Learn French in one year: is it realistic?

No doubt in your mind, you do want to learn French.

You do like the culture.

You do like the people.

The problem with learning French

You do like how the language sounds.

But how much time is this going to take you?

How are you going to proceed?

Free materials will only take you so far.

Will you be using texbooks?

With everything the internet has to offer, textbooks are getting old very quickly. The language also changes quickly and words that were trendy a few years ago are now almost unheard of.

• puce 1
• puce 2
• puce 3

The problem with learning French

It never ceases to amaze and sadden me that:

1. I find most textbooks really boring. I understand they were needed back when computers weren’t a thing, but there are now much more efficient and engaging ways to learn.
   
2. Most students of French feel guilty because they think they are ‘failing’, when it’s actually the material and/or the presentation of the material that’s irrelevant and making them bound to feel ‘guilty’ that they can’t put together fluent French.
3. How much the material out there is dead focused on having you learn things you don’t need – wasting your precious and time and energy, and even slowing you down in your progress by instilling doubt in your mind, and eventually undermining your confidence.
4. Everyone just seems to acknowledge that learning French is a disheartening process, in and of itself.
5. Students seem to think French is an impossible language to learn. It’s also hard to teach.

I really admire my students. If I were learning French and had all these obstacles put in front of me, it would take serious effort on my part – showing how keen they are to power through, no matter how dry and disheartening the process is said to be. Now that shows some love for the language, the country, the culture!

I do believe one year is a realistic target to achieve fluency in French, when using the right strategy:

1. Rewarding yourself for every step you take, to keep you engaged.
2. Material that is relevant to you: not fresh new material, or not even ‘interesting’ new material, but material you are already familiar with, whose content you can go through by guessing. Guessing is very much an underrated skill – everything has to be so perfect these days. Trial and error will get you a long way.
3. Learning vocabulary this way, not through lists – this will bore you quickly, however motivated you are.
4. Learning verbs through their conjugation, not through infinitives.
5. Having the right listening strategy: breaking down sentences into patterns and mimic the French intonations is actually much more important than wasting time on practicing that ‘r’.
6. Not focusing too much on the whys of the language: French is notoriously obscure when you get there. Only get there when absolutely needed.
7. Avoiding learning ‘genders’ as something you must know – you can get by without, eg. knowing ‘du poulet’ doesn’t mean you understand why ‘du’ is used (because ‘poulet’ is masculine, and therefore… etc.)
8. Avoiding grammar at first, and getting down to grammar rules only when in absolute need of a ‘rule’.
9. Having the main difficulties of French put aside in the beginning, and slowly getting to it as you feel more confident: homophones, false friends, subjunctive, etc.
10. Focusing on sentence learning, rather than word learning.

These are only a few quick tips. There is so much more to efficient language learning strategy. I really wish enthusiastic language learners didn’t lose their enthusiasm so quickly, just because of the disheartening way things are presented to them. I wish they stopped feeling guilty about their lack of progress – thinking they’ll ‘never get there’. When teaching French, I went through several life-changing breakthroughs. The number one being that:

It’s (mostly) in your head.

Learning language is a very emotional process – not so much a rational one.

We attach emotions and meaning to our learning.

Emotion is everything.

Me

When the language is taught in relation to an emotion, it becomes much easier to remember it, and for the brain to use it when bringing this emotion back to surface.

I hope these tips will help!

Bonne chance! 🙂