Learning to speak french!
so.. I've decided to learn french. I've wanted to take it up for many years. I learned it in 4th grade (pretty much 8 years ago now!) And I could speak and have a simple conversation. Sadly, I've forgotten it all except how to count to 5. LOL.
I was wondering if anyone else had learned, and has tips on learning. I learned german in 9th grade and totally flunked. (Partly because I never did the work or payed attention but it was also very hard) Sometimes I wonder if I would be able to learn a language, because I don't retain it very well....
My best friend is majoring in international business and is in her 3rd year of french, so I would be practicing with her and stuff.
Any one else learning/have learned/ or just speak it as your native tongue?
9 Comments • Newest first
@Alectric:
I am next semester.
Been studying French for 9 years now. I'm pretty good at it. Half of Belgium speaks French so it's a pretty big deal over here. If you don't have good knowledge of French, it can seriously affect your chances of getting a job.
Born french.
I do admit we have quite complex spelling rules, and accents.
Speak it with your native tongue and when you are good, try to go with an international pronunciation.Doing both at same time is hell.
I had the choice between learning French and Japanese - I took Japanese.
Also, I had a relief teacher that had taken both French and Japanese up to Year 13. She said that Japanese was so much easier (I would say this makes French a pretty hard language to grasp) and French has some complex sentence formations.
I don't get how it is much different from Japanese considering, for Japanese, you need to learn formal, informal, plain past, plain neg, plain past neg, etc...
From learning French for half a year, all I remember is: Un, Du, Twa (Not written correctly, of course) and J'mapelle Christopher. I never caught onto French and it wasn't incredibly interesting for me (maybe it was because in Japanese I was learning different alphabets).
@Piroku: I know what you mean - same stuff for Japanese. I watch a few youtube videoes and before I can translate what they are saying, they've already finished speaking :O
[quote=PhoenixShots]french was pretty easy (4 years in Highschool). Speaking it is straight forward but writing becomes a bit tougher, especially when you get into the subjunctive mood[/quote]
Spelling really is very tough. Considering you can have a word with 6 letters and it will only have one sound to it. LOL, how strange right?
It's nice that the sentence structure isn't much different than english, from what I can tell.
[quote=Permafrost]I took French for 3 years in high school. Don't remember too much of it. I'd rather learn German, but they didn't have that.[/quote]
German was a really good language. I enjoyed it, but at the time school was the last thing on my mind.
I think if you want to take it, you really should! It was a very fun language if I do say so.
I took French for 3 years in high school. Don't remember too much of it. I'd rather learn German, but they didn't have that.
All I know about French is that they have complex spelling rules.