Last month, I started down my Top 5 list of tips for speaking French. I hope you’ve been practising recently and have started to see les fruits de tes efforts*. Don’t be discouraged if you feel you’ve not made great strides. As tutors we know it’s sometimes difficult for students to see their progress, but if you’ve made any attempts at all, you’re more experienced and almost certainly better than you were before you did so. Allez*! Let’s get onto Top Tip #2.

Boring, je sais*, especially when you’re dying to speak French fluently. I mentioned in a previous post to think about slowing down your speech, as if communicating an important message to a four-year-old (do…not…put…the mobile phone…in….the toilet), but I feel it’s worth a bit of elaboration again this month.

It’s important not to run before you can walk and one way you can do this is to consciously slow down your speech, or rather, as this is more often the problem, your thoughts.

We’re so used to thinking and speaking at lightning speed in our own language that sometimes we try to do the same in French. You’ve put in so much time to learn your vocabulary, conjugate your verbs, remember the difference between au, du, de la, aux (or is it en, or dans - oh mon dieu*!) that by the time you come to speak, your head is an electric field, firing shots all over the place with the result that when it comes time to open your bouche*, your brain has seized up and you just draw a big, fat blank. Please let me assure you this is incredibly common and absolutely normal. However, if you launch into speaking in that frame of mind, ça va mal finir*.

If you don’t make a conscious effort to slow down your racing mind and therefore your speech, instead of inching slowly towards the rabbit hole we all know so well, you race right into it and then can’t get out. Remember, le but* is to keep the conversation going. What usually happens by going too fast out of the gates is we strike a word we have no idea how to say very early on. We, as tutors, see it all the time. The student’s brow furrows first, then eye contact is lost because we tend to look up and to the left when we’re trying to remember something. This is followed by an awkward pause and almost guaranteed, our valiant Chouchou* will break into English with “Ugh, how do you say XYZ in French?” and the momentum is lost. Worse (and I know I’ve been guilty of this), the student reaches for their phone or dictionary, picks up their pencil and enters their own little world as they look for the word they think will get them out of their dilemma. In my experience, even I do find it, the person to whom I’m speaking has lost interest by that point and it’s very hard to pick up the thread of the conversation from there. Better to creep toward that potential rabbit hole and give yourself a chance to step around it.

Remember, calmez-vous*, slow it down, lentement mais sûrement is the path to good conversation.

Next month, Top Tip #3 gives you the choice: go high or simplify. Bonne continuation et bon courage!*.

Walk before you can run