subject: Studying the French Language Effectively [print this page] Learning a new language is never easyLearning a new language is never easy. Fluency can take years to develop and, generally, you have to speak the language quite a bit before you're anything even approaching fluent. You can speed up the learning process a bit by investing your study time in activities that are more effective. One of the most difficult things about learning the French language is the fact that the spelling of a word oftentimes only slightly resembles the way that the word is pronounced. This can be mastered, but you have to listen before you'll get it to any useful extent.
If you think about how children learn their native tongue, it doesn't involve reading and writing until they've got the basics down. It's easier to understand how letters represent a word you know how to say than it is to look at an unknown word on a page and try to pronounce it. One of the pitfalls you may encounter when you try to learn French, in fact, has to do with the very nature of the alphabet. If you're reading a French word and sounding out the letters to English conventions, you're really not learning anything at all.
To speak French, you have to hear French spoken. The letters on a page are all subject to different rules and conventions than what you're used to. For example, very few consonants at the end of French words are actually spoken. This is one of the most problematic aspects of learning this language off the page. Consider, for example, that "aux" is pronounced nearly the same as "ox" in English but is entirely different in French, sounding similar to the letter "o" as it is spoken in English. Even describing the sound is hard. To really learn it, you have to hear it.
Online French classes can be helpful, but remember that the Internet is mostly a written medium. Audio classes are still preferable. If you ask immigrants from other countries how they learn English, many of them will tell you that they learned a lot from television and radio. Listening to French music and spoken French are great ways to learn this language, as well. When you pronounce the word and know it already, you'll find that learning to read it is much easier. What held true in childhood is still true in adulthood, in this regard.
