Listening to French is the first step, prior to speaking. By listening, I don’t mean understanding French. Simply listening.
Getting used to the music of the language.
Once you’ve gotten familiar with how French sounds (monotonous with a slight ‘up’ by the end of the word/sentence, roughly speaking), you’re going to need to understand the words.
Here are a few tips:
- Starting with Listening to French – as mentioned before.
- Being able to break down the sounds into words, for example : /lecha/ becomes ‘le chat’ in your head
- Soon, you’ll be able to use sentences: /lechanoir/ becomes le chat / noir.
- Once you recognize a new word, but you are positive that you have never heard about it before, look it up with google and type the word how you think it is spelt. It does not matter that you get the spelling right, especially with modern search engines correcting almost every spelling mistake.
Let’s say you hear a new sound: /chan.gan/ – you think : /chan/ from chanter ? no.
/chan/ from champ, as found in ‘champagne’ ? no.
No, because it does not make any sense in the context of the content you are listening to.
One of the myth about learning French is that you need to understand everything people are saying – it is important to dispel these myths that are slowing your progress as well as your motivation.
Back to /chan.gan/ : try it on Google – type, say, ‘changan’ – nothing.
Play around the spelling a little and add silent letters (a lot of French words have silent letters, the most common being -e, -s, -t).
Let’s try: changane – nope, the sound would then be ‘aNN’ by the end.
Try « changans » – it shows ‘changeons’ which is a different sound: you want /an/, not /on/
Try « changant » – there you go, it now shows the word « changeant », giving you the translation : ‘changing’.
These are just a few tips.
There are a lot of tools out there that, when used right (and when you even know about them!), help a lot with your French self-study.
Some of my favorite translation tools include:
– Wordreference
– Linguee
– Deepl
But using them takes a bit of time – they each have their own ways and suit different needs.
If you need more guidance on how to learn French, click here and download your free ebook!