How to Learn French

Some of you may have already cottoned on to the fact that I am pretty passionate about the French language.

I started learning it at the age of 11 at my local primary school and right from that first lesson it was le coup de foudre* for me.

Nearly forty years later, I’m still learning French and about 13 years ago I set up Lingua Franca to teach other people this belle langue*. The Lingua Franca team has taught literally thousands of people and part of the reason we all love it so much is that while we’re officially the educators, what we learn from our students is like a rich vein of gold that we get to mine at each and every lesson.

As an Australian who learned French as a second language from one of the most remote corners of the earth, with no French heritage and little in the way of French culture to discover, I’m often asked by our students how I did it.

When I look around the office, though, it’s clear that I’m in no way different to so many others. My colleagues, all native-French speakers, are fluent English speakers as well. We have students we’ve watched become fluent and others who have come to us already speaking fluently. What we all have in common is that we took the first step, and then, crucially, kept going.

In this new series of articles, we’re going to look at how to learn French. Not the le, la et les* of it, but actually how to succeed in achieving the goal so many of you have.

So, gardez un œil* each month for our very top tips, drawn from the personal and professional experience of the whole team here at Lingua Franca: moi, l’équipe et nos Chouchous, bien sûr*.

*love at first sight | *beautiful language | *the, the and the | *me, the team and our Teacher’s Pets, of course