For the last year YS and I have been studying French once a week (4.5hr on Saturday!) A few months ago I wrote some Python code to read the RSS feeds of the most popular French newspaper site, and then kept track of the count of each word. I repeated this every week for a few months. In the end I had a database of the top ~3000 words used on the site. Today I decided I wanted to play with Processing, so created this little word collage. It is 1680x1050, my monitor’s resolution. Two thumbs up for Processing!

Status: ✅ I’m currently studying French, and if you’ve read any of this site, you’ll notice I’m a bit of a techie. Often several of my interests collide, which is what happened today. I was searching for the “most frequent french words,” and while I found some lists, nothing was exactly what I wanted. My desire was to have a PDF of the top few thousand most used French words. With the English translation next to it. In order. I’ve found some great resources, which I’ll list now

I’m about to head off to bed, but I have to admit, today has been very productive. I woke up at 6:20am (it is a Saturday), had breakfast, and went into the city. At 9:00am I started my new French class, which looks like it will be great fun. My teacher has great energy, the students are interesting (and seemingly bright), and I’ve picked up a copy of Asterix. Although I haven’t made it past the first page, I’ve enjoyed looking up the words and reliving a comic book I read as a kid. I haven’t learned conjugation yet, so I might wait to read more until next week.