Learning French could be a thrill. Unless you don’t want it to be, but I doubt that 🙂
Your experience has probably not been great so far, as you realize the time and energy you have already invested in your learning.
Learning French is a mindset: the best intentions are sometimes not enough.
Here’s a quick tip: absorb everything.
Just picture this – you are lost on an island somewhere in the Pacific, and the only way to survive is to learn how to make fire. Don’t you think you’ll soon be able to get a bit warmer somehow? As you explore your options through the forest, you get to observe what animals do, how they survive, and try to mimic them. With no choice left but to rely on keen observation, you learn from them. You do what they do. You see how they made their lives easier and more comfortable. They seem to be doing fine. But you are a human, and you need to adapt their survival strategies to your situation. The strategies don’t have to be just the same as the other creatures on the island (every species got their own actually). They can be a little different, as long as they help you survive one night – soon turning into one week, one month, one year…
Your survival strategy? Uttering French, soon turning into speaking French, into conversations in French, into fluency in French…
How your strategy will be a bit different? That will be your accent. The same way everyone’s got a voice that can be recognized, your survival strategy will be shown in the way you speak. That is simply not something worth worrying about. The animals on your island seek refuge, they fight, they retreat, they make a move, they need to eat – however they do and whatever the cost is. They need to take action, whatever kind of action.
If you get into the mindset of absorbing everything – every piece of information as if it were key to you not spending a cold night and having some sort of dinner. Opening your ears to the sounds around you, opening your eyes and see how animals get around, avoiding any distraction or procrastination – that won’t do you any good if you’re seeking to survive tonight.
Learning French means you are opening yourself to another culture, to another mindset, to another environment. Keeping your eyes and ears open, and being open-minded about how people behave and how the language is structured is key to a pleasant experience – one when you get that feeling of entering a new world of possibilities, knowing that you didn’t just memorize lists of words, but that you are fitting into a culture in a way that you couldn’t imagine.
CTA EBOOK to get into the mindset