Learning French — Help Required
My impression of the French
I’ve been taking French lessons at Alliance Française de Singapour for some time now and I have sadly not been making much progress. Maybe I’m just getting too old for it but this foreign language thing seems a lot harder than it used to be. Either that or I am getting lazier to study. There’s no way to tell.
Perhaps it’s because I am not actually wired to master a language through a structured curriculum. After all, I did learn Japanese (JLPT 1 certified) by watching anime — totally true story.
In order to attack this problem from a new direction, I’ve come up with a long-shot proposal that may just be crazy enough to work. I am offering “free” Japanese lessons to any interested French speaker (of sufficient proficiency) out there who shall in return give me — you guessed it — similarly “free” French lessons. I can start anywhere from Japanese basics to JLPT preparations. Side note: This proposal works a lot better if said French speaker resides in la République de Singapour.
So, French speakers out there (in Singapore?) looking to pick up the mystical Japanese language, do drop me an email… Please?
Other courses I can offer in exchange include: “Preparing for SAT” (2310 non-superscore), “How to write an A’ Level General Paper” (straight As) and “US university application for dummies” (my own Commonapp essay makes me cry).
August 2nd, 2009 at 8:02 pm
French is very hard to study at the beginning but when you have acquired the basic, it will be more easier… until you start the advanced grammar and conjugation which very hard because there are more exceptions than standard rules… :x
So… Bonne chance pour ta recherche d’un professeur de français (à Singapour) ~ ;)
August 2nd, 2009 at 9:20 pm
French… I wouldn’t consider as very difficult weren’t there such inhuman pronouncing rules. Mes copains de classe detestes ca langage, mais c’est parce que notre professeur est une bitch. The highest mark somebody can get when she’s teaching is a 3 (aka C). Nah, anyway, it’s irrelevant.
Good luck with your search!
August 2nd, 2009 at 10:48 pm
I had the misconception that French was easy to learn since its in alphabets :x
August 3rd, 2009 at 12:52 am
I don’t know what level you’re at, but if you can read at all, I recommend the Inspector Maigret mystery novels by Georges Simenon. They are short books in easy French, with good psychological mystery stories and give a feeling of Paris in the 1950s (I guess). And they’re just the kind of thing the Alliance Française might have around.
For an English-speaking person, French is a lot easier to learn than Japanese or Chinese. Even though the grammar and pronunciation are so different from English, English got a lot of its words from French in the first place, so that makes learning vocabulary much easier.
August 3rd, 2009 at 1:58 am
I took French from grade 4 all the way to grade 12, and I can’t write or speak better than a five-year-old despite getting As in the courses themselves. There are too many tenses, and my accent was horrible.
August 3rd, 2009 at 5:21 am
It’s not you, it’s French.
You already speak one of the most horrible, mangled, senseless languages on the planet (English)… why take on another one?
Japanese is easy. Sure, it has its fiddly bits, but it is a structured, agglutinative language. French is arbitrary and stupid, on the level that English is (except with regular, though phonetically borked, spelling).
Don’t even get me started on Portuguese.
August 3rd, 2009 at 5:46 am
I’d definitely trade Japanese lessons for French lessons. Too bad I’m not in Singapore. T_T Francais, c’est facile a apprendre! (ignore all the accents I left out, I know.)
I have some comprehension of the French language and trust me, it’s not you, it’s Alliance Francaise. They managed to screw my head up once I entered classes with them. I grew to hate French. But hey, after 6 months of French immersion school, I managed to slack off all the way until Grade 12 French and still ace it! It has its similarities with Japanese, really.
J’espere que tu trouves un bon professeur de cette langue! ^_^
August 3rd, 2009 at 5:53 am
Bonne chance dans ta recherche !
August 3rd, 2009 at 7:06 am
Hey, maybe you should stick to the tried and true method…
…and start picking up some French anime dubs.
August 3rd, 2009 at 8:34 am
I agree with 0rion – I did 4 years of French during secondary school, and never managed to become fluent. On the other hand, a couple of my friends in the same course who were watching French movies purchased off Amazon managed to ace the class – they ended up with a higher level of fluency than the teachers at the MOELC.
To summarize, “Immersion for the win!”
Bonne chance ma petite chat. Tu est une fenêtre.
August 3rd, 2009 at 8:58 am
Good luck, French is difficult to handle perfectly, but you should be able to understand (or be understood) easier than with Japanese, I guess.
ZmmCool is right with exceptions… even in France many people make mistakes.
TJ is right too with tenses, take a look at this example with “to walk” http://www.la-conjugaison.fr/du/verbe/marcher.php
And I won’t blame Seinime for accents, even I often ignore ‘em
Indeed you can pick up some French anime dubs, but try to find the good teams, it’s often poorly written…
And rather than animes, It would be better to find French shows with subtitles to start. But I hate most of French TV programs, the only ones I love would be very bad for learning… or maybe Oban star racer if you’ve not already seen it.
—
Bonne chance, le français est difficile à maîtriser parfaitement, mais tu devrais pouvoir le comprendre (ou te faire comprendre) plus facilement qu’avec le japonais je pense.
ZmmCool a raison sur les exceptions, même en France beaucoup de personnes font des erreurs.
TJ a aussi raison sur les temps, regarde cet exemple avec le verbe “marcher”.
Et je ne reprocherai pas à Seinime d’ignorer les accents, je le fais moi-même
En effet tu peux prendre quelques sous-titre français d’animes, mais essaye de trouver les bons, certains sont très mal écrits.
Et plutôt que des animes, il serait mieux de trouver des émissions françaises avec des sous-titres pour commencer. Mais je déteste la plupart des émissions françaises, et les seules que j’apprécie ne seraient pas bonnes pour apprendre… ou peut-être Oban Star racer si tu ne l’as pas encore vue.
PS : Firefox found 2 spelling mistakes in my french part… and none in the english one (and I’m French)
August 3rd, 2009 at 10:25 am
You mean you picked up your Japanese vocabulary from Anime and Eroge… Lots of blogs seem to say they learn Japanese just from watching shows but I think that’s half true.
Anyway, half fun learning French. Then you’ll have two Asian languages in your pocket and two European =P
August 3rd, 2009 at 11:44 am
Bonne chance, brave fou!
Premièrement, apprends les jurons!
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August 3rd, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Oh my god. Good luck. I’d NEVER learn French unless i’m forced to…
Had to learn in for 4 years in school and god yes, i’d much rather learn kanji than that.
August 3rd, 2009 at 10:29 pm
You need to start getting addicted to French movies lol.
August 3rd, 2009 at 10:41 pm
Straight As for A level?! Help meee
August 4th, 2009 at 11:23 pm
hashi:
I actually picked up the French version of Murakami’s Au sud de la frontière, à l’ouest du soleil, but it’s too hard for me. I don’t think I’m at that stage yet.
Kyuusai:
Haha. For some reason I actually find French rather sensible except for the gender part.
Seinime:
Yes I’m starting to question their teaching style too.
0rion:
I am seriously considering that. Well, French movies at least. Not sure if I can stomach anime dubs.
Xcomp:
It is indeed half truth. Of course, many people also have varying definitions of what “learning Japanese” means. Haha.
SM:
Read the politics section of Digg.com everyday. True story.
August 5th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Hello DarkMirage
Please, let me know if you accept some recommendations of french movies and books to improve your learning.
would be pleased to advise you
August 6th, 2009 at 3:19 am
I learned English and a German from watching cartoons as a kid. Totally flunked French come college. I can only conclude that French is what in professional terms is called a Shitty Language.
August 6th, 2009 at 4:35 am
I had to learn French while I learned English. My approach was learning the basics (conjugations and stuff), once that’s done practice by reading children’s books. You familiarize yourself with the grammar and develop your vocab then. Well, I managed to do decent using that method, but I dropped it the first chance I got.
August 6th, 2009 at 11:03 am
Hmm… French, I have such horrible memories of learning that language.
I learned it to near fluency and sadly I can still have a decent conversation.
The worst part is that French being my second language messed up English, my first language. Stupid Canadian immersion program teaches you all the necessary schooling (Math, Science, etc) in French from the time you’re about 6 and then suddenly you have to know everything in perfect English when you are 12.
Ah oui, vous pouvez vous sentir à quel point fort de mon amour pour la langue française est, ne peux pas vous?
August 6th, 2009 at 11:49 am
To be honest IMO it’s alliance francaise. Now I haven’t taken classes there personally, this is just my impression of alliance francaise. The classes there are quite slow, and it would seem that slow classes would be a sure killer for someone of your track record.
IMO learning french was a total waste of my time. There’s hardly any exposure to it in singapore, aside from the Boisson au Soja etc that you get on packet drinks. And the worst case is, as so many people above have commented, it messes up your english.
However if you’re still keen then I can only suggest that you keep on it. http://www.viedemerde.fr (my personal favourite) is an excellent website, I only wish I had it when I was learning french. Anyway my advice would be to do what you did for japanese, just expose yourself to a lot of french. Movies, films, songs, the like.
Good luck
August 9th, 2009 at 10:41 am
What do you plan to do with French primarily?
If your main goal is reading, try to borrow this book called “French for Reading” at NLB, it moves fairly quickly. You’ll be reading simple (but authentic) science articles for the first few chapters and move on to unadulterated literature by the end of the book, including Voltaire, Baudelaire and Pascal. It’s out of print, so you might want to photocopy it for your personal use.
There’s also this series called “French in Action” which uses the direct method (completely in French) from the first lesson to the last. There are torrents available.
For finding native speakers, you might want to try http://www.mylanguageexchange.com/. Personally, the Japanese speakers there have never replied favourably to me (either they ignore me or they are female and don’t feel safe) but I dunno about the French people.
August 9th, 2009 at 11:02 am
Oh and for literature in easy French, L’Étranger by Albert Camus is great.
August 10th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
Hi darkmirage
Studied french till JC1. took french h1 mais helas je ne peux pas vous aider cos i got “C” or sth. Ah but mon professeur francais said the same thing to watch anime in French sub/dub! SERIOUSLY.
never managed to do that though… mainly cos its too gross! secondary reason is that i n’ai jamais trouve much of this kind of stuff.
oh btw im ur junior! haha ;)
August 11th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Perhaps this Wikipedia article will be useful to you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_language_acquisition
August 25th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
ehm, J’aime le chicken?
September 19th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
mmm Moi, Je pense que le probleme avec le Francais ( exusez moi j’ai n’avez pas la cedille ici) est la grammaire, et le sense de ca que vouz ecrivez, que vouz parlez, c’est tres difficile .
Well, at least that’s what i think, i don’t have that big trouble with the pronunciation( Must be cause my primary language is Spanish), maybe the syntax’s, coherence of a sentence( therein lays the TRUE problem of French), I’m still studying it, but if i can be of any help, send me an e-mail. ciao
March 18th, 2010 at 7:19 am
you know, if you’re going to learn french (or any latin based language, for that matter) it’ll be helpful to pick up latin first…
latin is extremely easy to learn for english speakers, and it really helps with french, german, spanish and the like.