“The Little Prince” Taught Me French Unlike Any Teacher

The traditional language learning focuses more on learning the grammar first and fails to encourage using the learned theories. However, I wanted to reverse this process and start using the language right away by reading books.

I decided to learn French quickly by reading the “The Little Prince” in French. I challenged myself to read only one chapter per day.

Although it is a children’s book, I find it quite challenging with a diverse range of vocabularies and grammar patterns. For each chapter, here is what I did:

1. I listened to the audio first without pausing to get an overall feeling.
2. Then, I listened to the audio again while reading, but this time with the intention to understand every word.
3. Then, I read the text without the audio while paying more attention to the grammar and sentence structures.
4. I listened to the audio one more time without looking at the text.

I read on average 3 pages of text per day. It was difficult at first, but it became easier as time went by.

Here are my thoughts after completing the book.

1. I should have started this challenge earlier. I got faster in recognizing patterns and memorizing new words as I developed an intuition for French.
2. I should have documented the process of this challenge from day one so that I could share it and inspire others.
3. I will apply the same learning process to other languages such as Spanish and Japanese, because it proved effective.

Overall, I had lots of fun. This process also taught me the best way to learn languages. Unlike traditional language learning, I call this the “book immersion” method where you use the language and acquire the grammar slowly with sheer amount of repetition.

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