Talk French to yourself

To stop translating in your head has so many benefits and is the quick way to supercharge your progress whilst learning French in Switzerland. Your French immersion course is the perfect environment for learning French but when you leave the classroom it is not as easy to maintain this constant flow of new grammar, vocabulary and conversation even though you are doing a language stay. One of the things  found particularly useful is speaking to oneself in French. This may sound a little odd at first but it’s actually working!

The first tactic to try is just to describe what is around you in your daily life. This is so simple but many students don’t do it, the stuff you are surrounded by daily is the stuff you are most likely to use regularly. This is great because when you learn stuff that is relevant you feel like it’s worthwhile and you are more likely to use it yourself but people around you are more likely to say it as well. Being able to pick out words from rapid French conversations is great and the words that are more likely to be said in daily life are the things you are surrounded by. Don’t just keep it at nouns, say the actions you see people doing or yourself. I promise if you look around yourself right now you will see plenty to describe even if you are alone. Are you in a room? What objects are around? What do you normally do with those objects? And so on. You can do this anywhere at any time and if you get to a word you don’t know make sure you note it rather than just hop over to the next, it’s easy to want to rush on to the next word but this is bad practice. Get into good habits and eventually it will become second nature and less of an effort.