My French-Learning Experiences - Language Proficiency

by Laura K. Lawless, French Language Guide

I am not a native French speaker - I learned it as a second language. Maybe my experience will help you to determine your own fluency potential.
  

At what age did you begin to learn French? How long did you study? 

When I was about 10, I had a McDonald's calendar that explained how to say 1-10 in a different language every month. My older brother (my hero) was studying French in high school at the time, so I memorized the French 1-10. He then taught me to count to 20. My parents hired a high school French teacher to tutor me, but that only lasted for a few lessons (too expensive). 

My first real French class was when I was 13. I started studying as a freshman and continued all through high school and four years of college (in college, I often took two or three French classes per term). After college I spent six weeks studying French business and culture in Rouen - this was my first extended stay in a francophone country.

My first year of graduate school was in French translation and interpretation at MIIS, so it doesn't really count as a study of the language itself. I spent two months in Paris the summer after that, and then stopped going to school for two years. I then spent a year in a graduate program in French language and literature at SJSU. 

So all told I spent nine years formally studying French.
  

How much did you study per week, on average? 

During high school, 5 hours in class plus maybe 2 or 3 hours of homework. College: 5-10 hours in class plus 5 or 6 hours of homework.
  

At what point did you feel as though you were, perhaps, fluent in French? 

In Rouen (after 8 years of study), I literally felt my level of French increasing daily. I was able to communicate without stuttering, without searching for words or verb conjugations, and I could read a paper, watch movies, and chat with French people. I felt perfectly at ease speaking French. Unfortunately, when I returned to the US I started losing it again.
  

What was the hardest thing about learning French? 

For me the hardest thing is just stringing everything together: vocabulary surrounded by good grammar, getting the subjunctive in there when it needs to be, remember to throw "y," "en", "te," etc. in front of the conjugated verb. I guess you could call this the conversational aspect. Part of the reason this is hard for me is because I'm naturally shy, so I feel uncomfortable when people listen to me closely, and this is magnified when I'm speaking a foreign language.
  

If you could, what would you have done differently about learning French? 

I would have spent a year studying abroad in college. I don't know what happened - in high school I dreamed about studying abroad, but in college I somehow couldn't be bothered. One of my greatest regrets in life.

I would also study more, make vocabulary lists with articles so that I'd learn the gender, and take a phonetics class sooner. (I didn't take a phonetics class until I was in grad school, and there was a lot about French pronunciation that I hadn't known. For example, I didn't know that there are two different o sounds [note vs rose], nor about enchaînement. By the time I learned these things, my French pronunciation was somewhat fixed.)
  

Continue reading about fluency...

Discuss in my forum

• french proficiency
• language