Martin & Marseille

It is interesting to watch the development of my language skills (the French language skills, that is). Remember for me it's the first time I'm really learning a foreign language, English doesn't count and Latin doesn't really count, either.
Before I went everyone told me I'd pick it up in no time and I'd be fluent after a couple of weeks. I don't find it that easy.
For a start, I communicate too much with other foreigners (i.e. non-French) people. This is less avoidable than it seems: for a start, I live with more foreigners than natives and then I do lots of stuff over the internet. If I work on a computer project for a day on my own computer I usually don't see much French stuff. Even some projects for university require reading English papers. I probably do much more stuff in English when I'm in Germany but never noticed.
Then I don't do much active learning. My École does offer French for foreigners, but that's designed for 1st year students and clashes with my 3rd year timetable. 80% of my learning is just chatting with people and listening in classes, the rest is made up of reading (fiction, newspapers, some web sites) and only a very little bit of actual work on my grammar and vocab. I think this is not the best way to learn a language: It's difficult to remember which prepositions to use and which gender nouns have this way.
Nevertheless, I'm a lot better than I was. I can follow most of my lessons, even when the prof doesn't talk too clearly (most of it interpolated, but still). I read French books (nothing hard, so far only French translations of English books) and newspapers and get quite far using a dictionary. I have conversations and use the subjonctive just because everything else sounds wrong. I get asked for directions and can help.
But I still make loads of mistakes. This is what I find difficult.

- Pronunciation
Is not really that hard. Write me down a French word and don't rush me, I'll read it without a mistake 95% of the time. But French pronunciation is adaptive. It changes. That makes it difficult to apply it correctly the same time as constructing sentences. And it is very sensitive to mistakes. Little pronunciation mistakes can make words and sentences completely incomprehensible.

- Conjugation and tenses
German conjugation is weird and very irregular so I should be used to this. There's a difference, though: in the spoken language, German speakers usually only need the present form (Indikativ), the past perfect (Perfekt) which uses a participle and present forms of be (sein) and have (haben). Future forms are even easier: connect future forms of 'be' and 'have' with the infinitive or use the present in a future context. The famous Konjunktiv isn't really used that often so you can get quite far with forms like 'Ich würde gerne klettern' (I'd like to climb).
French conjugations like their own forms. For spoken language, you need to conjugate the participle (for passé composé, past tense), the imparfait (simple past), futur, conditionnel, of course présent and the subjonctif which all have their own conjugations. Then, you should know the futur composé which is a composite conjugation but uses go (aller) for a modal instead of have and be. For a higher language level you also could learn the subjonctif imparfait and for reading the passé simple is often used in books, but for an intermediate level understanding them is enough.
Point I'm trying to make: we Germans are getting a bit lazy and use modals too often, so this multitude of conjugations is confusing.

- Vocab
I'm pretty lazy learning vocab. It's just so boring... But as I never learnt lots of French at school, most of my vocab I just 'picked up'. Which means I don't know much, use it in wrong places and of course mix up the genders. What I try and do is remember whole phrases: "La coté obscure de la force..." not only gives me the genders of two nouns, but also helps because words on -é usually have the same gender - now I know it's feminine.

- Writing
My writing in general is pretty bad. I'm starting to get the hang of accents, but my biggest source of mistakes is the accordance of adjectives and participles. Take this sentence: 'FSO is very well developed.'. In French, that's 'FSO est trés evoluée.'. I usually forget the last e, because it's so far from the word FSO. And even so, FSO is an English abbreviation - so why is it feminine? Answer: because it's a technology, and it's 'la technologie'. I just hope I didn't do any mistakes in this paragraph.

- Style
Have you ever seen or hear someone create a phrase and you thought "Grammatically it's correct and I can't explain why, but it doesn't sound very good?" People tell me that loads here. Interesting: seems like a 'feel' for a language evolves in several stages. I wonder if I ever get to the one where I can choose the 'better' phrase from two grammatically equivalent ones.

Although my French gets better all the time, I know it won't be anywhere near perfection until March. 6 months is just not enough to learn a language at my age .