Tips for Learning French on Your Own
This article is for everyone interested in French. An amazing, beautiful language is very demanding of those who learn it. We want to help you. Beginner or advanced, here you will find tips on how to master French. Great opportunity!
Features of the French language
Both – a lot of questions: There are only two genders in French: male and female. This is a plus because you don’t need to remember the middle one either. The disadvantage is that all adjectives, numerals, pronouns, verbs, and verb forms are consistent in gender and number. At the same time, the gender of a noun cannot be determined without an article.
These are staggering numbers: The numbering system in French is different. In Russian or English, we are used to using suffixes. For example, four is fourteen, and four is fourteen. Not so in French. The numbers following 16 are made up of 10 plus another number. The same thing happens with integers. It takes some time to adjust to such a system and pronounce large numbers on the fly.
The French pronunciation adds to its allure. Nasal vowels graduated r’s, and consonant-vowel combinations all make up the beauty of de la langue française. Some even joke that in French, pronunciation is more important than meaning. At the same time, you’ll hear annoying remarks from language learners about how badly spoken French handles foreign words.
Merge: Another feature of French pronunciation is called “connection. This is the phonetic link between consecutive words. It doesn’t just happen, it happens according to the rules. If one word ends with a consonant and the next word begins with a vowel or dumb h, they are linked and read as one word. Six heures, for example, sounds like one [sis: r], whereas six hommes—[sism].
How to learn French on your own?
French is not the hardest language. Completely self-taught, Especially if you already speak English or Italian. For the latter, they share Latin roots, while the former has many words borrowed from French. In this section, we’ll give you some tips on how to learn good French.
Begin with your voice. Yes, just like at school. We don’t like such methods ourselves, but especially in French, they work best. In it, you first need to understand the reading rules. Understand why beaucoup is pronounced [boku] and qu’est-cequeça is pronounced [keskösa]. Only then can you start learning French vocabulary. If you start learning words by ear right away, you may run into a problem: it’s hard to correlate pronunciation with spelling. Who would guess from scratch that [om] is homme?
Have fun learning. The main secret to learning any language is to learn it the way you like it. Tired of rote grammar? Throw away that unfortunate textbook and do something fun. Watch French TV series, listen to and memorize songs, and read books or comics. If you’re learning the language at all, you won’t be able to get rid of the grammatical structures, and Subjonctif will overtake you. But after all, it can be disassembled into delightful examples.
Don’t be afraid of mistakes. It is impossible to learn a language well without practice so online French classes for beginners are also available. Feel free to mispronounce words. No matter what the French joke is, no one will turn you away for mispronunciation. They are likely to praise everyone who dares to learn their great and beautiful language.
Practice every day. Learning a foreign language is 20% understanding of grammatical concepts and 80% practice. At least an hour a day speaking French. It can be 30 minutes or 15 minutes. The most important thing is not to forget it. It’s enough to listen to a recording on the way home or say a recently learned phrase aloud.
