subject: Studying the French Language through Art [print this page] One of the most convenient and pleasant ways to learn to speak French is through music and storytelling. While many people jump to reading novels, that method has serious shortcomings. One of the worst is that, if you have no real grasp of the written language, you'll envision characters pronouncing words completely incorrectly and you'll inherit those bad habits. You may also find that the frustration of looking at dense pages of words you don't understand proves to be too much and that you give up too soon.
Learning French can be a lot of fun if you do it right. The easiest way to get the basics down is to listen to someone speaking French in a real setting. For example, in a story a character might go into a store. She would say simple things such as "Hello", "How much is this?" and "Thank you" and you'd understand what was going on, even if you didn't know the exact words she was saying. With time, you'll hear these common phrases more and more and begin to understand them. Understanding is the first part of becoming truly fluent.
The final stage of fluency, speaking, is something that is rushed in too many programs designed to teach language. French is a complex language and it takes a lot of time to even hear the subtle inflections that differentiate some words: voux and veux, for instance. When you hear them in context, however, it makes it much easier to understand the differences and to understand how they link up to the words before and after them. This is one of the most valuable parts of learning language by listening to stories and songs, as you learn how people really speak, not how their speech looks on paper.
You don't have to go back to college to learn to speak French. In fact, this language is so commonly-spoken that you can probably find friends to practice with most anywhere. You can also find programs that offer simple songs, interesting stories and good writing as a means for you to learn the language. When you're involved with the characters, you remember the scenes from the story and the language is another aspect of that scene. This makes it much easier to enjoy the experience of learning as, after all, you're engaging in art, and what's more French than that?
