Transcription
How did I learn French? That's the subject of today's video.
Hi, I'm Robert. I'm a therapist in Paris who works with individuals and couples. I wanted to make this video because in a couple of my previous videos, I'd mentioned how important it is to learn the language when you're settling into a new place. Even if you can't become fluent in the language, just to become competent in your daily life, able to manage situations, and as a way to show respect to the people of the country that you're settling into. But in France, it's not always so simple to learn the language. It can be quite a challenge. So, I thought I'd share my story because maybe some of the tips in here could be helpful. Let's get into it.
To begin, let me take a moment to prove to you that I can speak French. I mentioned in the beginning of the video that a lot of people seem to struggle to learn French. And the question you might ask is, is French an especially difficult language? Now, for me, as a former language teacher, I would say that if you're coming from a European language, French shouldn't be that challenging to learn. There are major differences with English, but most of the language is shared. It's a lot easier of a language to learn than say Chinese or Indonesian if you're an English speaker.
But where does the difficulty in learning French come from? I would argue that the difficulty comes from certain quirks about how French language is taught, particularly in France, and how cultural differences, especially in communication, can make French people seem intimidating for people learning the language to speak to. These are just a few general observations that I believe, and you might relate to as well. And that's my way of communicating that even though I may have been able to learn French relatively quickly, I don't judge anyone who struggles to. I had my own challenges, which I'm going to talk about.
I usually tell people that when I came to France, I couldn't speak any French. This is 90% true, but not 100% true. I had done a couple of language classes in Singapore, a few weeks where we'd do night classes once a week for 2 hours, I think, and in the language school I was studying at in Singapore, I'd officially passed A1. What this meant in practical terms is I had a general knowledge of the basic syntax of French and how the conjugations worked, and I'd been introduced to the grammar of the passé composé, but I hadn't really managed it. And as far as my ability to use French, I was watching French TV shows with my partner and if I was watching something like Top Chef, I would understand maybe 2 or 3% of what happened. So, in terms of my comprehension, I really didn't have much. And as far as my ability to speak and say things in French, in very controlled situations, I could say basic phrases, but that was it.
So, why do I tell people that I couldn't speak any French when I arrived? Well, the first day that I came to France, I realized how insufficient my abilities were. I couldn't express anything to people beyond "une baguette" or something like that. Most of the time people wouldn't even understand what I was saying because of my pronunciation, and every single thing that was said to me was just a barrage of syllables that I could have no way of understanding. My functional ability to use French was pretty much zero. Tourists who have done two weeks of Duolingo would have more ability than I did at the time, which is why I feel like it's more or less honest for me to say that I didn't have any French when I arrived here.
And one of the differences I noticed with France being a language learner compared to countries where I'd learned the language in Asia is that in France, when you have basic French, no one is impressed. If you go to China and you stumble out a few words, people are very impressed. You go to Indonesia, people will be very accommodating and understanding of you. In France, you mumble a few phrases like that, people will start talking to you with 100% native speaker style French. And if you are like me, you become overwhelmed and unable to function in a conversation. That experience is one that can be disheartening for people, but I was more or less prepared for it by my partner and because I'd traveled to France once before. I'd been in Paris for 2 days, so I knew a bit what to expect in terms of speaking French. And all I thought was, "Okay, I need to get into a language school. I need to learn the language. Let's do this."
I arrived here in 2021, and at the time, it was my intention to settle for at least a few years. So I decided that I really wanted to make a go of speaking French and that I was willing to take some time off work to make that happen as part of my integration and settling into France. I gave myself 6 months off work just to learn the language. Taking six months off work to learn a language is something not all people can do. I'm aware that I was in a privileged position to be able to do that in the first place, but it's not like I'm that flush with money. I did make sacrifices to learn the language because I felt like it was important and it would set me up for success later on.
So, how did I make use of these six months that I gave myself? The first thing I did was I enrolled myself in a French course. I found the most prestigious school in Paris. I took an intensive course and I paid a lot of money for, I think it was, two months of class. I ended up having a bad experience at this school. So, I'm not going to name the school here, but if you're looking for a language school and you'd like to ask me privately for advice, you can send me a message and I'll tell you which school this was.
My first day of class was less than a week after I'd arrived in Paris. I was very excited for the first day. I had my school bag, my books, my textbook. I arrived right on time and got into class, and I hated it. I absolutely didn't like this language class. The first problem I had with this school was the style of learning was completely non-interactive. The teacher would spend a lot of time talking to us as a class, meaning we were passively listening to a teacher for hours on end. We would do this for 4 hours a day, and then we would sometimes be given paperwork sheet activities to do by ourselves in silence. Can you tell what's missing here? What's missing is we weren't speaking. We weren't using French. What we were learning were formal grammar rules, ones that were actually quite high level. We spent the first week of class studying the subjunctive mood. I mentioned earlier that I used to be a language teacher and I'm kind of a grammar nerd. I don't mind grammar rules, but the problem I had with this was we're learning a fairly obscure rule that doesn't apply in that many general situations, and we were learning it in a way that was completely disconnected from any sort of real-life context. We would just study grammar in isolation for hours and days on end. After one week of studying the subjunctive, I had a very good theoretical understanding of what this grammar was, but it didn't help me learn French at all. Friday, after we'd been studying this subjunctive for one week, I took myself to Monoprix. I wanted to get myself a steak to celebrate, and I couldn't even ask for a steak at the deli. It was beyond my abilities to do that. I had to use Google Translate and show the guy on my phone. I think that example speaks for itself. But if you need another one, the day after that, my partner and I went to her parents' place, and her father said to me when he greeted me, and I had no idea what he was saying to me.
Believe it or not, there were things that I had even more of a problem with at this language school. One of them were the textbook materials that we were studying from, which I found to be completely culturally insensitive. Even though we were studying A2, many of the activities would ask us to discuss really sensitive issues like religion and women's rights and take strong positions or argue strong positions against them. Now, this isn't the biggest deal in the world. Generally, my value system agrees with the ones that we have in France. But it was quite shocking for me coming from Southeast Asia where sensitive subjects like that are considered, um, not taboo, but you don't ask those sorts of things in the context of an educational environment where the purpose is not to discuss those things. If you're just needing to learn language, you don't need to be talking about subjects that might offend large groups of people.
But the bigger problem I had was the teacher of this class was a bully, and he would bully students. I was one of the strongest students in the class, and he didn't give me much attention. He would spend most of his time talking at the weaker students, including one older American guy, and particularly the Asian students. He would single them out, asking them difficult questions that he knew they couldn't answer. And when they would freeze, I don't know, he would shout the questions back at them. He would do this for minutes. And I could see no reason for him to be doing this other than a sadistic desire to humiliate students for their weaknesses. As a teacher myself, it offended me. I hated it, and I would intervene when he was doing it. I knew the answers. I would come in, I would tell him the answer, and I'd say, "Let's move on." And he would get weird about it. He was quite intimidated by me. But he didn't stop bullying these students. I'd had a week at this prestigious language school supposedly learning French, and I hadn't learned any French that was helping me functionally use French. And the hostility of the environment there was actually making me afraid to speak French. I'd come to France feeling confident in my abilities, but after a week in this school, I would find that when I would need to speak French in public, I would get this anxiety rising up inside me that would make me freeze.
So on the Monday, we went back to class. This teacher started bullying a student. I stood up. I walked out and just went home. Didn't say anything. And I got an email from the school immediately saying, "What's wrong? Is everything okay?" I sent an email back itemizing all the problems that I had with the school, describing how I didn't think the education was effective, but also that I found the environment disrespectful to me and I did not like how the teacher was treating the students. I asked them to provide me with a refund for all of the classes that I wouldn't be taking. I spent a lot of time writing this feedback in business-like French. I sent it to the school, and they never replied to me.
As I'm telling this story, I'm noticing a bit of saltiness and anger come up. And there's two parts to that anger. One part is that I consider that they disrespected me as a customer of their business. I paid for a language course, I didn't learn any language, and when I tried to ask for a refund of the services that I wasn't taking, they blanked me. But I really have a problem with people in positions of authority using those authority positions to bully the people in their care. For me as a human being, it's unacceptable. And for me as a teacher, a former teacher, it's outrageous. And yeah, this was an upsetting experience that was part of my welcoming to France, but I didn't think too much about it at the time beyond the practicalities.
Okay, I don't have a language course. I need to learn this language somehow. What am I going to do? Well, I had the textbook from the school that we were studying. So, I continued to study that on my own. I was reading the newspapers. I was still doing French daily in whatever capacity I could, and I looked for another language course. Here in France, you have these language courses offered by the town hall, and they're quite well-reputed. They're very affordable because they're subsidized by the French government. Subsidized by the French government. So, as someone learning French through the town halls, you don't pay a lot of money. Um, but people consider that the quality of the education is very good. And as it happened, there was a new semester beginning of language courses at my local town hall. So, I signed up and I was accepted.
Despite my excitement for the language course, I unfortunately didn't have a good experience. It was better than at the language school I'd been at because at least the teacher wasn't bullying and humiliating the students, but well, I'll just describe what the structure of the course was. So, it was a 3-hour class, and at the beginning, the teacher was just talking to us in French about how difficult French is to learn and how it's going to take years and years and years to learn French. And then one student asked a question, which is, "When do we use the plus-que-parfait tense?" And this teacher's eyes lit up. He obviously loves his grammar. And he spent the next hour talking about the situations in which you would use the plus-que-parfait as opposed to the passé composé in French. A rather obtuse grammar point, but one that is a bit more practical than the subjunctive. Now, for me as a language teacher, there's no reason to talk about the plus-que-parfait for 1 hour because it's pretty simple as a concept. In fact, we have it in English. Okay? We call it the past perfect, and it's a way that you distinguish further past from near past. The way you would say, "Before I ate lunch, I had done the housework." That "had done the housework" is the past perfect or the plus-que-parfait. So if you need to explain the plus-que-parfait to English speakers or anyone from a European language, all you need to do is get them to think about a similar concept in their language. "Oh, I had done that before I did this." You only need to spend a minute explaining this. And I knew that because I'd read a one-sentence description in a textbook. Okay. So, I was rather annoyed that this teacher was spending over an hour explaining a basic grammar point. But what was even more frustrating to me was that the way he was explaining it was completely incompetent, and everything he was saying was just confusing the students even more. And when I was talking to these other students in the class on the break, they would tell me things like, "Oh, I've been learning French for 5 years at the Alliance Française and they still don't get things like that."
So this time I wasn't going to bother sticking around for a week. I went to one class. I unenrolled myself, and I did get my money back that time. I'm sharing with you my experiences of doing French classes in France. And I know people who have had much better experiences than I have, and I know people who have also had worse. I think if you want to take one lesson away from this, it is to be careful about where you sign up for language lessons, or if you are in language lessons and you're finding that they're not working for you. It might not be because you're dumb or you're incompetent. It might be because your teachers are dumb and incompetent. That might sound like a harsh thing to say, but my opinion as a former language teacher is that a lot of the courses in France are dumb and incompetent, based on old-fashioned assumptions and outdated models of teaching that don't work in the 21st century, and probably didn't work in the 19th century either.
By this stage, when I dropped out of my language classes from the Alliance Française, I'd been in France for almost a month, and I was starting to have success with the self-study that I was doing. I noticed that my French was improving in terms of my functional ability, and I was becoming confident to speak French. Because of that success that I was having, I decided that rather than going back to the language class well for a third time and potentially having another upsetting experience, I would give it a go learning French myself and see what happens.
This decision to become my own French teacher was one that felt really good. It felt empowering. Those experiences that I'd had being in language classes where I wasn't feeling helped by teachers were disempowering experiences. Whereas this one, I was deciding to help myself. And I took it seriously. I gave myself a study routine in the morning where I would spend 4 hours studying at my desk. I downloaded a whole suite of textbooks, editor, ones like that. You probably know the titles. I can't remember all of them now. And I started with them, but I found I didn't like them. They felt like they were dumbed down for me. I wanted real things. So, I started getting the newspaper. I'd go on Le Monde, the website, or I'd get the hard copy edition, and I would read real-life news articles. And every morning I would do a reading study that would involve news articles, and I also did a novel study. One of my favorite novels is Bret Easton Ellis's first novel, Less Than Zero. I know the whole thing in my head. And what I did is I got a French translation of Less Than Zero. I would read the French translation side by side with the English original, and anything that I couldn't understand in the French translation, I would look in the English translation for. Because translations are not one to one, there were times I did need to search a dictionary to make sense of the text, but usually what I was doing was getting a taste of how French operates differently to English. Things that you would say this way in English would be more natural to say this way in French. I specifically chose Less Than Zero because it models casual everyday language and dialogue. If you're going to be studying a novel to learn a language, it's good if it can be normal everyday language rather than something too literary. When I began doing this novel study, it would take me over an hour just to do one page from Less Than Zero. But within days, I was getting quicker and quicker and could read entire chapters in that amount of time. If you give yourself a stiff challenge and you work at it hard, you will progress.
In addition to reading, I was also doing writing. I was keeping a journal in French, and I would give myself no fixed amount of time, however much it felt good to write for. At the beginning, that was about half an hour, but as my endurance got better, I could spend an hour writing in French. Writing is a really great way to workshop your language. When you're speaking, you don't have the time to really think about and process things like the grammar and vocabulary choices, but on a blank page, you're writing things down. You have the time to be thinking and developing that process. So, I highly recommend writing. What I would do after I'd written my text is I would type it up and put it into a grammar checker. That grammar checker would give me feedback on my expressions, and I'd be able to see where I needed to work to develop my grammar more. Speaking of grammar, I did have textbooks that I was working on. I was doing grammar activities. It's important, especially in a language like French where they do value accuracy of expression. You want to make sure that you're not breaking your grammar too much in ways that make you look, uh, like you lack credibility.
Of all the activities I was doing at this stage, though, the one that helped me the most was music. French music. I would study French songs. Which songs? I'd just go on Spotify. I'd listen to playlists, and if I liked a song, I'd decide to study it. I studied everything from Zaz to Stromae's classic kind of French boomer music to, um, rap, current-day rap. The way that I would begin studying songs is I would listen to the song with a copy of the lyrics, reading along with the lyrics, just trying to hear the words that were being sung. This is not a simple thing in French because of the way spoken language works. There are so many contractions, words are blended together, syllables are dropped. How the music looks on the page is quite different to how it sounds. So, I was just trying to be reconciling the difference there, and that was great practice for my ear. I couldn't do it at 100% speed in the beginning, but the nice thing about YouTube, where we are now, is there's a speed function. So you can take something like "Anissa - J'aimerais tellement," a very fast rap song, listen to it on 25% speed, and you will hear each word pronounced separately. When you got it right on 25%, lift it up to 50, then 75, then 90, until you can hear the lyrics as they're written at 100%. That'll be great training for your ear. Obviously, when you're studying a song like that, you want to know what it means. So, you're going to be looking up those definitions. You might be able to find them in your Petit Robert, or you might need to use Google and read what people are saying, especially if you're studying rap songs like I was. So, you've spent the energy to really understand and hear what is in French music. Take it further. Learn to sing it. That's what I did. I can sing everything from Zaz to Véronique Sanson to Stromae. Not very well, but that trained my pronunciation. I mentioned earlier how nobody could understand my French when I came here because of the way I would pronounce things. That fixed my pronunciation, learning, training my mouth to learn the music of French. If you struggle with pronunciation, I highly recommend doing this. Get yourself ready to do karaoke with French people.
So, okay, in the mornings, I was reading French texts, I was writing, I was listening to music, and I was learning to sing these songs. What is missing from all of this? Speaking. I had a French partner at the time, so you're probably thinking that I was doing speaking with her, but it wasn't really the case. My French partner didn't have much interest in helping me speak French in those beginner stages. I mention this because I've heard a similar story from a lot of people that their French partners didn't want to help them learn French. In my case, my partner had had a lot of difficult experiences in school. She'd found the French school system to be, um, punitive and unfriendly, very focused on mistakes, and she didn't want to replicate any of that with me. She thought that helping me learn French would involve her being mean to me, and she didn't want to be mean to me. I did a lot to convince her that she could help me in other ways and make it safe, and she became more willing to engage with me in French, but it was never something she felt totally comfortable with. And she was doing other life projects at that stage as well. So there was only so much in the day she was willing to or she was able to dedicate to me learning French. Learning French was my project, not hers. And I was okay with that because it was very important to me that I did not become too dependent on her. Her being French, me being non-French, that could have happened very easily in a way that would be unhealthy. And I thought the more ways that I can be helping myself and empowering myself, the better it would be for that relationship. Think about that, too, if you're in the same position.
So, what was I doing to practice speaking French? Well, Paris is full of French speakers, so I would use French every time that I was in public, buying, uh, stuff at the boulangerie, which I was doing every day. Then, um, having conversations with people in the street. I took on this mentality that, um, "We're in France, we speak French." I thought, "Okay, I'll try to, uh, do my best to go with the flow in that regard." So that was helpful to me, but there's only so much practice that you can get speaking French with random people on the street. So I knew I needed more. And I started looking for conversation associations in France, places that I could go just to practice speaking. There are thousands of conversation groups that you can find on the internet, and in a city like Paris, you can find plenty of them in person as well. Some of them offer more structured speaking exercises where you talk on certain topics or you practice speaking, uh, with particular grammar, and others are more open format. I tried a couple of different ones until I found one that worked for me. The one that worked for me is called ARC, and I'm going to link them in the description because I'd highly recommend them for other people in Paris who want to practice speaking French. The way the sessions work there is they have three sessions per day which are open. Anyone can arrive at any time. You don't need to sign up in advance. And you'll be seated at a table with a native speaker, a Parisian, and there'll be five or six of you around the table, and the Parisian will direct the conversation. Whatever the topic of conversation is depends on the interest of the animator or the animatrice. The people at ARC, they're volunteers, and they do this from a genuine desire to help people integrate into French society, to help foreigners integrate into French society. They're people who are worldly and interested in other cultures, and they like to make conversation, and they will make conversation with you.
The very first day that I went there, sat in a group. The animator was a man named Pierre, who was a former, um, judge with the Cour de Cassation, a quite high-level position in France. He's a guy who carries himself with gravitas and that sort of bourgeois energy. And the first question he asked me was, "Alors, quelles sont les choses qui vous ont surpris chez les Parisiens?" What are the things which have surprised you about the Parisians? And my response was something like, "Australien. No, no, no. Vite Australien. Wait, wait. Just Australian. No, no, no. Australian." It was like that. And, um, yeah, it was rough. I spent a lot of that first session just listening to other people. Indeed, probably the first few weeks I was spending a lot of time listening, offering bits and bobs where I felt comfortable. But it really developed my French. I loved the open structure format where, just like in the real world, you can be asked any topic and expected to talk about anything in the moment. It's not controlled in an artificial way like a lot of learning programs can be. Those controlled exercises to develop specific skills, I was already doing plenty of them in the morning. So as the months passed between my study in the morning and then spending like 2 to 3 hours a day speaking French in the afternoon at this place, within 4 to 5 months, I was usually, not always, but usually speaking at a C1 level, depending on the days. I had certain things that took a while for me to click in the language, um, which really stuck me for a while in certain situations, but globally my French was developing. One of the things that stuck me, just incidentally, if you're interested, has to do with, um, the position of pronouns with respect to auxiliary verbs. So, you know how in French you would say "le voir," but you would say "je le vois," but you would say "je l'ai vu"? The position of that pronoun "le" changes in the passé composé and other tenses. It completely messed me up, and every time I needed to say something in the passé composé that involved a pronoun, for about eight or nine months, I would completely freeze and blank out. Spinning ball error.
Another thing which was developing my French was that part of my integration into this country involved having meetings with French government departments to set up my business, to deal with things with respect to my driver's license, all of that. And as I mentioned, my partner was dealing with her own life projects. So these ones I took upon myself, like once a week or once every two weeks, I would have one of these meetings, and my challenge for the week would be to prepare for them in terms of the language. I would try to anticipate all the things that would be discussed, make sure I know the vocabulary, have responses prepared, have questions prepared, prepare myself so that I could go in and do my best in those interactions. If learning French were a video game, rendezvous with the French government would be like your boss fights. And I was having a boss fight every week. They were not always very fun, but I learned a lot from them.
Even still, as I said, I gave myself 6 months to learn the language, and that was a time I was also using to set up my business and to set my life up in this country. After I'd been doing all of that for my language in those first 6 months, I reached a point where I didn't need to be doing so much daily practice. I could take my foot off the accelerator, and my French was at a point where it was developing naturally and organically because I was speaking every day. I had friends with whom we would speak entirely in French, and my language has just continued to develop organically since then.
Okay. So, what can you learn from my story? Well, you probably have learned things already. You know what you're taking away from it. But as a summary from me, I would say that be careful with French courses. I can recommend you a good one or a good school, which is EFI, École de Formation Interculturelle. It's in, I'll put a link in the description. Um, but do be choosy. Don't feel like you have to settle for a language course where you feel like you're not learning. And if you are studying and not feeling progress, don't blame yourself or get discouraged. You might do well to find a different language school, or you probably have more power to learn this language independently than you think you do. So, if you haven't fully explored that, excuse me, think about ways that you might do that. All of the cliches about learning a language, it's a marathon, not a race, blah blah blah, those things apply. Um, make sure you're doing a mixture of rigorous, formal activities, learning the serious book stuff, as well as learning the street stuff as well. Natural speaking, becoming fluent and comfortable like that. Make sure you do both because life involves both.
The one caution I would mention here about the way I learned French is that French people don't always tell you when you're making mistakes or saying bizarre things. One of the words which was very important to me in the beginning was to tell people that I was confused, that I didn't understand something, which in French you would say "Je suis perdu," or "Je ne comprends pas." But I insisted on having a word like "I'm confused," "I don't understand something," or "That's confusing." And what I found, thanks to, I don't remember if it was Google Translate or, but I started saying to people, "Je suis déroutant." Now, "déroutant" means like "unsettling" or "bewildering," and it's quite a bizarre, um, scholarly word to be dropping in daily life. If you're at Monoprix and you're trying to tell someone that the, uh, automated checkout is confusing you, that one's not too big of a deal. But one that was a bit more significant was I started confusing the two expressions, and both of them can be used to say goodbye, indicate you're going somewhere, and both of them have a, uh, more casual spoken feel, especially "Je file," which is like saying, "Kind of, I'm making a beeline," and it's like, "I'm getting out of here." But what I was saying to people was, if you speak French, you probably know how that's understood. But for those of you who don't, "Je me déroute" means "I'm inserting something into myself." It's what women say to describe putting a tampon in. Tampax. And I was saying that to people, and they were hearing that I'm going to [ __ ] myself. I was saying that to people for a good couple of years before someone told me what it meant. And it wasn't even them telling me unprompted. I said it to a really attractive woman at a party that I'd been dancing with. I said, "Ah," and I said to her, "It was really nice dancing with you. Hope to see you again. I'm going to [ __ ] myself." And she looked at me with a face that made me know something was wrong. And so I asked her, like, "Is it?" And she says, "Well, like, are you trying to tell me that you want to [ __ ] yourself?" And I was like, "No, I want to just go home." And she's like, "Well, I don't judge you." And it was the beginning of a nice friendship, actually. Um, but as an example, you can be saying really bizarre things in France, and people won't tell you. So, be aware of that.
Anyway, I think that's all I really have to tell you about learning French for now. Hopefully, that's been a useful or helpful video for you. If you have any tips of your own or any experiences that you'd like to share, I'd love to hear from you. Drop a comment. Otherwise, remember to like, subscribe, and share. See you for the next video. Bonjour.
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