In the last How to Learn French post, we talked about les hauts et les bas* of being a beginner learner. I mentioned that when students sign up for their first French course, they’re usually brimming with excitement and just busting to start speaking French.

Unfortunately, that initial brio is often quickly replaced with something nearing despair as they realise the enormity of the task ahead. I’ve spoken about how that happened to me only very recently with learning Sanskrit. On a side note - I’ve had four weeks off due to a term break and guess who’s done about two hours of the 20 she planned? I have, though, managed to draw myself up a cheat sheet so at least I know what I don’t know (and I’m counting that as a win).

So, what to do when, after getting a handle on the groundwork, you’re ready to launch into actually speaking? This will likely happen to you a few times along your learning adventure. Here at Lingua Franca, we encourage you to do our Speaking Practice Courses right from Absolute Beginner 1, and it’s usually around the Absolute Beginner Revision mark that you’ll get your first soupçon* of desire to speak. Once you’ve got the present tense sur le bout des doigts*, you’ll probably be drawn to making your own simple sentences.

When you do, you’ll soon realise how great it would be to be able to tell someone what you did yesterday and what you’re going to do tomorrow. You can still say quite a lot without knowing those tenses, but roll on Beginner Revision…

Then, by the time you reach Intermediate Revision, usually in about your third year, you’ll be impatient to start speaking up, and rightly so. You’ve diligently learned several tenses as well as un tas de* vocab, you’ve got the numbers under your belt and have a pretty good handle on the pronunciation. You’re probably looking for a reward for all that hard work and your fervent hope is that when you do open your mouth the words will flow out as easily as they do from the ball of your pen.

Mais, non*!

How many times have we heard this refrain from our Chouchous*? It’s a lament I know well personally, having expressed it about my own French many, many times. Préparez-vous*, it’s a question you’ll ask yourself more than once throughout your French learning career, but it seems to be at its most piquante* when you know a lot in theory, but seem unable to let the words coulent*.

I remember in Year 12, just as we were nearing our final exams, our French teacher was particularly pleased with our performance one day. She said: “Félicitations, la classe*! You’re now able to speak at the level of an eight-year-old!”. While she smiled at us beatifically, we let out huge (and let’s face it, dramatic) sighs of disappointment. I’ll never forget it. All that work to be able to speak like a virtual bébé*? You’ve got to be kidding!

I’ve reflected a lot on that moment in the years hence, and have come to realise that Mlle MacPherson was paying us a sincere compliment. Though at 16 the thought of speaking like an eight-year-old was frankly insulting, when you think about how much an eight-year-old is able to say, most French learners would be delighted to have that level of fluency.

So, how to set yourself up for succès* as you take your first steps?

As frustrating as the advice to take it ‘slowly but surely’ may sound, it really will set you off on le bon chemin*.

Leaping out of the gates at full galop* might feel great for the first few words (which you’ve likely prepared ahead of time in your head), but a sentence or two later, you might feel yourself barrelling full speed into a rabbit hole from which it’s hard to escape. Trying to express yourself as you do in your native language, with the vocabulary, fluency and dexterity built up over a lifetime will ensure you spend more time underground than above it. It amounts to trying to run before you can walk, and from recent experience I can tell you this is probably not the way to build confidence, which will account for about 80% of your success.

Last month, I promised you a story about a jumbo tennis ball, so here it comes.

In a year of new things for me, I’ve recently taken up tennis. While my friend and I were keen to get on the court and rip a few backhands down the line at our first lesson, our teacher insisted we start by standing on either side of the net and throwing (carefully and very gently) an oversized pink tennis ball to one another. Oh, la honte*! This action apparently mimics the elements of a solid backhand and laid the groundwork for us graduating to our first strokes with a regular-sized ball later in the hour.

This applies to your French as well. Freezing up mid-sentence because you don’t know the word for ‘four-wheel drive’, for example, is the equivalent of me trying to pull a drop shot on my opponent when I can’t even be sure I’ll make contact. Could you use the word for ‘car’ instead? How important to your story is it that your audience know you’re talking about a specific type of vehicle? Remember, the goal is to communicate. In order to get your message across, you may need to simplify the message itself. My bet is it won’t overly impact your story and the most important thing is that by choosing a word you know instead (voiture*), you’ll likely get to the next word and the next and the next, and before you know it, you’ll being having yourself a real-life conversation.

Next month, more tennis analogies* await, as we consider the concept of the 100-point rally. À la prochaine*!

Rabbit holes and jumbo tennis balls