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French Learning Path

#french #writing/guide

My French is entirely self-taught, which is why my learning path is rather non-linear. I don’t know if I did it efficiently but I employed a decentralised approach whereby I learn whatever material I deem relevant and make connection to my existing knowledge later. Sometimes aimless learning can be enjoyable. Anyhow, notes that I take along the way are indexed in French MOC.

In case anyone finds this useful, I will do a retrospective outline of my French learning path. Please note that this is not yet a comprehensive path. Caveat: this looks rather idealised because it is :P; prepare to bump into all sorts of trouble.

  1. Use Duolingo until level 2 checkpoint.
  2. Learn French API and get French pronunciations almost perfect. Try training on minimal pairs. The |ʁ| sound took quite a while for me.
  3. Use Anki to memorise 2000 most frequent French words; you can find frequency lists by googling or looking for a shared Anki deck.
  4. I made it halfway through Easy French Step-by-Step1 but didn’t find it useful.
  5. Try out audio programmes for continue learning without looking at the screen. Pimsleur is a good one that has spaced repetition built in. Coffee Break French is more fun to listen to (and it’s free).
  6. Set the system display language to French.
  7. Continue using Duolingo, but this can result in a learning plateau when used alone as Duolingo doesn’t do a good job teaching grammar and things more useful than describing how to make pureed vegetables. Therefore keep using Duolingo only as long as you find it effective and enjoyable.
  8. Start working through Grammaire progressive du français2. Start with the intermediate level worked for me. This book is entirely in French but it is indeed progressive.
  9. When anything comes up, just google it. There are tons of free French resources out there, but they are most likely discrete.
  10. Expand vocabulary to 5000.
  11. Once the point of comfortable French reading is reached, start getting inputs.
    • I mainly use Learning With Text (which isn’t the easiest to use) to read and listen to French content and learn vocabulary from text.
    • Possible input material can by anything in French that you find interesting. Mine (type + recommendations) includes but is not limited to (still, it is best to find material on your own):
    • Alternatives include LingQ, FLTR, and LingL (or really just a pencil and a dictionary)
    • Grammar should become increasingly intuitive as you are constantly exposed to large amount of input (this is still a theory to be tested)
    • One should probably aim for accumulating 20,000 words using this approach (that’s without lemmatisation, of course)
  12. If bold enough, start doing everything in French. This means:
    • Play video games in French - you’re more likely to learn something that’s fun
    • Take MOOC courses in French - they usually have transcripts available so the text could be another resource for studying
    • Join communities in French - like Discord groups or things like that where communicating in French becomes necessary

  1. Rochester, Myrna Bell. Easy French Step-by-Step: Master High-Frequency Grammar for French Proficiency—Fast! McGraw-Hill, 2009. ↩︎

  2. Grégoire, Maïa. Grammaire progressive du français - Nouvelle edition: Livre intermediaire. LP, 2018. ↩︎

  3. Be careful that verbs in a novel can be very confusing if you are not familiar with all the tenses. ↩︎

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