Learn French in 3 Months
How to learn French in 3 months?
Have you decided it’s time to learn French? We’re glad to hear that! In order to help you on this journey, we’ve prepared a list of tips and tricks to make your trip from bonjour to proficient a bit easier.
1.Find your French people
This one may seem old-fashioned and irrelevant, but you have to understand that humans are social creatures. You will need someone to hold you accountable and help you get through tough times when times get tough, and tough they will get. The traditional method is the so-called méthode de l’oreiller (English: pillow method) and it boils down to finding a romantic partner who happens to be a native speaker of French. If that’s out of question for you, you can look for friends or people interested in language exchange. At least that isn’t difficult in this era we live in. If you are unable to find companions, you can always rely on a good school, an online teacher or even a group of people learning French together.
2.Plan and execute
Since you are working within a limited timeframe, you don’t have time to waste. You need a study plan. Any good study plan for students aiming to become fluent in any language needs to focus on all four of the main language skills: speaking, listening, writing, and reading. In order to achieve a high level of main skills, you need to learn some sub-skills: vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. All language learning plans for beginners revolve around sub-skills. The lower you are on the proficiency scale, the more you have to focus on those. As you move up the ladder, main language skills need to be targeted more. The most pertinent note to take from this part is the importance of not skipping things in the early stages of your learning and trying to develop your main skills and sub-skills equally.
Sadly, many solo learners find it difficult or nearly impossible to do all of this on their own. That’s why we advise you to find a native speaker to help you out or, ideally, hire a teacher to guide you along the way. We offer many programs for French language learners as well as several popular class options available both online and in-class.
3.Materials
There is an abundance of materials for studying French you can find. They range from books to online apps and there is something for everyone. We also offer our own materials if you decide to study with us, but here we will be talking about some of the things available and how these things could be of use to you. We’ve learned over time that there is no perfect material suitable for everyone and something that works for one student may not work so well for another. That’s why we make a short list of useful materials and you can decide what works for you:
- A dictionary is the best known method of studying a language, but it may not be the most convenient one. There are many dictionaries available on the market and you can probably find one in the nearest bookstore or library. Many English-speaking students of French choose the Larousse Concise Dictionary, but there are other good dictionaries available as well.
- Grab a book to help you out if you fancy. Practice Makes Perfect: Complete French All-in-One by Annie Heminway is a popular choice, but there are many books to choose from.
- Online courses and apps are the most popular method of learning any language nowadays. These are constantly proving to be the most efficient way of learning and they vary in terms of features, interaction, skills you can obtain and price.
We recommend choosing one of our programs like the 3-month French group course:
https://ltg-academy.ch/product/3-month-a1-french-intensive-course/
4.Checkpoints
Now that you’ve got everything in place (people, plan, and materials), you need to create a point at which all of it comes into place. It should be once a week or once in two weeks that you arrange a structured language exchange, a class with your teacher or a meeting with your group and you go over all of the things you’ve learned during the last week or two. This checkpoint is meant for you to find holes in your knowledge and get help from someone to fill those holes with the necessary information. We all make mistakes when learning and these come in various forms, anything from a simple misunderstanding to skipping parts we dislike. These mistakes create gaps in our knowledge and these gaps sabotage our progress by creating points of frustration where we lack bits that connect together to learn a more advanced concept. If these issues aren’t addressed over time, they lead to a speaker in need of relearning one or more concepts. Whether or not you are operating within a limited time frame, you should always test your knowledge from time to time! Be persistent and bonne chance (good luck)!
