Part of that is because I’m quite introverted. I also thought back to those swimming lessons I’d had as a kid (aged 6-12) and remembering how ineffective they were because I was a weak swimmer who was afraid of drowning and I just can’t learn well in group/class situations. I remember hating that class because the teacher went too fast and we’d go from chapter to chapter in the textbook when I hadn’t even understood everything from the previous chapter. I thought back to the last time I’d taken a language class, it was about 3 years prior, my sister had asked me to come join her in a beginner’s Spanish class. I decided that if I wanted to go and live in France I’d HAVE to learn French.
But I didn’t understand a single thing about grammar or how the sentences are constructed or WHY it’s written/said the way it is… Fast forward to 2009… I decided I wanted to move to France and my whole future depended on me finding a way to move there. If a test involved memorising a bunch of facts or figures, or simple words, I’d do well in it. I actually did very well in that French class but that’s because I’ve always been good at memorising stuff.
I’d taken 6 months of French at the beginning of high school when I was only 12 years old (in Australia we don’t generally have a middle school or collège so high school or lycée immediately follows primary school or école primaire), and from that I’d memorised a bunch of numbers, colours, and phrases like ‘ Comment t’appelles-tu?’ (‘What’s your name?’ or literally ‘How are you called?’) and objects such as la piscine… because I’d say, “ la piscine the pool” which sounds like “la piss in the pool” and as a 12 year old I found that outrageously funny so it’d stuck in my head my whole life… I know it is very long but I wanted to get everything down, to write the most helpful guide possible, to encourage you and to show you that anything is possible, but only if you want it badly enough. This is a story of my French language learning journey. (the text in the image is from one of my real class exercises) How I learnt French in just 10 months by someone who did it!ītw You can apply my methods to learning any major foreign language.
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