I was doing a lesson with one of our very long-term students a few weeks ago, looking at all of the French verb tenses (there are 15 conservatively, more like 19 or 20 when you go deep).

If you’ve not immediately smashed your computer screen and headed to the nearest corner for a soothing rock, stay with me, because this is a happy news story (je te jure* !).

In looking at all the tenses, we realised that beyond a certain point, they mostly become compounds of the ones you already know (and those that don’t are likely to be literary tenses and very rarely used).

For example, the futur proche* is really just a combination of the present tense plus the infinitive (je vais parler - I am going to speak). For those of you who have dug a little further back into the French grammar armoire*, you’ll know that the plus-que-parfait* is just an amalgam of the imperfect tense and the past participle that you’ve already seen in the passé composé* (j’avais parlé - I had spoken).

It goes on. The futur antérieur* is a combo of the futur simple* and the past participle (j’aurai parlé - I will have spoken) and the past conditional just takes it a step further (j’aurais parlé - I would have spoken).

So, it’s a bit like an apprenticeship, or apprentissage. You have to do the hard yards first in order to develop the skills that will allow you to master your chosen trade in the future.

This may not be sounding like a good news story yet, granted. It might just sound like plain old hard work, which it sometimes is (even though there are many moments of delight along the way).

But the good news starts here.

Much like my Mum’s very sage advice to me the first time I had my heart broken (“It will never be this hard again, I promise”), your very first course will always be the most testing.

At Lingua Franca we have 16 different levels ranging from Absolute Beginner 1 to Advanced Revision. By far and away the first lesson of Absolute Beginner 1 is the trickiest. In fact, to be more specific, it’s the very first vocabulary list, about some seemingly benign basic greetings, that can cause intellectual panic to set it.

Take a look for yourself:

In that very first 15 minutes of the lesson, we touch on the following:

silent letters
strange vowel combinations (oi is pronounced wuh?)
tu vs vous
the supremacy of the masculine gender (in grammatical terms)
standard vs familiar language (bonjour vs salut)
liaison
the difference between on and nous
pronunciation exceptions (monsieur)
how to pronounce French ‘r’s
agreement (enchanté vs enchantée)

C’est beaucoup, non*? If you’ve been doing French for a little while, the above list probably doesn’t look that scary at all. You’ve may have even forgotten that these were new concepts to you once upon a time. But imagine how it feels to be back there at Lesson 1, trying to take all of this in. You’d think it was a foreign language.

Spare a thought for our Absolute Beginner 1 students, as it doesn’t let up for the rest of the workbook. Numbers to 100 (“what do you mean 4 x 20 means 80?”), nationalities without capital letters, the joy of their first irregular verb (hello, être*) and the back-to-frontness (for English-speakers) of the noun plus adjective situation.

We can actually pinpoint the moment the shine will come off for most brand new students. It’s Lesson 4, when they learn to conjugate (huh?) their very first regular verb. The mood almost always goes from engaged and excited to focused and serious as they broach the verb vendre* and when the door opens at the end of the lesson, it’s like a wave of tension follows the students out.

However, for the courageux* and courageuses* who front up for Lesson 5, it’s all good news. Having had their French hearts broken, it’s only upwards and onwards from that point. Places around town (fun!). A guessing game in French? Count me in!

And so it goes along the winding path of your French learning. Peaks and valleys, climbs, descents and periods of coasting.

Another of our students tells a very reassuring story of learning to be a volunteer guide at an art gallery. The training was extensive and the information new and copious. With so much information swimming around in their heads, the trainees felt as though they’d never be able to remember everything, let alone communicate it in a comprehensible (and engaging) way.

Just when our student thought she could take no more, the trainer explained to her that it was totally natural at that point to be utterly confused.

The trainer explained to them that this period of confusion often represented the last moments before the information would start to synthesise and arrange itself in their heads. That is, that this was the worst it would get. As it turns out not only was Mum a master consoler, but she had some insight into brain function as well.

It might help to think of your learning as a series of waves of various heights, with blobs of confusion dotted along the way. Comme ça*, the next time you’re faced with a new and challenging concept, you can be secure in the knowledge that understanding and mastery is just over the next rise, and that, de toute façon* you’ve seen much worse before.

It gets easier