How to Learn French - When will I be fluent?

May 31, 2024 / Katrina Waugh

Our Chouchous* here at Lingua Franca are a fairly diverse bunch but I’d guarantee almost every single one of them harbours this desire: to be fluent in French one day.

It’s a noble goal, c’est sûr*, and one I still hold myself after all these years, but recently I’ve been thinking about what really means to be fluent and I might be en train de* amending my goal.

Most people would think that I am fluent, and I guess I am in many ways. But if your version of fluent means knowing every single word in French, then I am most decidedly not. I still discover new words in French regularly and it’s this petit plaisir* that got me thinking in the first place.

Until recently, it very much was my goal to one day speak French as easily and as fluently as I speak English, but I’ve realised recently this is simply not possible. I’m 52 and I have lived in Australia for 50 of those years. Even if I were to jump on a plane today and live to the ripe old age of 100 in France, my French would still never catch up to my English. It’d get close, that’s for sure, but all of that imprinting as a very young person in an anglophone environment would not be able to be overridden but mes années glorieuses* in France.

That realisation troubled me at first until a second one hit me: if I was truly fluent in French, I’d have no reason to learn it any more, and what would my life look like in that case? Much poorer, I have to admit. French has been the passion of my life and I can’t imagine my vie* without it. It brings me so much: challenge, exchange, wonder, frustration, joy, connection. Why would I wish that away?

I’ve spoken before about how I was always in a rush to learn French, to get ‘there’, as I thought of it. Any yes, ‘there’ was fully fluent. I know a lot of students wish for the same thing, and while I want them to achieve their goals, I think it might be helpful if we all reframed our aims a bit.

How about we think about achieving proficiency instead of fluency? Linguistically, the difference between these two is actually a bit of a minefield, but on a less academic level, proficiency means being able to get things done, and that sounds appealing to me.

There are different levels of proficiency (and fluency, too, by the way) but in an effort to help you recognise the wins as they come to you, let’s consider some concrete proficiency milestones.

Could you introduce yourself at an AA meeting?

Let’s set our expectations nice and low for our first milestone in order to (hopefully) get a quick run on the board.

The traditional AA introduction in a meeting (in the movies at least) is “Hello, I’m so-and-so and I’m an alcoholic”.

Can you insert your name and an adjective of your choice instead?

“Bonjour, je m’appelle Katrina et je suis australienne*.”

Okay, you’re not going to set the world on fire with that sentence but it’s a start! You’ve got a foot on the ladder.

Could you introduce yourself at a party?

We’re just talking the basics here, not getting involved in a philosophical debate about the merits of Simone de Beauvoir’s later works. Do you think you could have a very short conversation with a French person about yourself: where you’re from, what you do, why you’re here at this fabulous party? Oui*? Félicitations*, you’ve just become a social papillon* in French!

Could you get around France for a couple of weeks without causing an international incident?

Do you think you’d be able to order a taxi, book into a hotel, perhaps hire a car and order in a restaurant without falling foul of the law? Some people call this traveller’s French, which makes it sound a lot easier than it actually is. Being able to pull this off requires a level of proficiency that doesn’t usually come from a quick read of your guidebook on the plane on the way over. Confidently navigating these situations demands not only linguistic skill, but some cultural savvy as well, and this usually only comes after you’ve been at your French for a while. So if you’re able to do this, chapeau* ! You’ve just moved up another rung on the language learning ladder.

Could you have an argument in French?

This is the rung that brought me undone when I was living in Paris. I won’t go into the gory details, but it involved the Musée d’Orsay, my tendency to procrastinate and some missing headphones. For the record, it also involved a gross miscarriage of justice*, but let’s move on.

Not being able to defend myself articulately in French when I felt I was being wronged was a low point in my French learning. I knew that if I broke into English, my French interlocutrice* would have ‘won’, so I continued on in my strangled and mangled French until it became clear to me that my only choice was to walk away. So I did, and managed to keep it together until I got home, but the minute my apartment door clicked shut, I burst into tears of frustration and humiliation. I can still feel it as it write this. Not the best day for my French, je t’assure*.

A former student of mine had the exact opposite experience though, when her car hire fell through on her first day in France. She found herself on the phone, arguing with the Hertz representative and was absolutely gobsmacked when all the words she wanted to say came streaming out of her mouth in the right order and with the perfect level of indignation. It was that day that she realised she’d reached a level of fluency she’d been aiming for. She now lives part-time in France and I can only imagine how incroyable* her French is these days. How about we take Karen’s experience as inspiration over mine?

Could you make and maintain a friendship with a French person?

Finally, the true hallmark of proficiency, making a French friend. What better way to exercise your French muscles but with deep conversations, shared experiences, and maybe even some inside jokes (tout en français*)?

As you know, I don’t consider myself perfectly fluent in French, but I have reached this level of proficiency in the last few years and it feels like the most incredible reward ever for all the hard work I’ve put in.

Don’t get me wrong, for the most part learning French has been an utter joy for me, but there have definitely been times (many, many times) where I’ve felt like I was stagnating, or worse, going backwards, and it was akin to hard labour. But from where I am now, and with the relationships I have with French people, I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat. Ten times over.

So, let’s be careful what we wish for. Being totally fluent in French would be wonderful, it’s hard to deny, but where would we be without the thrill of the pursuit? Bon courage, les Chouchous*! I know you can do it, just go one rung at a time.

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