How I went from sitting bored in an American classroom to working full time in French in Europe
My name is Noah, and I know you can be fluent in French within 1 year. I started taking French classes when I was 15 in high school, but sitting in a classroom was no way to learn. I remember being so excited to learn the language at that age, only to find myself disappointed as time went on.
Why did it seem like there were people in other parts of the world who spoke several languages fluently? Why couldn’t I remember verb conjugations and vocabulary? After all, I was doing everything the teacher asked.
I was determined to become fluent one way or another, so I decided to get a degree from Florida State University in French Language and Literature. The result of these studies was that I hammered loads of grammar and read books that were far outside of my abilities, but I still couldn’t express myself in the language.
In short, my studies drilled the rules, but not the language. I could not speak a single word of French without feeling very silly, and I could not have a conversation at all, much less understand a native speaker.
That was the case until I decided to take matters into my own hands. I worked to get good grades and earn a study abroad scholarship in my third year to Paris. That’s when everything changed.
Getting directly in contact with the culture, the atmosphere, the food, and the people completely changed my approach. The first few days of ordering groceries in French did more for my learning than all 6 years prior.
Although I knew that I was learning faster through immersion, I couldn’t explain why. Of course, being “surrounded” by the language is the best way to learn, but I knew there were people in the US who learned languages independently. How did they do it? How was I going to take my newfound ability back home?
If I could figure out why it was easier to learn French in immersion than in a classroom, then perhaps I could replicate that reason and create a detailed plan to learn at home.
Before leaving for France, I read a book about brain plasticity, which is a specialist’s way of saying “the way your brain physically changes as you learn.”
Your brain creates pathways. That’s what you need to work at in order to be fluent. Learning to ride a bike creates neural pathways. So does practicing order of operations. So does studying for specific questions on the SAT.
But you can’t create neural pathways sitting in a classroom doing French exercises. I knew I needed to create them, but it needed to be in a natural way. It couldn’t be too burdensome, or I would become frustrated. It couldn’t take too long, or I wouldn’t be consistent. It needed to be fun and enjoyable, because I wanted to continue enjoying French.
While I was abroad, it struck me. When I learned a word or conjugation in class, and then I heard that word in the street, and then I read it in a magazine, and then I wrote it in my journal, and then I said it out loud... I intuitively remembered it. There was something about engaging the four mediums of communication.
The strange part, however, was that one time wasn’t enough. No, I needed to go through that 4-step process between 3-5 more times before the word or conjugation really stuck.
And when I say 3-5 times, I mean on different days. I noticed a distinct difference between 1) rare words that I may have heard 5 times in the same day as part of a lesson and 2) words I heard several times over the course of many days because the topic was trending.
For example, the word for a frog is “grenouille,” but it almost never comes up in everyday life. You only learn it in a picture book in French 1, so I had a hard time remembering it until I adapted my new plan.
On the other hand, the word for a French president’s “5 years term” is “quinquennat.” This was trending in 2017 during the French elections, so I heard it a few times from different people. I still remember where I learned it today!
The “secret sauce” to learning languages was not repetition in a classroom. Repetition alone is not enough to learn French.
The secret to learning French is actively engaging the four mediums of communication, letting those active thoughts go, and repeating them 3-5 times over different days.
And this was relatively natural while I was studying abroad.
With this in mind, I decided to take a radical approach to studying. I spent all my study time speaking (out loud to myself), listening to movies and songs, reading newspaper articles, and writing in a journal. In a learning context, these are the four mediums of acquisition.
I made a conscious effort to practice them in even increments. But it wasn’t easy. I had to lay out a complete learning plan without timing break downs and making sure I had resources available. It meant that for each hour of study, I spent 15 minutes on medium.
But that wasn’t the only struggle. Although I knew how to learn French, I didn’t know what to learn. After all, there are more than 100,000 words in the French dictionary. There was no way I could learn all of them.
That’s where my studies came in handy. I was able to identify several great resources and let them provide the content for me. In one year, I could communicate confidently with native speakers.
This was truly one of the great moments of my life. I felt like I had overcome an immovable obstacle, and that the opportunities were endless.
In fact, I was so happy with my progress that I ended up applying for a Fulbright Fellowship to go back to Europe and exercise the language I had learned and loved. During that time, I passed the French Ministry of Education’s (Ministère de l’Éducation) French proficiency exam, which qualifies me to get a degree, work, and get citizenship in France. The exam is called the DALF C1.
Today, I work in investments for an IT company based in francophone Luxembourg. I speak French at home, at work, and in my personal life with friends. All of this is possible because of the “secret” I uncovered on how to learn and the plan I enacted during a year afterwards.
The French Objective is designed to give you the tools, the encouragement, and the materials you need to get to practicing, practicing, practicing… listening, speaking, reading, and writing. It aims to help you become fluent in a year.