[kaesar14]

Learning French despite not living in a Francophone country.

During the pandemic I wanted to see what the process is really like for a language that I had no prior experience in. Turns out the entire popular consumer facing industry for this sort’ve thing doesn’t help for anything but tourist phrases (i.e Duolingo).

It took a lot of time and determination to put in the regular exposure every single day to train my ear, as well as 2-3 lessons on the internet every week for the last 2.5 years, but at this point I feel comfortable en disant que je parle français couramment.

Not ultimately that useful in the grand scheme of things being American, but it sure does feel nice to accomplish a goal!

[PretzelSweat]

Could you expand on your learning practice - resources, online lessons, etc? I'm interested in see what led you to becoming relatively proficient in what I would personally a consider a rather fast pace.

[kaesar14]

Yeah, definitely.

I started with what I call “bootstrapping” the language, which is learning enough to understand at least a few sentences of unbroken spoken French - this I accomplished with listening to the first 2 seasons of Coffee Break French, as well as grades readers. This I’d say took around 6 months.

The next phase after that was expanding vocabulary and ease of expression. This is when I started listening to the Innerfrench podcast which is a fantastic resource - the first few episodes are much slower than recent material, but even that took time. This was the same time I started consistent Italki lessons. I find trying to start lessons before this point is difficult as you can’t really hold a decent conversation yet. You really need a base.

I’d say that phase lasted… another 6 months? It was around that time I switched jobs and in between spent 6 weeks by myself in France, which as you can imagine was a supercharger of learning. I slept like a baby every night after the mental exhaustion of trying to keep up.

After this point the key has really been lessons, lessons, lessons, and more lessons, at least as far as mastering output goes. You need as many opportunities to practice as possible, and one thing I found that was key was finding tutors who have different favorite subjects. I have one with whom I speak about my daily life, another with whom I discuss the news and society, and another where we watch a movie or read a book and discuss it each time we meet. This is also the point I moved up to real French literature, beginning with Camus but branching out to many other authors I now like quite a bit. Reading is quite challenging since the breadth of vocabulary can be astounding, but the key is to look up whatever you really can’t infer.

At some point in the last year I’d say all this got me from B1 to B2 in the CEFR framework, at least in all skills but writing.

Happy to expand on anything if you find it interesting! I think 2.5 years was probably the fastest I could do this all without a gigantic time investment or moving to a Francophone country.

Edit: Are you learning French or another language?