When in a hurry, nobody’s got time for grammar and subtleties of the French language.
There needs to be a simpler version, an idealized version of what French should be: simple 😉
Spending your time and energy doing the trimming yourself certainly won’t do you any good, leaving you frustrated and disheartened with the language.
It’s like you take on gardening, only to get rid of weeds and being too tired to do the beautiful things you aimed to do with your garden.
Assuming you are aiming for conversational French (see the article what is the best way to learn french), the following tips will help to learn simple French:
1. Realize that you only need three tenses to get by: past, present, future. The rest is history.
2. Realize that genders aren’t that important: what is important is getting it combined with another word: au, à la, aux, du, de la, des
Getting it wrong will NOT hinder your progress in any way. Anyone will understand what you mean. Some could even be so kind as to correct you, because they want to help you make progress in that regard.
3. Realize that pronunciation is not as important as intonation: spending years getting that /r/ together isn’t going to take you anywhere.
It is much more productive to speak faster and put an emphasis by the end of a set of words:
J’étAIS / au cinéMA / avec mes aMIS.
A faster version of this would be:
J’étais au cinéma avec mes aMIS.
Bonne chance ! 🙂