If you’re anything like me, you’re probably in a bit of a hurry to learn French. By that, I don’t necessarily mean you have an upcoming trip or are about to take a new job in a French-speaking country. I just mean that you’re very keen to get better and dream of the day when French words will flow effortlessly out of your bouche*.

I remember when I first got serious about my French. I have a very clear vision of my bedroom floor being strewn with verb conjugations on lined foolscap pages with those little white circles around the holes to stop them from tearing out of the lever arch files (remember them?). We only graduated to those ever-awkward files in upper school if I recall. I also have no memory of my sister (with whom I shared a room) being mad about the mess for once, so she must have already left to go off to university in Perth. My best guess, therefore, would be Year 11, which means I’d been doing French for several years before I really knuckled down.

Our teachers must have been extremely patient with us as we fumbled our way through our verbs, mangling and mispronouncing the conjugations in our rush to achieve fluency. I imagine they didn’t have a lot of choice, mind you. This was coastal semi-rural Western Australia in the 80s. I suppose they were taking a ‘softly, softly’ approach in order to avoid losing us to the much stronger forces of the time: the beach and boys. I’ll be forever grateful to the language department at my local high school for opening our eyes to the world beyond our Puberty Blues-esque origins. They really were battling a pretty strong cultural current.

So, possibly motivated by a short exchange I did to l’Île de la Réunion* in Year 10, I must have decided it was time to get serious about my French. I did so by writing out reams and reams of verb conjugations. I did it because I loved French, but I must admit, too, that it satisfied the slightly obsessive part of me that dogs/helps me to this day. Yes, I had to brush them up a little many moons later when I started Lingua Franca, but the intellectual muscle memory was there, so the process was more agréable* than laborieux*.

I have no such muscle memory when it comes to tennis, as I must have only played it for a season or two as a child. This is an unfortunate fact for my tennis coach, though he wears it with patience and grace. One of the kindest and friendliest men I’ve ever met, he nevertheless lets me get away with absolument rien*.

At a recent lesson, before I even got a ball in my hand, Vince asked me to shadow his stroke with my racket in an attempt to get the fundamentals of the forehand swing down pat. We did this with our backs to the fence to the side of the court so as to shorten my swing and therefore reduce the margin for error. When he was satisfied I was close to mimicking his stroke, he allowed me onto the court, and started gently lobbing balls to my forehand side, reminding me that the technique was more important than the result.

Though my ears received the message, my body did not react as it was simultaneously receiving a message from my brain that screamed “imagine if I absolutely creamed this ball and hit a winner?”. Naturally, any technique I may have possessed just a minute or two before was instantly forgotten and as though to underscore my recalcitrance as a student, my ball went straight into the net. Vince let this go a couple of times (as I mentioned, he really is très patient*), but as more and more of my balls found the net, he suggested that we may need to return to the fence, sans ballon*, to go over the technique once again.

Naturellement*, I didn’t want to do this, so I tried harder and harder to whack the ball over the net, which caused me to tighten up and, well, you can probably imagine the rest. Being sent to the corner, like when we were in primary school is called aller au piquet* in French, and with my head slightly bowed and my sneakers dragging across the court to the sideline, Vince probably wondered if he wasn’t, in fact, dealing with une petite gamine*, rather than a fully-grown 51-year-old femme*.

In case you haven’t already gathered, being sent to the fence is the sportif* equivalent of being told to learn your verbs.

So many of you express the desire to just “speak, speak, speak!” and we, as your tutors, are here to facilitate that, of course, but it is also truly what we’d love for you to be able to do. There’s nothing better than looking at a student you’ve been teaching for months or perhaps years on end, and one day suddenly realising they actually speak French! It’s as rewarding for us as it is enriching for you. Sometimes, though, achieving that goal does mean we have to suggest that you spend some time back against the fence in order to come back to the playing field of speaking better prepared to claim your victory.

By the way, I’ve noticed over the years that there are periods where you can skate by without really mastering your verbs…and then there are times (often months later, when you’re least expecting it) when that fence will be looming. In my experience, and according to the Lingua Franca system) they are:

1. At the end of Absolute Beginner Revision: you really want to have mastered the verbs être, avoir, aller and faire in the present by then, simply so you can enjoy seeing just how much you can already say based on these crucial verbs. It’s a lot.

2. Intermediate 1: this is where we introduce the imparfait (imperfect tense). While the concept of the imparfait can be tricky, the conjugation is relatively simple. Simple, that is, if you learned the conjugations of the 20 slightly irregular verbs we taught you back in Beginner 1, such as dormir, sortir, mettre, boire, prendre et al. Ringing any bells? The reason' they’re crucial is that in order to find the stem for the imparfait you must go to the ‘nous’ form of the present tense, and if you find yourself guessing at that, put down the ball, slink over the fence and start limbering up.

3. Advanced 2: for a similar reason as above, in order to be able to conjugate the subjunctive tense, you need to know your present tense ‘ils/elles’ conjugations. We find that when students aren’t 100% confident with these, it really does add unnecessary stress to learning this rather abstruse concept.

La morale de cette histoire*? A little bit of effort goes a long way. Do your future self a kindness by committing your current one to learning a verb conjugation a day. Here’s the first one to get you started. It’s one people commonly get wrong when trying to take their first steps in speaking in the imparfait. Je t’en prie*.

BOIRE - to drink

je bois
tu bois
il/elle/on boit
nous buvons
vous buvez
ils/elles boivent

Therefore, to say ‘I was drinking’, we take the ‘nous’ form of the present tense conjugation, remove the -ons and add the imperfect endings. So, je buvais = I was drinking. Voilà*!

Next month, in an effort to remain at all times contraire*, we’ll look at how every time you turn up to French is a win. Until then, maybe buy a pack of 500 loose leaf A4 sheets and see how much damage you can do. Bon courage*.

Sent to the fence