Hello everyone

After having taken different paths in my life I am finally ready for a real long term challenge.

Background: I used to play MTG - Magic the Gathering when I was a teenager. I managed to reach a decent level and to reach Nationals every time I wanted to take part in them. I then played Poker for multiple years and ended up playing high stakes on the Chinese apps. I ended up broke and it opened new opportunities in my life, I was not addicted to Poker and I could quit relatively easily. It's still among my favorite games as of today but I never feel the urge to play and no longer play. The rapid evolution of RTA convinced me that I made the right call when I started to work as an online language teacher. Just like my other former passions, I'm not as devoted as I used to be. My students are highly satisfied and I can make a decent living in cheap countries but I need competition. I need to be able to prove to myself and others that I am good at what I am doing with a well-defined metric.

One of my best assets is humor - I love to act, I love to make people smile and laugh. It's really hard to make a living off being funny and that's why I want to combine my multiple skills in order to enter the utopian world of actors in Los Angeles in some years. I could very well teach French to actors and be part of this fantasy - I know I'd be a good fit but I need to find my way in.

What is my plan? I will keep studying and teaching languages until my English is good enough and until I master Spanish and Russian. In parallel I will try to build an online identity (other than my identity as a teacher). I have the right qualities to make it and luckily I have the time, the material and the people I need to help me in the process. I am taking impro' classes each week and I never skipped one since I have started. It is an achievement already since I am not the best student when it comes to attend classes regularly.

I am a French native and I will do my best to post videos in English as much as I can and to add subtitles when needed. English is the language I feel the most confident in, despite the mistakes I make. There is no confusion in my thoughts and I get straight to the point compared to when I speak French.

Why did I choose 2+2 for my only blog after having explained that Poker is far behind me? I have been a long time lurker and I love the community and its rich advice. I bet it will be rewarding for me to interact with knowledgeable gentlemen of your kind and I am looking forward to discussing deep/subtle life subjects with all of you. vamooooooooooos

The only links I will post here will directly lead you to my English videos for which I am craving meaningful comments and suggestions. I assure you I will never beg for followers here and we will make constructive criticism with the 2+2ers interested in joining the party! It is a serious project and I'm convinced that some of you might come with ideas that people in my real life surroundings wouldn't have.

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I talk about meme culture and try to decipher memes in different languages such as English, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Indonesian, German and Swissgerman.
(the FB group promoted at the start of the video is obviously not mine)

Your written English is not bad.

I speak as an English native who lived in France for 19 months and tried hard to learn French. I still couldn't string two written sentences together without it being ridiculous. The structure of the language is different. In fact, I don't quite believe you're a French native.

Your students are satisfied, not "highly satisfied". I tried to learn French, not "tried hard". One should take care with the cliches and exaggerations IMO.

Thank you for the messages.
Learning French is suicidal unless you have very good reasons to learn it such as having a French speaking girlfriend/bf, work related, you have a fascination for the language (many people do). If you just do it a little bit for the sake of it, it's very unlikely that you get decent results. You need just so much time and effort in order to get some basics that is often heartbreaking and people end up giving up pretty early in this long process. French is so hard that there is a saying "C'est l'exception qui confirme la règle" = it's the exception that confirms the rule... it's quite self-explanatory.

What about the highly satisfied thingy? Is it grammatically impossible since you can only be satisfied or unsatisfied and there is no way to nuance it?

I had a busy week and I put some effort in my usual occupations.

I recorded and edited one short video that I love, a friend of mine was filming and it was a great activity to do together (we have more footage that are not part of the video).

I fixed my desktop computer and it will save me a lot of time for editing videos. It's also a nice motivation to end setting up the apartment where I just moved. It will look like what we were calling the "GG Room" back in Thailand, where my 2 Poker colleagues and myself were grinding all night, every day. I will post a picture when it's ready. Plenty of nostalgia at the moment but the future is promising!

There is a public swimming pool and a nightclub in my street, I went to both of them and they were average/good. I try to spend 90% of my time actively and productively.

Next Thursday I will take part in a language exchange that is organized like a speed-dating. From my experience, language exchanges tend to suck because there are people always telling the same stories to the same people, making the same mistakes and other guys who are there just to hit on girls. This one might be different since you're sitting 1-1 with someone who speaks fluently your target language and then the other way around, 5 minutes each and then you switch seats. From what I've heard and seen on the Internet it's a functional organisation and there are plenty of people. I still have to choose if I want to go full Spanish or if I want to mix languages to maximize the numbers of people I'll get to know here in my new city. I'd pick the latter if I had to choose right now.




It's not the best timing for the vid' since all the regulations were lifted recently but it was now or never and I saw a great opportunity to use the mask

Probably not impossible. But there are too many unnecessary adverbs in this world, and it's sloppiness of thought. Not that I'm sure that "highly" is an adverb there, because I wasn't taught grammar. I liked having to learn some grammar when I was learning French, although I have since forgotten most of it. Perhaps it has to be learnt at a young age.

Pretty satisfied with how I have been using my time recently. I did the usual teaching/learning languages and I'm making huge progress in Spanish. I must take a C2 (European max. level) exam in around a month in Lanzarote, Gran Canaria, Spain. It's pretty unlikely for me to succeed but everything I learn in the process is acquired knowledge. I went to the language exchange last week and it was a great experience. I'm making plenty of new "friends" in the city where I just settled and it's a pleasant feeling.

Today I decided to do some "Street Impro". The improvisers are mainly passerby and not myself. I create a setting and then I ask random people to act in my video. I speak with them for less than a minute before we start, we shoot the footage and then it's goodbye already. You can see in the video how happy I am to be part of this. (or to create this, whatever) .

In the first part of the video, I ask the guy to pretend to be an art expert and to tell me about that ugly statue in French. *The second part of the video is in English* and I just told a guy with a broken leg who left the gym if he could make up a story explaining how he broke his leg on the statue and my only instruction was "Make the story as crazy as you can, but remain in your character". He did not have any prior acting experience and he did super well. His native language is German and he managed to express himself very well in English.



I'll be recording more videos in the coming days. The sun is finally shining and people here are happy to be alive. Thanks for reading and until next time xo

I spent a lot of time on the computer recently so I'll not write a lot, especially since nothing very special happened.

I'm now going to the gym, swimming pool and sauna everyday. Gym is definitely not among my favorite places. I mainly go there to lose weight and get some muscles back. I take good care of my health overall but I've been a little too extreme with the Sauna thing and ended up being light headed even after having left the building. I will be extra cautious from now on.

As I previously stated, I put my studies of most languages on hold (besides French and English) in order to focus entirely on Spanish. I even speak French to people who try to communicate in German with me on the street, and I try to speak the max. amount of French and Spanish for my brain to assimilate as much as possible in the limited amount of time I have before my exam. I started to write texts in Spanish and my teachers are correcting them and writing down useful comments. Every time I look back at the progress my students have made (or I've made myself) studying online makes me wonder how some people still haven't realized how valuable and accessible it is. In some ways, I'm proud of being part of this, as a teacher but also as a student.



I only had the chance to record one video (entirely in French but auto-sub in English might work, I didn't check) and the few friends of mine who watched so far loved it! It's always difficult to find a cameraman during day time on week days. When more people will be 'involved', I hope to be able to release more enjoyable videos.



Thank you for reading/watching/ writing here, if you have a feedback or a question to ask

Vamoooos

I just had to chime in and say French is one of the easiest languages out there for a native English speaker, that's a fact. I totally agree with you that learning a second language if you're not fully committed to it is a waste of time. There's no point in "knowing some French" being a native English speaker.