For the past three months, I have cut back on news and social media, focusing on something much more positive, my own mental health. I chose to exchange that wasted energy for something positive: learning a new language.

For my entire adult life, I have wanted to study another language, feeling ignorant knowing only one, but I had had nine years of French in grammar school and into high school and three years of Spanish from high school through my first year of college. This created a split language dilemma that paralyzed me. Did I want to study French, which I had had three times as many years studying, or Spanish, which I surely learned more of, because it was taken when I was older and the French was basically the same lessons year after year. It stopped from from taking the first step.

The other half and I were discussing moving to Europe somewhere for retirement and France has become an increasingly enticing prospect. At the same time, the negativity from politics in America, and in the world in general, was dragging me down, putting me in a bad mood all the time.

Well, the discussions about trying out France finally cemented it. I would use my time for constructively and see what I could do with French.

I downloaded Duolingo and Rosetta Stone and quickly realized that in order to really get anything out of them, I had to pony up the dough and pay for them, The free versions just weren't worth a damn. It surprised me how much French I had retained and how much I had actually absorbed.

What have I learned about those apps? If you're looking to become fluent in another language, you're not going to do it with an app alone. Even with these two, tackling it from different perspectives, it wasn't enough to feel like I was really getting a good grasp of things.

At least in these early stages, Duolingo focuses on repetition and making sure you can match person, tense and whether things are masculine or feminine. It's also fun, set up like a game, which keeps it engaging. But a lot of it is about picking out preselected words, and that's not something you're going to have in the real world.

Rosetta Stone seems like it is more set up to teach you the language, and it is more challenging than Duolingo. But it isn't nearly as fun, so it feels a lot more like work. It's nearly entirely in the language you're trying to learn, but as such, I had to search for answers to questions elsewhere. I turned to looking up websites for more in depth explanations for verb conjugations and other matters that arose.

I went to YouTube, where instructors put out free lessons on real French dialogue, which differs substantially from learned, written French. They run down commonly used phrases, which don't translate straight into English, but French speakers would know the meaning of. Think about looking for a needle in a haystack. People around the globe have their own sayings and it's handy to have a grasp on them if you're so inclined.

I bought some reference books, a French/English dictionary, a verb dictionary, a book of common phrases, one of short stories. I also downloaded a free flash card app. What I've found is that it's best to learn in a number of different ways.

So here I am. Mid 50s and trying something completely (well somewhat) new. I still grind my gears over politics, but I had to try to save my own sanity at the same time.

Bonne chance à moi-même.