Beginner

Are you a beginner – or do you feel like a beginner – when it comes to French?

Who are you?

Maybe you’re planning to travel to France soon and would like to be able to say a few things in French when you’re there.

Maybe you have a French partner and would like to communicate with them in their native language. And you want to interact with their family and friends too.

Maybe you have always wanted to learn French, but never got around to making the decision to just go for it. But now you feel that there is no time like the present. You might regret not having started five years or ten years ago, but don’t waste your energy on regrets. The best time to start is now.

Maybe you learned some French at school, but have been stuck at the Year 10/11/12 stage ever since, knowing a few words but unable to say anything useful, or unable to understand spoken French.

Maybe you have visited a French speaking country. Those experiences have sparked an interest in being able to return one day with a better French language ability, along with the capacity to interact with the locals in a more natural way.

Maybe you are planning to live in France as a young person on a working holiday, as a early to mid career professional or as a retiree. Even if your job is conducted in English, your experience of France will be so much better if you can speak and understand the language.

What you will learn

If you start one on one French lessons with Fast French, you will learn useful vocabulary right from the start. Some of this vocabulary will be brand new, while other words will be familiar to you from what you already know of English. This will mean you have less work to do to remember these “new” French words. After all, if a French word is virtually identical to an English word you already know, how hard can it be to remember it?

You’ll learn useful phrases, laying the groundwork for a linguistic technique known as “chunking,” which will how you to keep most of a phrase, but replace one or two words at a time to substantially change its meaning and usefulness.

You’ll learn via a process of listening and talking. You’ll receive instructions in English and will give answers in French. You will be able to interrupt and ask questions of your tutor at any time.

You’ll feel confident and empowered after your first lesson. No delayed gratification. No memorising irrelevant vocabulary lists about blackboards, desks, pupils and exercise books. You will experience freedom to make mistakes without being judged for them. That’s what every French beginner deserves. That’s what every French beginner gets at Fast French.

Why apps don’t work

Are you a Duolingo fan? Great! You have probably already learned some useful words in French. So, how’s your pronunciation? Not so great? Do you understand any of the rules underlying French pronunciation? Do you know why one construction is grammatically correct and another isn’t? Both of these problems are typical of app learners. Despite more recent attempts of apps to roughly check the user’s pronunciation, they are pretty terrible at this job. And you can spend months or years in an app without learning basic French grammar principles. Have you had any interesting conversations in French with your app? No? Why not? Then are you really learning French?

An app like Duolingo is a great addition to your language learning, but it won’t replace accurate human feedback. It won’t be able to answer questions based on your own misunderstandings of French (or English). It won’t have the ability to have a human conversation with you in French.

Apps are great, but they are optional extras that will enhance your French learning. They will keep you busy when you have nothing else to do. For the real experience of learning French, you need a live human to learn from, not a machine.

Why classrooms don’t work

You might think that the one-on-one tutoring that Fast French offers might not be as good as classroom learning. But classroom learning is mainly good for making friends with people with a shared interest in French. It’s especially popular among retirees seeking to meet other retirees. But classroom methods are not very effective for learning French.

If you do a one hour lesson with Fast French, you will be speaking French for 20% to 50% of the time. That is between 12 and 30 minutes of YOU speaking French.

If you do a typical one hour French class (eg Alliance Française, CAE, another language school, etc) with 15 students (including you), the teacher will probably speak for at least half (30 minutes) of the class. The remaining 30 minutes will be divided among the 15 students in the class. 30 divided by 15 equals TWO minutes per student of talking French. You’re paying all that money to speak French for TWO minutes?! And that’s assuming that one of the students isn’t a pushy personality who likes to dominate conversation at the expense of the other students. You might end up speaking ZERO French during the entire one hour class. Why spend money for classroom-style teaching if you don’t get to speak any French?

But that will never happen with Fast French. You must speak French when you do an individual session with Fast French. You cannot avoid it. Your brain and your mouth might be exhausted at the end (it’s a good way to burn calories!), but you will have succeeded in speaking French. You will experience success right from the start.

Take action now. Book your first lesson!