Or, How I Learned French in 6 Months.
Disclaimer: I haven’t mastered French in six months, but I’ve made some good progress. I’ll be spending the next year in Aix-en-Provence, so I’ll have to say more later about how well prepared I actually was. This is what I’ve discovered so far.
1. Coffee Break French
An excellent series of 20-30 minute podcasts, easy to listen to while taking the bus to work or walking my dog, and they’re free. Best of all, in addition to learning French, you learn an authentic Scottish accent. I’m being serious. The podcasts are taught by a Scottish language professor named Mark, and — particularly in the earlier episodes — you hear lots of English dialogue between him and Anna, one of his Scottish students. It adds a whole alternate dimension to the lessons. In actual fact (a phrase he uses all the time), Mark lived in France as a kid and has an excellent French accent.
The episodes are free, and they are, but it’s worth upgrading to the premium version, which is still much cheaper than Rosetta Stone. You get “bonus” audio sections that go further in explaining various topics, plus downloadable pdfs with transcriptions, additional grammar notes, etc. J’ai bien aimé ces podcasts!
Here we see Mark and Anna in Paris for one of their series where they travel around France and have conversations with actual French people and then explain important language points from the conversations. Aside: Mark also teaches Spanish, and in episode 12 he teaches the Scots version of Robert Burns poem, To a Mouse. Skip to 6:50 or so or just listen here…
2. Brainscape Flashcards
This is a pretty awesome app for burning information into your head. Yes, it’s essentially just a set of glorified flashcards, but these come with a couple of pretty big advantages over the traditional index cards wrapped in a rubber band. You can carry around as many as you want with no extra bulk. The app keeps track of which ones you know well and which ones are a struggle. You can buy sets of readymade cards that include audio with correct pronunciation — and you can make your own. I think they’re awesome, even somewhat addictive. My biggest complaint: I get hung up on memorizing unlikely phrases just because they happen to be included in the vocabulary pack I purchased (for example, se bourrer la gueule is apparently a vulgar way to say ‘to get drunk’). Brainscape Flashcards
3. The News in Slow French.
This is a free weekly podcast in which the newscasters give the news — get this — slowly. Since each episode has four or five stories, it easily takes me a week to work my way through the whole thing. It’s worth paying $10/month for the ability to download archived versions and especially for the transcripts. I like the dramatic intro music:
Check out the News in Slow French.
4. The French Language Discussion Forum
This is a discussion board where you can post questions and read through different topic threads. I’ve asked several questions over the past few months and each time have been answered promptly and thoughtfully, usually by more than one person. For example, yesterday I posted a question about pour versus pour que and by end of day had two meaningful responses. I liked what the user called Devas told me:
As a rule in written French it’s best to avoid using pour especially after a substantive when pour is related to this latter , one must try to replace it by something more precise such as,
La publicité est un moyen efficace d‘ augmenter les ventes (d’augmenter rather than pour)
l’expert a révisé le contrat destiné au client (destiné au rather than pour)
Le conseil d’administration a étudié les candidatures à un siège au comité de vérification des comptes.
5. About.com French
I’ve never really used About.com in the past because they seem sort of pre-google and less reliable than wikipedia. But it’s hard to ignore them when you go googling for things like “c’est vs il est” or “avoir imperfect.” I’ve found that they have excellent resources and clearly written explanations. Yes, they have an obnoxious habit of making you click for every extra bit of detail (page clicks = page views = more ad revenue). But, in a way, this advertising-motivated strategy has a weird synergy with making things clear. Everything is chunked out into small, bite-sized portions. They have quizes, grammar notes, and page after page of verb conjugations. It’s like a massive free textbook. Never again will you have to purchase and carry around one of those unwieldy 501 Verbs books. Just one example of a useful resource: a fairly extensive list of faux amis, “false friend” words such as assister and avertissement which don’t mean what they sound like they mean.
And now, a bonus section. More proven techniques:
6. French/English Dictionary App
I held off on buying this and I’m not sure why. For $4.99, you can get a Larousse French/English dictionary for iPhone. So much better than the paper version. With a paper version, you look up the word — let’s say it’s “blind” — and you see that it’s aveugle. There is some cryptic explanation of pronunciation, but not enough to instill confidence. With the app version, you click the little audio icon and hear it spoken in French. There are 10 or 20 examples of the word being used in sentences. If the word has a related verb form (aveugler), you simply click on the “conjugate” button and you can see it in all forms. All on this little device they call an iPhone…
7. Take a class.
Learning anything requires work, and one big advantage of a class is that it “requires” you to do the work. There are other advantages, too, but don’t fool yourself into thinking you’ll postpone studying until you join some class. You still need to be motivated, and if you’re motivated you can probably learn a lot more on your own and simply by speaking with French people. Anyway, I’m taking a class at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, which is affordable and local.
8. Find a French person to converse with.
This is pretty key, but not always so easy. Phebe found a young woman, a Swiss college student, through friends. She’s great — friendly and energetic — and I wish I could have met more often with her. She assigned me a French novel that turned out to be sort of a light romantic comedy, albeit with some R-rated romantic portions. Mildly awkward when I naively asked for the meaning of certain words.
There are other things I could mention, but I’ll hold off for now. I’ll come back to this after I’ve had a chance to assess how well-prepared I actually will have been!
Rhymes with Lyric 