Don’t give up

Welcome to the first article in our new series: How to Learn French. Not just les rouages*, but tips on the attitudes and practices you can adopt to ensure your success.

WARNING: C’est long* - I’ve obviously got a lot to say on ce sujet*!

I used to think that success in learning French all came down to having a flair for languages.

While it is true that some people are naturally gifted at learning a second (or third or fourth) language and therefore may find the whole process easier, now, after 13 years of teaching French, I know it’s not the secret sauce so many are looking for.

The key ingredient is much less sexy. It is simply this: don’t give up.

As the owner of a French language school, I obviously have a vested interest in this topic. Our business relies on people turning up week after week, term after term and year after year. We try to make the experience of learning French as enjoyable as possible to facilitate this process, which is just good business sense, but to really get to the heart of the matter, it’s helpful to zoom out a bit.

Let’s take away schools like Lingua Franca, apps like Duo Lingo, where you live, your current circumstances, budget, work commitments, health and all the other complicating factors that can affect our ability to learn a new skill at any one time.

Let’s get back to tin tacks. 

You want to learn French and you have one life in which to learn it (unless you’re a believer in reincarnation in which case you can take your foot off the pedal a bit).

My instinct, when faced with this kind of very clearly defined problem, is to tackle it head on. My thinking would go something like this. “Right, you’ve only got a certain number of years in which to achieve this goal, so best let’s get started straight away and work like crazy on it for the next few years so that in the not too distant future you’ll be able to look back across your perfectly mapped timeline and say: ‘I did it!’ ”

Though I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it at the time, I know that from the minute I realised I loved French at age 11, I was on a mission to ‘conquer’ the language. I wanted to get to the end of it, to be able to say “I’ve done it”. I know I’m not alone in this desire. I also know there will be much wiser people than me shaking their heads as they read this, wondering why I’d bleed this pursuit of all its fun, mystery and grace by imposing such a harsh timeline.

The irony is that it is the love of the language itself that leads many of us to gallop towards a perceived finish line. We’re greedy, gluttonous almost, for more and better and easier. I want to learn more words, I want to be able to understand better and why isn’t it easier to get the words out when I know I know them?

I’m now about to turn 50, so I’ve been learning French for almost 40 years, and I’m yet to conquer the French language. My timeline’s in tatters and about five years ago it finally dawned on me that there is, in fact, no finish line. Never will I reach the level of fluency I have in English in the French language. Never. It’s simply not possible. The day I realised that was not a great day for me. 

Before you go and drop a lit match on your kerosene-soaked library of French books, let me tell you about what we actually see happen at the Lingua Franca offices, and what has been my personal experience as well.

With a couple of rare exceptions, the path to language acquisition is not linear. Depending on your personality type, you may very much wish it to be, but then how could we account for the potential clients we meet on an almost weekly basis, the majority of whom tell us a version of the following story?

“I did a bit of French at school and I absolutely loved it but then for some reason I didn’t or couldn’t continue it and then life got so busy and I just never got back to it. So now here I am, thirty-five years later and I’m really keen to get back into it but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten everything.”

Sound familiar? I’d estimate that two out of three of the stories of French we hear contain most, if not all, of the elements above.

So what’s the solution? Absent a dream run of French all the way through school, followed by studying it at university, a year-long exchange to France in early adulthood, weekly lessons at a reputable French language school as well as regular travel to France throughout the rest of your adult life, what is one to do in order to realise the dream of speaking French?

Again, the trick is simply to not give up.

There are so many impediments that can befall you and I am not suggesting that it’s possible to continue to power on with your French when they do. Illness, having children, financial difficulty, your favourite teacher leaving, moving cities or countries, ageing parents, fatigue, a general loss of interest - all of these things can befall us, and sometimes two or three at a time. I’m not suggesting that you doggedly pursue your French when the decks are stacked against you. What I am suggesting is that you find a way to keep a thread of French in your life, even if at times it’s as fine as a silkworm’s work. If you don’t, you risk never returning to it so that when, in ten years’ time, someone asks you if you speak French, you’ll be answering no, whereas your contemporaries (who didn’t stop) will be replying with a very confident “Oui, bien sûr !”

Looking back, I think that’s perhaps what I did, even though it wasn’t a conscious decision at the time.

I did have the beginnings of a dream run, at least. French in Grade 6 and 7 at my local primary school, then French all the way through high school, plus the extreme privilege of a four-week exchange to the French-speaking Île de la Réunion in Year 10. Then I had my first little bump at university when I decided to study Law and French just wasn’t on the menu at the uni I attended. To be honest, I don’t remember missing it too much as I was fairly absorbed with my move to the big smoke, my first serious boyfriend, a part-time job, and, oh yes, my studies.

Unsurprisingly, if we fast forward two years from then, we’ll find me studying for the resit of a contract law exam I’d failed, in the little flat in South Perth I shared with a girlfriend. It was summer holidays, stinking hot and there I was in my unconditioned bedroom trying to force the required information into a brain that just did not want a bar of it. A chronic procrastinator, I decided to reach for my old French book from Year 12 and it was when I cracked that text that it all came flooding back to me. The excitement, the mystery, the puzzle of a foreign language. Each page held a potential that any language lover will understand. What do I know, what don’t I? Why is that like that? Hang on, that can’t be right…oh yes it can. Oh wow! I get it!

A two-hour drive and a very tearful conversation with my uncomprehending parents and I was back on track, studying a Bachelor of Arts at the University of WA. As if making up for lost time, and very much against the advice of my course advisor, my first four units that year were French, Italian, Japanese and English. I even decided to go to TAFE one night a week to study Spanish.

Now two years older than my cohort and infinitely more worldly by my own skewed estimation, I was more interested in working and partying than studying. Though I did turn in all my assignments and attend most of my lectures and tutes, my head just wasn’t fully in it. I had not lost my love of language, but I hadn’t quite grasped what a blessing it was to uncover a passion at such a young age and the importance of treating it with respect. I’ll never forget one of my favourite French tutors, a gruff but cynically funny man, complimenting a couple of the weaker students in a tute on their progress and then taking a breath, looking directly at me and saying without a trace of a smile “And your French, Ms Waugh, is just getting worse”. I flushed with shame but only because I knew how right he was.

The end of my degree looming, with a decidedly average result transcript and no desire to teach, I was saved by my Mum, who saw that Qantas was recruiting flight attendants and a second language was a requirement. I applied, got in and managed to scrape through the language assessment and the next thing I knew I was on a plane to Sydney for training.

As language speakers, it was a requirement that 50% of our roster be made up of flights to the destination on the Qantas network where that language was spoken. So the German speakers would be up and back to Frankfurt, the Thai speakers would go to Bangkok, the Spanish speakers were sent to LA and we French speakers would be sent to London as there were no Paris flights at the time.

There was a fair bit of resistance to the language speakers by some of the older crew members, who perceived us as ring-ins who only got the job by virtue of being ‘lucky’ enough to speak a second language. Therefore, we were only intermittently called upon to perform the tasks we’d been employed for: reading out the standard flight announcements in French, communicating any ad-hoc announcements as required and of course, assisting any French-speaking passengers who found themselves on our code-shared flight.

While I enjoyed reading out the French announcements while hiding from view in a galley, my speaking skills, through lack of practice, became so poor that the thought of being called upon to make an ad-hoc announcement about a diversion or a broken down catering truck was enough to ensure there was a constant pit of anxiety in my stomach before each flight. As for being asked by a fellow crew member to assist a French passenger or - worse! - being accosted by a real-live-French-person as I made my way down the aisle and not having any time to prepare - quelle horreur* ! I mean, I was okay if they wanted a glass of water (but still, was it d’eau* or de l’eau*?) but what if it was a medical emergency? So I watched, over the course of my 11 years with Qantas, as my French got worse and worse and worse to the point where if someone asked me “Parlez-vous français ?”, I’d answer ‘un peu*’ and slowly back away.

It wasn’t a linear decline. I’d have little blips where it would get better temporarily, whether by deciding to do a course on my time back in Sydney, or taking my annual leave in France, or buying a French textbook in my downtime in Singapore, but nothing really stuck and I started to consider my French as a skill I once had. As I write this, the fact that I went so close to losing the very thing that has turned out to be the most stimulating and sustaining thing in my life makes me very sad. 

Though speaking French was an asset at my next two jobs as well, (public relations for women’s golf in Europe and manager of a French restaurant upon my return to Australia), it was still not enough for me to fully comprehend that French was the golden seam that ran through my life and was begging to be mined.

It was almost by accident that I started tutoring French on the side but when I did, the penny finally, finally dropped for me. There I was, thirty-six by now, adrift, working in a job I hated but needing some extra funds to pay my mortgage. At the end of my very first lesson, when the client paid me, I could almost have left the money on the table and walked out. I’d had an absolute ball and the hour had flown by. Sixty minutes of talking about French with someone who was as nerdishly fascinated by the language as I was felt like an indulgence, not work.

And then the race was on. As I gathered more and more clients I had to make sure my French was up to the mark, so spare hours were devoted to swotting up on my French in an effort to make sure I was a least a few steps ahead of the next person who called. I was in heaven, effectively being paid to study French and then share my findings with people who were as enamoured with the language as I was.

That was 13 years ago now, and I have worked with the French language every single day since. I guess you could say I’m in a bit of a purple patch, particularly when contrasted with the spotty treatment I meted out to my passion for the first three decades. As it turns out, I’ve stayed the course, which I put down to two things. One, my love for French kept drawing me back and two, a language is a very patient and tolerant object of affection.

This is what we see every day at Lingua Franca and in the language learning community more broadly. Yes, we’re all familiar with the rust that sets in when we’re not exercising our linguistic muscles as frequently as we should, but nothing is ever lost. Your language skills lay in wait as you go off in pursuit of your life. Yes, they’re layered over with newer, more relevant information for your current situation but the day you decide to dredge them up, they’ll be there, I promise. The rise to the surface may take weeks or months, but eventually they’ll all be floating on the surface of your mind and it’ll be like welcoming back old friends. 

So if you see a dip in your learning on the horizon, or are blindsided by an unexpected chicane, just remember your French will always be there waiting for you and that your job is just to keep hold of that tenuous thread for as long as it takes you to correct your course. It’ll make your eventual return all the more joyeux*.

Next month: techniques to do exactly that.

*the nuts and bolts | *it’s long | *this subject | *what horror! | *of water | *some water | *Do you speak French? | *a bit | *joyous