Can “Deep Work” Help Me Learn French in 20 Days?

Hello friends, how are you doing today? I'm very excited. This stack of books means a lot to me. These are all of my French authors that I've always wanted to read in French. These are the English versions. I've got Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Michel de Montaigne, René Descartes, and so on, Simone Weil. These authors are fantastic and I love to study philosophy, but the problem is, is translation. And I've always thought, how great would it be to actually read their works in French. Now, a few years ago, my wife and I went to Paris and it was life-changing. I came back just so in love with the culture and the food. And ever since then, I've wanted to learn to speak French. And so what I did is what I've always done. I sort of downloaded little apps like Duolingo and I would play games for 10 minutes a day, thinking a little a day will help me speak French. But I've learned a couple of words and I've kind of learned how to introduce myself. But if you ask me anything outside of, what is your name? I'm going to stumble and panic. And I thought it would be really great to apply the idea from a very specific book because I teach a very specific concept on this channel, which is to read slowly, take notes and apply the ideas. And I want to apply the ideas from this book. This is Deep Work by Cal Newport. Now, every month I add one new book to my bookstore at Edgewater Bookstore. This is the January 2025 book that I'll be adding. And there's a very specific reason why. One, it's a great book to start the new year off with if you're interested in making change in your life and you want to do some deep work. But two, this book has helped build this entire studio. I wouldn't be here without it. In the book, Cal talks about how we should create a space where we can go and sort of sequester ourselves away from the world and we can get deep work done without being distracted or just pulled away from things. So I built this space. I painted the walls. I had to go out and find a location and everything. Got my furniture in here, my books, the lights, all of the stuff. And it was a major, major difference in my life from trying to do all of these things in my living room with my kids and the dogs running around. So here's the goal. Over the next 20 days, I'll tell you why 20 days in just a minute. I'm going to be immersing myself in the French language and bringing you along with me. And we're going to see if I can get past the basic, just introductory phase of French. I'm going to be filming. Let's jump in. And here we go. Okay, here is my plan. So I'm doing this for the next 20 days. And why 20 days? Well, because I have a break between now and when the next semester of my university program starts. I've gone back to school to get a degree in philosophy and I have some time off. And I thought instead of just sitting around the house, I would do this. This is my plan. So I'm going to do a Lingoda class. Now, if you've never heard of Lingoda, this video is not sponsored by them. It's simply a class where you speak with a live French person and it's an hour long and you can do them in person or individually or with a class. I'll be doing a mixture of both, but a Lingoda class is going to help me focus on my conversational skills. And they take about 60 minutes. I'm going to do those Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Then I'm going to do an Anki vocabulary practice. These are Anki flashcards. So every time I do a Lingoda class, I'm going to turn around and build the Anki flashcards for that class so that I can remember and recall the words that I learned. That'll take me about 30 minutes every day. And I'll do that Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. Then I'm going to do an experience called storytelling, which is going to focus on conversation. We'll review a quick video that I saw on YouTube of a guy who learned French by doing this very same trick. This is his idea, but that'll take me 30 minutes. And the short concept here is that you tell a story for five minutes every day. And then when you come across a phrase you don't know, you say it in English. And then you go back and watch yourself because you've recorded yourself and write down every word you don't know, look it up in French, and then add it to your Anki deck and practice. And then retell the story, trying to get them in French. The next thing I'm going to do is media immersion. There is an application called Lingopie, which I'll be using to watch shows in French. I'm going to start with kid shows, probably. Absolutely, actually. For 60 minutes a day, this will be easier to do. Or I can just sort of passively watch, and they play the subtitles in both French and English, and you can pause and look up words and what have you. So that will be helpful for listening skills. And then writing or reading will help me practice my sort of written or formal version of French. I'll do that for 60 minutes every day. Really what I'll be doing here is trying to read those Harry Potter books or the Roald Dahl books. And I'll be doing that every day except for Sunday. I'll also be doing a review of the Lingoda class every other day. So when I'm not in class, which will be Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, I'm going to go back and look at my teacher's notes and add any new words I don't know to my Anki deck. Finally, I'm going to work on my grammar, which will help me with the structure of the language, for 30 minutes. And I'll do that Tuesday and Thursday. There is a really great class online or on YouTube that I found where a lady explains all of the key concepts of French grammar in about 30 minutes, and it's very helpful for a beginner. Okay, that's the plan. It'll be roughly four hours of studying each day for 20 days. Let's go. Why does everybody speak so fast? Look over here on this side, I have all of the words like it breaks it down sentence by sentence. And then I've got the English under the French. So I think I'm going to go sentence by sentence. Yeah, the list of all the people who owe the money. Right, 60 minutes of this today, and hopefully I'll improve my hearing. I'm already starting to feel a sense of overwhelm and dread with this goal. I think I feel this all the time when I get really excited about something. And then I go to do the work. And I think, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, where do I start? That's where that little plan comes in. So I just have to take a deep breath right now and realize that I can do this. So again, the concept of deep work is to not let myself get distracted by tons of little things, but to dive in and it's scary to dive into a big project and commit to four hours a day, which seems insane. But this is my plan. I showed you this earlier. Today is Wednesday. So I need to do a lingo to class. Yeah, big family. Yeah, big, big family. Yeah. Okay, that class actually went better than I thought. I am getting a little better at listening. I think spending several hours today just listening to French and practicing French and working on my French notebook has completely worn me out. But that was the best class I've had because I was able to just sort of be in the conversation rather than think about the words. So I'm hoping that 19 more days of this, I'll at least be able to not feel stressed and not feel embarrassed when I'm in a French conversation. So that was great. Let's move to day two. Day two, I have found, let me pause, the Duolingo app, although I don't use it any longer, to read has actually helped me quite a bit because they have a podcast that I can listen to that's in French and it has somebody sort of speaking along and sort of moderating to make sure I know at least the context of what's happening. And then I can pay attention to the French in between. So I've been doing that in my car rides, as well as in between meetings and in between gaps of the day. And day two, it's going hard. It's going hard. I'm on day two and am worn out. I'm not used to this sort of level of focus on one specific topic, especially learning something. It's one thing to focus on your work for several hours a day. It's a different thing to learn something new, like a language, which is just mentally fatiguing for four hours. Part of deep work. I don't think the claim is that it's obviously that it's going to be easy. It's actually quite difficult. The claim is that if you do it, you'll make progress. So I am making progress, but I'm also very tired. Bonjour. Je m'appelle Eddie. Je suis un comptable. Et aujourd'hui, je prends parler français. Il s'appelle Lulu et Pancho. Yeah, the end. J'ai besoin de raconter une histoire. J'ai besoin de raconter une histoire. See, this is a phrase that I used in my story. I said, I need to tell a story. Didn't know how to say any of that. I put it here. It tells me how to say it, and we keep going on. I'm making progress. Day four. So I took the cover off of my book because I don't want to ruin it, but this is deep work. And in this book, he talks about having deliberate practice. Now, you need to not only set aside time to really focus on what matters and put the work and the reps in, but you need feedback, right? Because if you just keep doing the same thing wrong again and again and again, it's not going to get you very far. In fact, you're going to create bad habits, bad work, bad output. So there's a passage in here where he talks about Anders Erikson and the book Peak, I think, and they're talking about deliberate practice and how you have to approach your skill in such a way that you're getting deep levels of concentration, that you're working on something specific, but that that system is giving you feedback to tell you how you're doing. It says, this brings us to the question of what deliberate practice actually requires. It's a core component and it's identified as follows. Your attention is focused tightly on a specific skill. Goes on to talk. Number two, you receive feedback so you can correct your approach. Now, here's what I'm doing. Let me bring this camera over here so you can see me here. I'm on the camera. This is an exercise I thought was ridiculous. I found it on YouTube for speaking French. He records himself telling a story for five minutes and then every time he doesn't know a word in French, he says it in English and then he goes back to here. This is my Anki deck and he creates flashcards for all of the phrases he didn't know. And the reason why this works is because as he's recording himself talking, he's having to talk about himself, which means he's going to use words and phrases that he would actually use in real life. If you talk about yourself, you end up talking about your family, your interests, your work, the things that actually matter to you, and you're more invested in learning. But as you get the feedback by watching yourself on the screen, this thing here, it's super embarrassing, but you see how you sound and you see how you look and you also see what you don't know. And then over here, this is his method. He uses an AI platform called DeepL, which is known for translating languages from one to the other. It's an AI tool and it's free. But all you do is you put in the phrase here in English, he gives it to you in French, and then you create an Anki deck card. And then you tell the story again and again and again until you can get it. It's incredible and it's working. Bonjour, je m'appelle Eddie. Je suis comptable et j'étudie philosophie aux Etats et à l'Université d'Université. It's day five and I'm at that point where I start to feel just, it's getting hard, like emotionally hard. Have you ever tried something really difficult and you're excited at the beginning and then once you get into it, you start to feel doubt and you start to feel worried. I worried about myself and this whole process this morning. And I think it's because I started off the day with a YouTube video of this lady speaking in French. I just wanted to get the sound of French in my ear. That was the only goal. But in my heart and in the back of my head, I thought, there is no way I'm ever going to understand what this lady is saying. And I just started doubting myself and beating myself up. Well, I came to my office this morning. It's currently Sunday morning and I grabbed Deep Work and I began to read and I came across a passage that helped. Page 120 says, your ritual needs to ensure your brain gets the support it needs to keep operating at high levels of depth. And that was good feedback for me because I realized that my brain is part of this whole process of Deep Work. It's not enough to set up the environment. It's not enough to buy the gear. It's not enough to write out a tracker in your journal and get committed and tell the world. You actually have to control your brain as you go through the process. You have to sort of control that narrative so that you can be successful. And that's hard to do on your own. You need to design a system that gives you feedback and let you know that you're making progress. One of the nice things about this is that this whole lesson that I'm doing today is on the indefinite article. I don't even really know what an indefinite article is. I do now. Learning a new language has actually helped me understand grammar better. I've been forced to reconnect with the English classes I had in high school and college to remember all the differences between prepositions and adjectives and adverbs and just sentence structure in general. So that's just a nice side benefit to doing this whole Deep Dive thing. It's influencing and affecting other parts of my life in positive ways. It's pretty great. Morning, friends. So it is day nine for me. And I wanted to read a passage to you because this is important. I've spent the first nine days learning how to learn because sort of acquiring a language is a different sort of skill set that I have. It's been very challenging for me. And just sitting down for four hours a day and sort of banging it into my head has worked and it has helped. But it has also been difficult and I've wandered. I haven't had a very methodical approach. What I've noticed is that I've had to learn how to learn a language and that requires a certain set of exercises and just sort of ways to practice that are working for me. And I'm also finding things that aren't working for me. So this passage in here is I'm on page 117. He says, an often overlooked observation about those who use their minds to create valuable things is that they're rarely haphazard in their work habits. So in short, just because you've created a deep workspace and you have set aside the time and you're putting the time and the reps in, you can still be very haphazard with what you're doing and not get very far. If there's something I can do to put myself in the crucible of the French language without any help and I have to figure it out, the more I can do that, the better. And what I thought about last night as I was sort of going to bed was that I use my phone a lot. And if I can sort of make my phone a French phone, then I have to really think in order to use my phone. So this is nice because it forces me to use my phone less. And when I do use it, it's in French. So I just went to the language center in settings and I changed it from English to French. And now you can see that everything in here is like in the French language. So I don't know if you can see these titles, right? Everything is sort of in French and that's pretty cool. I still have a lot of stuff that is in English on the phone because you can go into each app and you can tell the phone for this app, present the information in English, but for the other apps, just leave them in French. That's really nice because there are certain apps that affect my work that I cannot have mistakes in. I can't sort of be lost in translation, but most of the apps on my phone are for fun or curiosity. They can be in French. And as I use them, it's showing me new ways to think about the language. So day nine, and that's the change I've made. And I'm trying to get less haphazard in how I approach my deep work. So I also have found that doing the maybe less interesting parts of the thing you're trying to acquire actually makes it more interesting. So this is my grammar lesson for the day. I found this lady on YouTube. She's got a lot of really great books and stuff. So I am one, supporting her, but two, using her as my mentor for grammar because she's very intelligent. And yeah, whatever you choose to sort of do your deep work in, there's going to be a part that is really interesting for you and really propels you forward. But don't forget the bits that maybe aren't as interesting. Those little bits that you kind of want to ignore are going to make your deep work really matter. That's the stuff that will make you great at what you do. He talks about in his book, the fact that in order to sort of express ourselves, we have to create something. We have to take all of this knowledge and make something with it or produce. And for me, I'm trying to produce and become fluent in the French language. And if I ignore the boring stuff, like the really deep grammar, the things that actually make sentence linking and sentence structure work, then I can practice all day, but I'm just going to sound strange. So don't ignore the boring stuff. By getting good at it, it actually becomes interesting and fun. I wasn't planning on this much screen time every day with learning French. It requires me to be in front of my computer way more for longer periods of time than I sort of mentally envisioned. So watching the videos, listening to the teachers, watching movies, working on flashcards. If I'm not at my desk, I'm on my phone and I have sort of gotten a pretty devastating headache today. So I think it's funny because sometimes when I read books, I come across sections at just the right time to help me. And I feel like Cal Newport knew this would happen because about three quarters of the way through the book, he talks about the need for allowing for distraction and allowing yourself to be bored and to not always be on. You actually need to work into your deep work routine, a sense of not working or a space of freedom just to let your brain relax and sort of process subconsciously what you're learning. Morning friends, day 10 of the French deep work situation. It's Sunday right now and I am back at my computer and I have done something that I think you'll find interesting. I have converted my life into a complete immersion of French. I mentioned before that I changed my phone to the French language. I did the same with my laptop. Here's where this gets really confusing because by converting my laptop to a French laptop, now whenever I go into the internet, all of the pages are mostly in French as well. So this does two things for me. One, it forces me again to think about French and to learn it throughout my day. But it also limits my internet time because it just it slows me down and I can't spend nearly as much time surfing the internet. And yeah, it's sort of a win-win. Trying to print the notebooks and I have no idea what half these words mean. So I've got my translator up over here. I've got my printing tool up over here. So first of all, I have to find the word that is print. So F-I-C-H-I-E-R. What does that mean? F-I-C-H-I-E-R means file. And then the cool thing about DeepL is that you can type in the French thing and it will give you the English thing over here. And then you can hit the sound button. I don't know if you can hear that. Let me try that again. It tells me how to say it. So that's nice. So F-I-C-H-I-E-R is file. So now I know that for future computer use in my French computer. So look, I did it. I did it right here. The printer is printing the notebooks in the appropriate shape, size, format, color, the whole thing. And I did it all in French. Now that is a very small win. I made the printer work. Who cares? But for the first time ever, I'm feeling a little bit of hope that I can acquire a second language. And that feels really, really great. Yeah. So I'm looking forward to going back to Paris one day and hopefully having some language under my belt so that I can sort of exist in those conversations and enjoy myself in Paris rather than being stressed and freaking out. Anyway, yeah, day 10 and it's going well. And we're printing notebooks. See all that's right there. Okay. So already I can tell that like, because I don't know the words and that's okay. I'm not getting good enunciation in between the words and they're kind of, you know, commingling a little bit, but that's okay. We'll work on it. In the last part of deep work, in the conclusion, there's this really great sentence that I think you'll like. Actually, it's more than a sentence, but this is really good. And I hope this will give you courage to want to be the kind of person that is willing to do all this madness for whatever you love and care about. He says the deep life of course is not for everybody. It requires hard work and drastic changes to your habits. Yeah. This is my French grammar book, and this is just the French grammar stuff I got to learn. It's hard work doing something deep, right? To really dig in and do it well. For many, there's a comfort in the artificial busyness of rapid email messaging and social media posturing while the deep life demands that you leave much of that behind. There's also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you're capable of producing. Doesn't that get you excited? For me, it's like the concept of, I'm not going to scratch the surface anymore. I'm really tired of that. I want to dive in and do the best I possibly can. And I'm 44 years old. I got time, hopefully, before I skip this earth, but you never know. I could die tomorrow and I really want to know what it feels like to do something as well as I possibly can. And I love that. So yes, I want to know that feeling. All right. I couldn't even say hello 20 days ago. I got things wrong in that, but it's getting better. It's getting better. For the past 20 days, I have been doing what's called a grand gesture. I have given four hours a day to the French language and it has made a big difference. So what you just watched, that last clip was me working with one of my French teachers and sort of getting more comfortable. So to go back to the beginning, my goal was not to be fluent in French in 20 days. That's not going to happen. People come on. Did you really think I was going to be fluent in 20 days? Although that'd have been cool. Really my goal was to sort of expose myself to the French language enough that when I spoke with somebody in that language, I could not panic. I could not be constantly self-criticizing and worrying, like I was being foolish or saying the wrong thing, but instead calm down enough to listen and to look at the person. That's a big challenge. And that has taken me 20 days to sort of develop that skill. But I think I'm there. I'm able to go to these live classes with my teachers and be a real student. And if I don't know what's going on, I'm comfortable asking questions and getting clarification and so on. So I'm going to call this session of deep work for me a success. Now what's next? The reason why I did this over the course of 20 days is because I had a holiday break between when I started this and when school starts back up. As many of you know, I'm getting a degree in philosophy and I had the holiday break. So this was a good opportunity to dive in deeply. Well, school starts next week. I'm going to go back and I'll tell you about what I'm taking here in just a minute if you're curious about those classes. But I have learned that I'm very vested in the French language. The nice thing that's coming out of this is one, I've gained some great vocabulary, some grammar, some comfort with the language. And I now know how to study French for me. And so what I'm going to do now is continue on with this progress. I cannot give it four hours a day every day going forward. There's just not time for that. But I will try and give it to what I'm going to do is I'm going to try and do three of these live speaking French classes a week. They're an hour long. So I'm going to do Monday, Wednesday and Friday, preferably in the morning. And then I'm going to give an hour of practice each day to reviewing class notes and preparing for coming classes and really trying to write out my stories in French in my notebook. On days where I don't have classes, I will be watching French movies and I will probably be reviewing course notes and reading in my French books, trying to get the language in my head, in my ears. I've also found a podcast I can listen to. So I'm going to try put two hours a day into French. That's still a lot. Right. But if you think about it, we have time. We have time in our lives to to to dedicate to these things if they're important to us. I mean, if I'm listening to a podcast, I can I can listen to that while I'm, you know, driving to get some groceries or whatever. And I can be sort of thinking about the French language and so on. Far better to do that and be working on my deeper projects than to, I don't know, just let YouTube feed me whatever it's going to feed me. So. OK, what's next in my life? If you're interested, school starts next week and I am taking two courses this semester. The first one is the philosophy of religion. This is a look at all of the Western religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaism, and how they came to be as a thought process for us sort of working through our questions of life. There are some really great essays in here. I'm excited to look at them. This class is going to talk about faith and reason, arguments for God's existence, arguments against God's existence and sort of how we we developed these religions over time. I'm so excited. Right. And I like that it looks at both sides, the pros and the cons, the fors and the againsts of religion. The second class I'm going to be taking is like a deep study course in Shakespeare. I'm not a Shakespeare. I'm not well versed in his work, I'm ashamed to say, and I've always wanted to be. I love his work, but I'll be honest, three or four pages in, I'm lost. I have no idea what's going on. So I signed up for this course and we're going to be reading five of his works. We're going to be reading Henry V's course, Cymbeline, which I haven't even heard of that one. I'm sure it's great. And I'm sure you're going to give me some, some comments for not knowing what that one is, but I'm looking forward to it. Much Ado About Nothing and then Measure for Measure. So I'll be making videos on my experience going through those courses as I'm learning and growing. And of course, I will continue to work on my French as time goes by. Look, if you're interested in deep work, you can pick it up at edgewaterbookstore.com. That's my bookstore. I sell it there along with my custom notebooks that I build for every book. And if you decide to tackle this work and make your life revolve around something that you truly love, that you want to create, that you want to build, that you want to do, this is a great book to get into. I'm so excited for you to give it a shot. And as always, until next time, read slowly, take notes, and apply the ideas. Thanks everybody.