I spent about 6 months doing primate research in Equateur in the DRC last year, and while I was there I found learning French extremely difficult. For many of the guides, French was a language either learnt in school and/or as a third or fourth language, and the saltier guys I was working with spoke Lingala with Francais being marginal (or even worse than mine). To further confuse things, a lot of the folk terms we used for different plants and animals were in Lomongo, another language spoken by the local ethnic group.
For the sake of my own sanity and theirs, I pretty much gave up on my French learning except for vocabulary and pivoted straight to Lingala, using this guide from a British expat that I happened to find one day while the internet was on. This put me at a disadvantage when trying to talk in depth with specialists from Kinshasa who spoke perfect French (and I had the grammar and vocabulary of the Frankenstein monster), but it did help me with talking to the guides actually helping drive the research, especially since my superior colleague spoke French but little Lingala, and that gave us sort of a different dynamic with how we utilized the languages. I'm not going to pretend that I'm particularly fluent but I could at the very least hold decent conversations in simple sentences, particularly since half the time it was used while sneaking around bonobo nests. Now that I'm back home, I'm not going to get nearly the same level of immersion that I did being forced to speak it every day.
Can anybody recommend good resources for keeping it up? I think knowing a Bantu language will be useful for helping learn other ones if I ever go back. It's not very well documented so I'm guessing that there's going to be a small reference pool here compared to something like Swahili. I'm also resuming my French knowledge, so maybe good resources for African French would be nice too.
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