging to learn, not because of the difficulty of individual words, but because of the sheer quantity of words you need to learn to achieve satisfactory comprehension of native content, such as books, movies, and television shows.

By some statistics, an average college-educated native English speaker is estimated to recognize and understand 20,000 to 35,000 English words. This estimate sounds about right based on my own experience of learning English, where I began to read English books comfortably with around 20,000 words in my vocabulary.

Assuming the same for French, I still have a long way to go before I can understand and enjoy novels and movies in this language, although I’m more than halfway through in my vocabulary acquisition. Since learning French is something I enjoy tremendously, I intend to keep on learning, at least until I finish studying the current dictionary. Hopefully, I can have a breakthrough in French comprehension in 2025!

Loving Extremely Inappropriate!

During the past week, I’ve been watching Extremely Inappropriate! (不適切にもほどがある！), a Japanese science fiction comedy television series that came out this year.

I normally don’t watch Japanese shows, not because they are boring, but because they don’t serve my language-learning purposes — as a native speaker of Japanese, I understand almost every word and phrase in the dialogues, making me feel as if I were merely being entertained without learning anything useful, and therefore wasting my time. For this reason, I normally gravitate toward English shows.

However, this time, I decided to watch Extremely Inappropriate! as it has garnered critical acclaim and won multiple prestigious television awards. “Futehodo”, an abbreviation of the show’s Japanese title, was even chosen as the Buzzword of the Year in Japan, attesting to its enormous impact on Japanese television and pop culture.

Extremely Inappropriate! revolves around the life of Ichiro Ogawa, a teacher in a public junior high school in Tokyo, set to be 51 years old in 1986. One day, by sheer chance, he takes a mysterious bus from the school, which travels through time and brings him to Tokyo in 2024. 

As the cultural landscape in Japan has shifted tremendously during the intervening 38 years, Ichiro encounters one surprise after another, shocked not only by futuristic gadgets like smartphones and wireless earbuds, but also by the whole concept of propriety in the 21st century.

In 2024, people are conditioned to be extremely careful about not offending anyone with inappropriate remarks and actions. With numerous restrictions, a stifling atmosphere envelops the entire nation, where everybody feels pressured to conform with the mainstream, and creativity and artistic freedom are severely curtailed.

This contrasts sharply with 1986, where all manner of inappropriate behaviors were prevalent and even tolerated, such as smoking on public transportation, inflicting corporal punishments on children, and addressing minority groups with slurs. Yet, the overall economy was much more vibrant, and pop culture was full of spicy, tantalizing, and entertaining content.  

Luckily for Ichiro, a neighborhood bistro where he was a regular in 1986 is still being run by the same owner, albeit much older, in 2024. He discovers a hole in the wall inside the bathroom which can transport him back to 1986, enabling him to travel back and forth between the two eras.

Aside from experiencing generational gaps, he also accidentally finds out what would happen to himself and his beloved daughter in the future. Ichiro is tormented about whether or not to tell her about this.

This show is somewhat reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi movie, Back to the Future, but with a unique focus on the evolution of Japanese society and culture, which I find fascinating. I was 12 years old back in 1986, and I still have some very vivid memories of that era. While I look back over that period with a certain amount of fondness, overall I’m still glad that Japan has transformed itself the way it did, so I definitely do not wish to move back to 1986.

Out of the 10 episodes of Extremely Inappropriate!, I have so far watched six. Each episode is so gripping that time really flies when I’m watching it. The rate I’m going, I should be able to finish the entire series by this week. I can’t wait to find out what will happen to Ichiro and those around him in the final episode!