Ask HN: What one skill are you proud of developing on your own?

I started with what I call “bootstrapping” the language, which is learning enough to understand at least a few sentences of unbroken spoken French - this I accomplished with listening to the first 2 seasons of Coffee Break French, as well as grades readers. This I’d say took around 6 months.

The next phase after that was expanding vocabulary and ease of expression. This is when I started listening to the Innerfrench podcast which is a fantastic resource - the first few episodes are much slower than recent material, but even that took time. This was the same time I started consistent Italki lessons. I find trying to start lessons before this point is difficult as you can’t really hold a decent conversation yet. You really need a base.

I’d say that phase lasted… another 6 months? It was around that time I switched jobs and in between spent 6 weeks by myself in France, which as you can imagine was a supercharger of learning. I slept like a baby every night after the mental exhaustion of trying to keep up.

After this point the key has really been lessons, lessons, lessons, and more lessons, at least as far as mastering output goes. You need as many opportunities to practice as possible, and one thing I found that was key was finding tutors who have different favorite subjects. I have one with whom I speak about my daily life, another with whom I discuss the news and society, and another where we watch a movie or read a book and discuss it each time we meet. This is also the point I moved up to real French literature, beginning with Camus but branching out to many other authors I now like quite a bit. Reading is quite challenging since the breadth of vocabulary can be astounding, but the key is to look up whatever you really can’t infer.

At some point in the last year I’d say all this got me from B1 to B2 in the CEFR framework, at least in all skills but writing.

Happy to expand on anything if you find it interesting! I think 2.5 years was probably the fastest I could do this all without a gigantic time investment or moving to a Francophone country.

Edit: Are you learning French or another language?

If you are serious about anki and start developing a big library I would recommend as well using: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/tree/mai...

It's a scheduler that's pretty well thought out, and can spread your reviews so they are a bit more balanced.

But as I mentioned (and I think this is where the skill comes in) I prune my cards every day. I'm not afraid to delete cards, I think it's crucial, interests change, circumstances change. So just drop what now seems superfluous.

Essentially it comes down to taking a look at reality as it really is, learning things and testing what you have learnt in the real world. (e.g. I was interested in branding since I think that is a huge hack which is sort of underutilized by smaller companies, but to do it well requires studying branding and it's different variable and how to manipulate them, isolate testing each variable and seeing results which can be a mix of objective and subjective metrics vs The older way would be to read some brand books, apply a few things and call it a day because "branding takes time")

It's also about being clear what you want and making sure that the path you are on will get you there.

Most importantly it's about being honest with yourself. Asking yourself, are you really happy with the path you are going down? If you want to change, and sincerely change, it is hard work but doable. But it needs to start with being intellectually honest and doing the work, taking the notes, collating the information and really working hard.