If you plan to learn French, set up a strategy!

French is not that hard. What’s actually hard is to stick to a strategy, to go further than the beginner level. Learning French is not a matter of money. My grand-uncle learned several languages when the internet didn’t exist and TV was rare. He used to order expensive methods on tapes or books from abroad waiting for weeks to get them. Now we just click on a button and it’s free most of the case. The abundance of methods didn’t solve anything.

Keeping studying French like it’s a language won’t change anything. We need to think about it without emotion and analyze: French is not a language. It’s something you want to enter in your brain, but even more. French is something you should want to be. Remember this fact about the learning process. You must be French to become French, that’s the key. In order to achieve this goal, you can handle two styles of studying.

The first one is quantity.

You love French movies, you love French songs so much that you can spend several hours and sometimes the whole day watching movies and listening songs. You like French novels or you read the news in French and you don’t really look for each word in the dictionary. You just enjoy it. It’s called passive learning. It’s a good technique that I like but not efficient enough to stay motivated (unless you don’t have a specific goal, then contact me I’ll give you one!).

The second one is quality.

You take one resource and look up every word, every subtle nuance until you get the core of the message. You will be able to memorize also this resource. It can be a text, an audio, a short video. Anything is good. It can be a verb drill, why not. Master a piece of French. Be fluent with just a small piece! In this case, you need more attention and your motivation must be stronger (you can ask a tomato to help if necessary).

Quality or quantity, what to do then?

These are not styles that you have to choose or not but you must use them together. Quantity will eventually lead to quality. You can use the same resource for the two styles of course. It’s just that your mind needs to be clear on what to do. That’s a very important thing. Once you are clear in your mind you can workout like a pro! Finally, if you have a habit it’s good to change it. Go back and forth with quality or quantity and find the good balance that works for you!