How to learn French. Learning French where to start

In France everyone speaks their own words beautiful language world - French. It is a pleasure to learn and pronounce it. At the same time, there will be no difficulty in pronunciation, except for the notorious rolling “r” for a Russian-speaking person. All the difficulties lie in reading written words, where 8 letters can be pronounced as 2. Where to start learning French if the only words that come to mind are “Salute” and “Cherche la femme”?

The entire process of learning any language is divided into significant blocks or stages, including mandatory exercises and additional activities to broaden your horizons and spark interest in the country, culture and history. The first stage is always pronunciation, which includes:

Studying the alphabet, letters and sounds conveyed by them;
Study of simple one-syllable words, as examples for the alphabet or for bookmarking vocabulary;
Training the perception of sounds by ear, getting used to French speech through audiobooks, music, videos.

The second stage includes reading and perceiving French words “from sight”. This is more complicated; the rules of phonetics and spelling are included in the process. Usually at this stage the following is added to speech listening:

Execution grammar exercises on phonetics
Studying letter combinations, rules for reading individual diphthongs or triphthongs. there are a great many of them in the French language;
Practicing pronunciation of words and phrases written in the book;
Collecting the first words in a personal dictionary.

To reading you also need to add writing words, so the third stage is usually writing, which in turn consists of the following additional tasks:

Practice writing printed and capital letters of the French alphabet;
Performing exercises in notebooks aimed at developing motor skills and getting the hand used to writing French letters;
Maintaining your own dictionary, where you need to write down the words you have learned with transcription and translation;
French spelling, mastering the peculiarities of composing sentences and punctuation marks.

After you can write and receive basic knowledge about reading individual letters and letter combinations, you can proceed to the most important stage - colloquial speech, construction of phrases. Conversation is the most difficult moment in any foreign language.

You need to express your thoughts by collecting all the knowledge you have gained about pronunciation, grammar, and sentence construction. That is why the first 3 stages come first, in order to think based on visual, mechanical and sound associations, the so-called “anchors”. At the final stage the following is added:

Adapted literature;
Audio materials, video materials with subtitles;
Personal conversation with other students or with representatives of the French-speaking nation - native speakers.

Exercises and methodological literature must be continued to be studied and mastered so that the training becomes comprehensive and versatile. If you choose just one thing, the lessons will become boring and it will be quite difficult to stimulate interest. Without a compelling goal, learning French on your own will be quite difficult.

Who can help you learn French?

Self-study French- it’s a complex and labor-intensive task, it requires tremendous patience and ironclad motivation, otherwise nothing will work out. You need to spend 40-60 minutes a day on classes, at least 3 times a week, regularly, without long and frequent absences. Then the result will be noticeable quite quickly. You will not speak French in a month or two, as advertisements for some courses promise; it takes about six months for a student to start constructing his first meaningful expressions from scratch.

On the way to developing pronunciation, analyzing grammar and searching teaching materials It's better to consult a specialist. It will be very difficult and time consuming to look through all the courses offered online and choose the one you need on your own, but the teacher can correctly advise and adjust your searches. What options can you choose:

Ready-made full-cycle courses presented online for free or paid access;
Online teacher-led learning courses;
Classes at a language school - course of study;
Personal training with a teacher;
The hardest way is to travel to France for a couple of months with or without basic knowledge, and study the language “in the fields.”

Any of the options listed can bring good results if you have the desire to learn and motivation. Without them, no teacher will make you speak.

Resources for learning French

If you decide to start learning on your own, without the help of a teacher or with minimal participation, then you can use the World Wide Web as a source of information and knowledge. There are dozens of websites, apps and apps for learning French. methodological manuals. 7 most popular of them:

lingust.ru is an excellent resource for all levels: from basic to advanced. Methodological literature, assignments and audio assistants will guide you and tell you how best to structure your training.
le-francais.ru – offers students to learn French with the help of online lessons and using specially developed materials. A popular and useful site for beginners.
tapis.com.au is an interesting resource for beginners and those wishing to brush up on old knowledge. Lots of interesting materials - audio, video and exercises.
podcastfrancaisfacile.com – a site with a bunch of different materials in audio format for listening to free time. There is information on different topics and sections of educational materials.
francaisonline.com offers online language learning with teachers. Convenient and simple site with additional sections educational materials For self-study.
bescherelle.com allows you to learn a language in game form, the site contains complex and simple games, problems and rules, presented in the form interesting game. Suitable for any level, even children will find it interesting.
hosgeldi.com is a resource for replenishing your vocabulary, it offers to regularly learn new words, you can subscribe and you will receive materials by email.

If you are a visual person by type of information perception, and learning is easier while watching video materials, then the following resources are for you:

Video lessons from the Culture TV channel using the Polyglot system are located online at TK Culture. Here you can gain basic knowledge of the pronunciation and grammar of the French language using a specially developed method in 16 lessons.
The website bonjour.com is needed for beginning students who decide to master pronunciation on their own. Here you can find a lot of videos about the rules of sounding basic words and phrases.
A treasure trove of video clips in all languages of the world is the BBC website, where you can find scientific programs, interviews, funny and educational materials in French. bbc.com
The interview in French with subtitles can be viewed on the website ina.fr. The material will be sufficient to master pronunciation features and improve reading speed.
Interesting material is presented by the website baihou.ru in the form of an educational series, where all the information is presented simply and clearly, and there are subtitles for each video.

For maximum immersion in culture and daily life The French can become familiar with print and online publications in France, watching national television and listening to local radio stations.

Television France- france24.com, tivi5mondeplus.com, d8.tv;
All radio stations in the country- radios.syxy.com;
French daily newspapers and their online versions - Le Figaro and Le Nouvel observateur.

These resources will be enough to diversify boring lessons and exercises, gain a lot of different information about life and the situation in the country, study the peculiarities of culture, important milestones in the history and mentality of the French.

Learn to enjoy your lessons. Boring memorization of rules and monotonous repetition of the same words will not bring results, because you need to put something else into the work. Thin your materials funny videos, reading books, watching movies, combine a pleasant pastime and lessons. Find interesting interlocutor and practice your acquired knowledge in personal, casual conversation.
Spend 30-60 minutes a day studying French. Regular, even short, exercises give enormous results if done productively and until the moment when they get boring. The ideal time is 40 minutes, of which 10-15 are for repeating old material, the rest of the time for new knowledge. Choose the time when your brain is most active. For some it is easier to recognize and remember in the morning, for others it is a night owl and new material I can only get my head around it at night.
Don't try to learn everything in 1 sitting. You can still sit through lessons on the first day of training for 4-5 hours, but such a volume will quickly get boring and become a burden. Accordingly, productivity will quickly drop to zero. Break the lesson into hour-long blocks and study every day.
Get a dictionary. A notebook with notes performs several functions at once: mechanical memorization of the material covered, words are always at hand and available for repetition, all the information studied is in one place. You can duplicate new words on a separate sheet and attach them in a visible place. You can periodically look at what you have written out of boredom and refresh your memory.
Repeat the material covered. Spend 20-30% of your class time on yesterday’s topic, and it’s better to look through everything you wrote down the first time. If you spend 15 minutes a day on this, you won’t have to learn the material again in a couple of months.
Read more literature. Reading books broadens your horizons, distracts you from problems, calms you down and helps you study. French authors were as productive as in any other country, so there is material for everyone. At the initial stage, you will need to look for adapted literature and read books of your level or higher with a dictionary. With the growth of vocabulary, the range of works will increase and expand.
Try to talk as often as possible. Without practice, you cannot learn a language, either in six months or in your entire life. The point of training is precisely the opportunity to maintain a dialogue and communicate with representatives of another country. You can get the opportunity to communicate on special forums, in language schools, V social networks, on trips. At first, communication will be primitive, but with the help of your interlocutor you can learn stable figures of speech, words often used in dialogue, analogues of standard phrases, and much more.
Find like-minded people. A person always needs to feed his interests and find strength for further development. The best way to do this is to show off the knowledge you have gained and the evolution of knowledge. In language schools, on forums and among friends you can find opportunities to share results. Nothing motivates more than the desire to do better than someone else.
Learn the language comprehensively. Exercises, writing, reading, audio materials, video materials - everything should be included. To study French on your own, you need to create a program that will harmoniously combine all types of classes. Then learning will be productive and interesting.
Try to learn phrases rather than individual words in the context of everyday conversation. Concepts change meaning greatly depending on the neighborhood. Words taken out of context have little relation to real speech. Try to study phrases in order to remember the peculiarities of sentence construction, use individual words, phraseological units and idioms.
Develop a system for rewarding your success. In classes with a teacher, this function is performed by grades, praise, and prizes. Any incentive activities may be suitable for self-study. Once you've learned a block, treat yourself to ice cream, a trip to the park, or a new trinket. Choose pleasant little things for yourself and celebrate small victories. Waiting for a prize is boring the lesson will pass much faster and more productive.
Don't give up at the first difficulties. The most difficult months will be 3-6 months, when the first fuse has passed, and little material has been studied. Then laziness begins, the search for excuses and the first absences from classes. Find the strength to overcome them, in six months it will be much easier, the brain will get used to portioned loads and will begin to perceive new information more calmly.

How to learn French on your own?

To summarize, we need to talk about motivation. The main thing is to want to learn French, materials and courses are freely available online and in bookstores. Find an hour a day to study and have fun, combining studying with watching movies. reading books, talking to interesting people. Then the process will be as productive as possible, even without resorting to the help of teachers and other linguists.

Given:

September 2008- a naive young lady with a level of French: underA2. Random scraps of knowledge in my head after foreign language courses. Phonetics, grammar, vocabulary - entry level, speaking skills and listening comprehension tend to zero.

November 2010— level of French: B2 according to the young lady, or C1 according to DALF.

Hello, my name is Galya, I am that same young lady and I learned French on my own (almost). Two important caveats:

I was taught to read (and in French this is important!)
I was not raped by Popova-Kazakova (this is about the second part of the title of the article).

After documenting my knowledge, I taught and continued to learn French, and now I have become so bold that I give advice on self-study. So, best advice, which for now I can give - go to the country of the language you are learning! I did this in my time with French and never regretted it. Now I'm learning Spanish, and would gladly wave in Latin America for a year, if not for a million “ifs”. If your “if only” still doesn’t allow you to do this, another piece of advice: create a language environment at home.

What is the language environment? If we take away the romantic and enthusiastic cries about “ahh there are French people around,” “ahhh I saw Paris and didn’t die,” what did I do differently? It took me 5 years of teaching to realize: NOTHING.

I just spent more time on the language than at home.

No magic pills or hidden secrets. No miraculous implantation of language into the brain in language environment doesn't happen. I did the same things I did in the courses, the same things I did at home, I just spent a lot more time on it.

I read a lot

At first, children's books were used (I worked as a nanny, and my charges were 4.5 and 10 years old). First of all, I dealt with preschool publications, then with comics, then switched to teenage literature. Then I started looking at my parents’ library, but this happened after the first 3-4 months of being in the environment. But even without the environment you can download interesting adapted books.

In addition to books, I read everything I saw: for example, after visiting museums I took booklets with me for different languages with a description of the paintings and the plan, and then translated the French version, looking at the English/Russian translation. But what’s stopping me from now opening the Louvre website http://www.louvre.fr/ and doing the same?

I listened a lot

I listened to radio and television, understanding only 10% for the first couple of months. I watched news, TV series and cartoons. Before, I never believed in “passive listening,” but it really improved my listening skills and helped me speak faster.

If I had known about this magical “immersion”, I could have done this from the very beginning and accompanied my studies with daily listening, and not once a week for 5 minutes in courses. I could select the right level of listening: listen to the news en français facile, for example. Listening to French is not just important, it is a prerequisite, if, of course, you want to understand not only written speech.

Speaking of writing. Although the French themselves can sometimes intimidate you with their spelling, understand all the superscripts from the very beginning and learn to type correctly.

I talked to the native speakers.

You will say: it is easy to look for carriers when there is no choice. But there was a choice. There are plenty of Russian-speaking people in Paris: ours are everywhere and you choose who to communicate with.

My classmate moved to New York and for the first year of her life did not speak English at all. She knows the language perfectly, she just had no one to practice it with. Her employers, colleagues and friends spoke Russian. So much for the language environment. If you create it at home, then to talk with native speakers, you have at your disposal excellent italki, polyglotclub and many more places where you can find a friend to chat on Skype.

I studied using authentic textbooks.

This won’t surprise anyone now, however, some prefer Popova-Kazakova. Let tomatoes and slippers fly at me, but how good it is that no one gave me this famous “base”. Then I still had to go through it, but I’m sure that you need to start with a modern textbook, from the very beginning picking up live vocabulary and listening to live dialogues.

Conclusions from this story:

Intensive is the best pace of language acquisition. By prolonging pleasure, we lose passion, desire and, accordingly, regularity
You can create a language environment without leaving your computer. To do this you need internet, desire, and also concentration. So stop reading about how others learn languages, start doing it yourself!

If you decide to dive into French next year, here's a beginner's plan of action:

We are looking for someone who could teach you to read or check your well-read texts. If you figure it out yourself, then this the only exception When is the best time to take a Russian-language textbook? But in any case, let someone monitor you and correct mistakes. The worst thing you can think of is not knowing the rules of reading and taking on Passé Composé. Get your pronunciation straightened out once and for all. It is logical and also beautiful.
Take the Latitudes 1 textbook - it will be the basis of your program. Follow it, never skipping the audio and tasks in workbook. The answers to all this wealth can be found for free, as well as the manuals themselves.
You can “dilute” this textbook with the books Grammaire en dialogues and Vocabulaire en dialogues, improving grammar and vocabulary. But no more than one chapter per day, because the learned material needs to be repeated. To practice new words, use the method that suits you.
We listen to French spoken every day - the more, the better. You can start with the Coffee Break French podcast, the Extra series. Watch movies with subtitles, sing karaoke songs, watch interesting interviews or musicals. Immerse yourself, in a word. Here is a list of resources from which you can choose.
After the first month of classes, we begin to read regularly. First, adapted or children's literature, like Petit Nicolas, then light books that you read in Russian, then something from modern authors. Balzac and Flaubert will wait for your confident B2.

In moments of despair, read “How I Learn Languages” by Kato Lomb and you will understand how lucky you are in the Internet era. There are now so many authentic materials of excellent quality that there will be enough for more than one lifetime.

P.S. If you have already started, stopped, or are in the process of learning a language, then all these tips are already clear to you, and you, of course, have not learned anything new.

I just wanted to say that the language environment is not a panacea. In the language environment, it’s just the same laziness and the same “I’ll do it tomorrow.” Moreover, neither a collection of links to valuable resources, nor advice from polyglots, nor unlimited internet. It's all about motivation and discipline, and then you can learn French on your own!

As for me, I did not give up studying foreign languages, although I returned home. My little secret: like-minded people from Language Heroes. This is something more than a language environment :)

Many thanks to Galina Lyapun for writing this article. Even more great and useful materials in French you can find her on

Good afternoon In fact, everything is very individual, the most important thing in the language is to study constantly, every day for at least 10 minutes, and the most important thing is to learn how to construct phrases like the French and speak! I would like to talk about my studies in France and how I learned to SPEAK French.

Several years ago I studied in the south of France in the city of Bordeaux as part of an exchange program at my university and this time still remains in my soul. I had to study for a whole year and take subjects in French! Studying in France is very different from studying in Russia..how does this manifest itself? We know the rules very well, but we don’t know how or are afraid to use them.

Before classes started, we were assigned to French groups and had to pass an exam. To be honest, I mostly prepared for grammar tasks, for what we were taught in Russia. But my expectations were not met. Arriving at the exam, we were given a whole stack of sheets on which various pictures were depicted and included a listening exercise that lasted a whole 3 hours! we listened and marked on the picture whether it corresponded to what was said. No grammar, no rules - this turned out to be self-evident, we had to perceive real speech, and we were not ready for this! We passed the exam and were divided into groups; in the first French lesson we spoke! They talked all the time! At first it caused panic, we had to say hello, introduce ourselves, talk about our hobbies, why we came to France and what we want to do in the future - and all in French! All European students were not afraid to speak out - right or wrong, but they spoke and even argued with each other! I asked how long they had been learning French, and the answer was - several months... SEVERAL MONTHS! and they speak! But we’ve been teaching for so long and we can’t clearly connect even a couple of sentences? at that moment I realized that it’s all about the approach to learning a foreign language - we Russians focus on grammar, and they learn to communicate and not be afraid to speak! That's the difference!
But we learn a language so that we can understand each other, so that we can talk when we find ourselves in a foreign country, so that we can learn the culture of other countries and simply communicate! Here main goal! Having returned and graduated from college, I firmly decided that I would promote teaching methods abroad here in Russia. I opened the Frangle language space and teach people how to communicate in an interactive way! I give a lot of material, I believe that the student can really understand many points in the study on his own, I teach students to do without me in studying in the future, and in class we talk a lot, this is the most important thing - to learn how to enter into a discussion, to use those designs that you know. I teach short video lessons, we started with the very basics, with the rules of reading. You can check out my project French-Easy! (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2WuCiwZMCK7vN5UtgPy7Fg) I really like helping people learn French and talking about the culture of France.

I teach you to speak and not be afraid to make mistakes! And it works! The most beautiful thing is when you see the result when people begin to think in French like the French. We meet every week for conversation club to practice everything you have learned.

I will be happy to help you too!

Much more complex than many other languages. To learn the French language perfectly requires more than one year of hard work and a lot of time and effort, but in modern world and with the current rhythm of life, unfortunately, we do not have that much time. In this regard, we will pay attention only to cases in grammar that require closer attention and are necessary when learning a language. In the process of learning a language, motivation is also very important. In the modern world, polyglots know several languages and that’s all, because they really like it, and they want to know and study them. If you have the same position in relation to the French language, then success is guaranteed, but if not, then you can forget about the desire to learn French as, in general, any other language in the world and not a single teacher can teach foreign language, in case of lack of desire from the student.

Motivation as a stimulus for language learning

Quite a lot important factor Motivation influences the quality and speed of language acquisition.

Let's compare two situations, imagine a case in which two young people decided to learn French. In the first young man French is needed for a trip to France in the summer to visit a young girl, but they met on the Internet, and, unfortunately, they speak different languages, which leads to the need to learn the language. In the second case, the young man must pass an exam at the university. The motivation in these situations is completely different; it is obvious that in the first case the young person will learn the language, devoting several hours a day to learning the language with great zeal. When will the second young man devote less time to learning the language and will not receive much pleasure from the learning process. The most important thing is to motivate yourself well. After all, when they tell us, “If you finish the quarter well, we’ll buy you a new laptop,” oddly enough, our grades for the quarter surprisingly become higher and we finish the quarter, almost excellent.

The verb is the basis of any foreign language

As you know, in any language the verb is the basis. Accordingly, in the French language, the verb is no less important at the beginning of the path of language acquisition. When learning French, you should definitely have a couple of books on French grammar in stock. Without this, it is practically impossible to understand all the basics of the language yourself. In French, there are four main verbs that are mentioned more often than others: to live, to have, to do, to be. First, you need to learn how these verbs are conjugated and make the conjugation automatic. Next, to strengthen your knowledge, you can make sentences in different times and conjugations with these verbs.

Don't expect the learning to be easy or quick. They should be given special attention, the variety of forms can terrify you. Unlike English grammar