Welcome to the French in Bordeaux website! We are here today to talk about “myths and realities about the learning process of the French language”. Because yes, I am sure that everyone is having thoughts about learning a new language and especially French but I am telling you that after reading this article you will directly want to start learning French.
First of all, French is a roman language so it has common roots with Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian so if you already know these languages it’s gonna be easy because you can find similarities.Myths and realities about the learning process
I think when you want to learn French you need to work, at the same time, on oral and writing. It can seem obvious when you learn a language but it is really important with French because, as I say to all of my students, French is a written language. It has all of these particularities that you can notice when you write but they kind of disappear when you read and speak. Indeed, one sound can be written in so many ways. But that is the richness of this language! It is easy though, the more you practice and learn, the more it is easy. Because when you know the pronunciation of the sounds, then it’s all the same.
Then, you may think we have a lot of letters in the words but we actually don’t pronounce a lot of them, which is true, but one rule that can help you is that most of the time (because we always have exceptions because of words that come from other languages) we do not pronounce the consonants at the end of a word. We only pronounce it if there’s an “-e” after the consonant. Example : petit (we do not pronounce the last “t”) # petite (we do pronounce the “t” thanks to the “e”).
One other myth that people can think of is that learning on your own is better because you can follow your own rhythm and learn when and how you want, which can be true but I feel like learning with other people is really helping because you can obviously speak with other people and so hear different accents and ways of speaking. This can help a lot if you are used to learning on your own and that you don’t really get the chance to speak the language that you are learning with other people. It is also a good thing because during the lessons you will get used to hearing your teacher’s accent and so it is good to be able to speak with other people. And following group lessons for French is good because you can learn a lot of new words, expressions and share experiences which is really important.
I hope now you’re not scared to learn French, this is a really nice language that has a lot of nuances and exceptions but I think that this is the beauty of this language!