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Learning French

By now you would have seen the tweets where I bang on about learning French.  Many years ago in the (*cough*) I did six years of French but I failed.

What a waste of six years of doing a language at high school!

Since then, the only time I spoke the language was three times when I was in the country travelling and even then, I made sure to butcher it as much as I could because frankly, I couldn’t care whether I was offending anyone.  I used to think, “just be happy that I’m at least trying to speak your language!”

Anyway, I’ve calmed down considerably since then but French has always been at the back of my mind niggling into me that one day, I should return to it and at least finish off some kind of qualification.

After visiting Strasbourg this year and spending a couple of weeks in France and Germany mainly by myself and wandering around this city, once again, the idea of learning French kept coming at me stronger than ever.  Every lunchtime I made an effort to eat at a decent traditional restaurant for a complete sit down meal and converse with the nearby tables or the servers so that I could practice French.  I began to fall in love with it – there was something quaint about looking forward to eating lunch every day.  I never knew what I was going to eat, where I was going to go and who I was going to meet.  Strasbourg will have to rate as one of my BEST highlights for 2020 because it surfaced this idea of learning a language that was hidden away in my heart and mind for many years.  I had to face facts that I couldn’t keep it hidden any longer.

I think this is different to all the other learning projects I’ve started and not finished in my life.  Sometimes there’s things in our lives that we wish we could have had more time to do or that we kept putting it off because life got in the way.

For me. it was always French.  To other people it’s learning how to play a musical instrument or learning how to draw or paint.  French for me really was something that I’ve always had inside me but the timing was never right to fully explore.  I kept making excuses to keep putting it off because of the realisation that learning this language means COMMITTMENT.  It means it’s not something I can do half hearted.  I wanted a new learning project that would last me for my entire life – that is part of my life – and which brings me a delight when I read a French book, listen to a French song or watch a movie where I can understand what it says.

I know it’s going to be a hard slog.  Already, I’m feeling it because it’s getting me out of the comfort zone of LANGUAGE’.  (It’s quite a humble experience to understand how you cannot express your full thoughts because severe language limitations stop your communication with others).

Ever since coming back from Strasbourg, I dusted off my old high school books and re-did the exercises so they all came back to me.

I bought an additional Grammar exercise book where it was full of drills and assessments (sorry, I REALLY need this stuff because without drills, practice, assignments – it’s pretty much useless for me). I also realised that it’s different to be able to read French but I really need to speak it so that’s where my Twitter network – especially Elena – has been a wonderful patient friend to be able to meet with me and correct my dialogue.

Since then, I joined a couple of conversation classes with the Alliance Francaise which have been a lot of fun (and which I’ll write about HOW they happen in another blog post) as well as signing up for Level A2.6 next week for 10 weeks.  (I was in Level B1 but I asked this morning to be downgraded so I can still practice more as I think Intermediate would be challenging for me).

Every morning, as well as doing my morning journal, I also write a page in my French journal to practice my writing however, I don’t know if what I’m writing is correct and this is where I need more feedback.

Learning in a class is fun for sure but for me, the more I think about it, the best thing to really up my game is to get a personal tutor to immerse myself into conversation and have that person feedback to me all the rights and wrongs of my dialogue, syntax, grammar and vocabulary.  It’s the only way – to take the approach of say, learning an instrument.

Here’s a short video I did on how I do this:

When you learn an instrument, usually, you take one-to-one classes for highly customised and personalised tutoring. I believe that this is the approach I need to take with language.  Also in classes, I have noticed that I prefer to listen and chat with the teacher than with other students who are also learning the language.

Why?

Again, think about it.  If you were to learn a musical instrument – would you want to learn it from someone else who is also learning it or from an expert?  I say the latter.

That’s why I have found that although my Alliance Francaise conversation classes are a lot of fun, I’m learning more about what it is I want in my language training and how I can adjust to make it my own and to suit my own needs for learning this language.  I have to stop comparing myself to others who are in the same boat and instead, seek feedback from the teacher however, in a class there’s one teacher to about 10 people.  It’s too much to give personalised and customised feedback to everyone.

For now though, it meets a need to just converse but I’m seeing it now that conversing with a natural born speaker (or someone who knows the language well) is FAR BETTER than learning to speak it with someone who is also learning the language because you’re not improving – if anything, you’re improving to pick up bad practices and bad habits and I don’t want that in the language.

I guess I’m pretty traditional in this approach.  If anything, I figure that I’m putting in the time and effort to really understand the nuances of the language and to speak it like say, a professional would do – minimal slang, in the proper French (even though it may not be spoken like this on the street) – the “Queen’s English” as they say.  There’s always plenty of time to learn the slang in the future but I really need to know the basics and foundations first before going there.

Oh well, there’s years to go yet.  On y va!

Videos I Made While In Strasbourg: 

(note that these were made as Instagram stories so they are not good quality and also they pixelate at times)

Day 1 At Strasbourg

Day 2 At Strasbourg

Day 3 At Strasbourg

Travelling to Strasbourg in Winter

Photo: Pierre Bache from Pexels

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