Problems With Learning French Fast

One of the most common, and understandable, problems that people have when they try to learn French fast is confusion. The confusion usually stems from courses that try to teach an entire language as a package. This means lumping listening, speaking, reading and writing into one course. This can be done, but when it's done all at once the results are usually not impressive.


Reading and writing are advanced language skills. When your goal is to learn French fast, they present more of a barrier to that goal than anything else. This is because French and English have very different rules where writing is concerned. Though their alphabets look and sound similar, in the majority of cases, the languages actually do have separate alphabets; they just use many of the same characters. This means that reading a word in French when you're an English speaker will almost always lead you to think the word is pronounced much differently than is actually the case.

To learn French fast, pare down the learning experience to the essentials. For beginner students, the most important skills are speaking and listening. These are the first skills you learn as a child, long before you learn to read and write, and this progression from speaking and listening to reading and writing is a natural one. When language courses attempt to make it all into the same experience, they usually do far more harm than good to the students using those courses.

Speaking, of course, is very difficult. The very different pronunciation of words in French makes it hard to learn French fast without a lot of setbacks and reviews. However, singing can help you to overcome this barrier. Though it's not often incorporated into language courses, singing is a very important and useful tool in the quest for fluency.

When you sing, you're forced to use language in a way that doesn't match up with its everyday usages. For example, you have to exaggerate the pronunciation of words to sing them correctly. This can help you by providing a way to correct your poor pronunciation skills. It can also shed light on how you're incorrectly pronouncing a word when you're not sure yourself.

Remember that music is a powerful tool for education. If you find yourself struggling with pronunciation, memorization and other language learning tasks, consider materials that use music to help you learn.

Dr. Dennis Dunham has over 25 years in international education experience and is a co-creator of LanguageandLyrics.com, a website designed to help you learn French the right way. If you've tried every language product out there and haven't made progress, visit LanguageandLyrics.com to see how learning French can be easy and fun.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dr._Dennis_Dunham