Moe’s B2B World

If you have decided that you want to learn French, we wanted to share with you a few tips that will make your mission a lot easier. We came up with key tips that are sure to make your quest more exciting and hopefully will help you grasp the language a lot quicker.

Whatever your reason for picking up the French language, there’s probably a certain level of intimidation that you feel. Many of the students we speak with feel that they are embarking on an impossible journey and that it will take them years to actually be able to speak a new language.

However, that’s not really true. While many courses and schools out there use out of date teaching methods, making it seem like a chore to learn French, there are now a number of self study courses out there that are better. They use learning methods developed by psychologists, and can cut down the time it takes for you to learn a new language.

You might be thinking about hiring a private tutor or taking a class at a formal school, but these may not give you the kind of results you want. That’s because classes tend to heavily focus on reading and writing components of language, not the process of actually speaking them.

Since most students’ biggest goal is actually speaking French, this fact can be pretty frustrating. That means that one of the best choices is finding a self study program that allows you to learn on your own, and focuses on teaching you conversational French.

Here are three tips to help make your learning experience easier.

1) Remember what your mom said and be sure to listen

It’s amazing hoy much information you can pick up just by listening to other languages. You won’t necessarily understand all that’s being said, but listening to others talk in French allows you to pick up the flow of speech, new words, and the basic language structure.

Watching movies in French with English subtitles can also help, since you understand what’s being said at the same time that you hear it.

One student actually downloaded an entire season of a French television program and watched the whole thing. At the end, she had much improved French skills, a grasp on slang and idiom, and a better understanding of the nuances of the language.

2) Don’t OVER-practice

You’ve probably heard that practice makes perfect, and this is true in many situations. However, one of the big reasons that people give up on learning French is because it begins to feel boring and like a chore.

You want to vary the ways you practice and do what it takes to keep your motivation level up. Don’t set a strict “learning schedule” unless you learn best that way. Instead, just try to make a point to include some form of French in your day.

That allows you to engage in the language without feeling restricted by a particular schedule.

3) Mix it up! Make sure to vary your practice

Remember that while you want to include some French in your daily routine, you don’t want to do the same thing and bore yourself. That means you should mix up what you do and when.

You could throw on a French TV or radio program or do a lesson from the course you decided to take part in. Maybe you have a friend that speaks French that you can converse with. Or while you are reading the newspaper, pick a couple of paragraphs and think to yourself how you might translate it into French.

There are many different ways to engage yourself in the language.

This last point is a crucial step in truly learning the language. By varying the way you learn, you are using different parts of your brain which helps you not only learn faster, but retain it much more effectively as well.

This is one of the reasons that some of the online courses for learning French have been so successful. They provide a wide variety of material, which helps keep students interested, at the same time as they provide good stimulation.

Learning French shouldn’t feel like a job. If you do it correctly, it’ll be exciting and fun. Just find the right course, stick with it, and follow the above tips and you’ll be able to speak the language in no time!

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 at 10:39 am and is filed under Education.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.