I Got An Amazon Echo In My Quest For French Mastery

And the latest significant expense in my quest for fluency in French is Amazon Echo.

It is an amazing device. A smart speaker. Yes, speaker (that is smart). It connects to my Audible audiobook account, Spotify, Pandora, Kindle, TuneIn radio and many other services to deliver anything I want on my voice command. 

I bought it majorly for my French learning. I am always telling it, "Alexa, play RFI monde from TuneIn radio". That way I am always having a french immersion in my home office. Alexa is the voice activated AI in the device and many other Amazon smart devices.

Also, we have this self-development sessions in my company where we pick a very inspiring and productivity enhancing book for Alexa to read for us. All I just say is, "Alexa, read The Success Principles by Jack Canfield from Audible". And that's it. 

The only catch is that you must have it always connected to both power and internet. Luckily, I have an inverter/solar power system and Tizeti 24/7 unlimited internet. 

I have seen my french greatly improve. I now hear what the fast native speakers are saying on radio, like 1/3rd of the time. And last month, I went touring Republique du Bénin, Togo and Ghana (wanted to get to Cote d'Ivoire but no more free time). I found it a lot easier conversing with the french speaking Béninoise and Togolaise. I could converse well with everyone though occasionally I had trouble understanding some of what they said until they repeated slowly or used simpler french. 

I got the Amazon Echo for $84.99 (there was a sales that period on Amazon from the usual $99.99) but had to pay over $30 more to have it shipped via MallForAfrica.

.Interestingly, there is another similar sale going on now.

Setting up Echo is very easy and you can manage it via an online portal: https://alexa.amazon.com Which I use from anywhere (home or away) to control the device remotely.

I sometimes hook it to my FM Radio transmitter so people in my neighbourhood can join in the French love. Well, it's actually so I can listen overnight on the radio by my bedside. 

All these work to be fluent in French 🤔.