#LIKEACHALLENGE 

Just some long overdue highlights from the epic Monte Carlo or Bust rally, when me and my dad managed to clock up nearly 5000km around Europe and raise nearly £500 for the Help for Heros charity. We went from Warsaw to St Quentin in France then down to Monte Carlo (via Switzerland and Italy) and back to Warsaw. All in my grandad's 1991 Toyota Corolla, which is still going strong. Enjoy!

Wow.. it’s been a while since I wrote a blogpost about my French challenge and it uddenly hit me that the 90days deadline is tomorrow! Yikes. To keep my promise and prove to you that I’ve actually learnt something, I’m currently planning a trip to France in May, where I’ll do a bunch of fun, cultural activities ONLY using French. And of course I'll aim to speak French for the whole time I’m there (well, most of the time...there will be some sign language involved I'm sure).

It's over half way through the French challenge, so where am I at? Well, I can finally talk about the past as the last couple of days have been about learning 'passe compose', the basic past tense in French. I did future tense a couple of weeks ago, so in theory I know all the verb forms now, but I have to practise, practise and yet again practise to feel more at ease using these in conversation. I had two French lessons this weekend as I wanted to catch up after a busy week

Week 5 has been a lot about ‘forcing’ myself to do those 15min of French when I know I’m losing momentum in my challenge and can’t find the same motivation I had in the first week. I did two 1:1 lessons in week 5, so that’s good, but I had to find new, interesting ways of learning in order to not get bored. I guess it’s easier when you just learn French in France and then you’re surrounded by the language all the time anyway. But doing it in London, I have to do (at least) 15

I know a bit more than 'une baguette' by this stage..just finished week 5 of my learning French challenge, but still writing a blogpost about week 4. My only excuse is that...I’ve been learning French plus doing the Vicky’s Secret challenge. So no sitting around for sure! Week four was when I had my first 1:1 lessons and that gave me a massive boost of confidence when it comes to actually speaking the language! You can learn from books, internet or listen to tapes / apps / y

I’ve had some moments of doubt this week pondering if I can ever get past only being able to name things and memorise whole sentences. It’s speeds up the learning process at the beginning, but at some stage you want to express genuine opinions or say how you feel, naturally, rather than delivering a script. I think I haven’t reached that stage with French yet. I’m getting to the point of ‘Tarzan French’ (a name used in the ‘Language hacking’ book), where you simply use whate