Are there good tools for learning to speak French?

Question

I'm a newcomer to France, I've have never had a formal education in French at school (being raised in South Africa), and i'm really trying to improve my French by:

• Taking lessons once a week,
• Reading comics (Tintin, Blake et Mortimer),
• Reading books (currently Harry Potter but started with books for small children) every day,
• Listening to Podcasts (Learn French by Podcast, Daily French Pod) while travelling,
• Watching 30 minutes of French TV a day.

Despite this, i think i've hit a plateau and i'm not really improving any more. I still struggle to understand news-readers, people on the phone, etc. One-on-one in person is best, but still not very good.

My question is what have you found to be the best resource (of any nature) for learning to speak French? I work from home so i get very few opportunities to actually speak to people - which i think would be the best tool!

PS. I do plan to ask more questions in French but this one particularly aimed at other Anglophones! :) PPS. This is probably better as a Community Wiki? SE is telling me this will likely be closed as it is subjective (which it is) but any answers would still be very useful to me and hopefully others.

Thanks!

Answer 1

For understanding I suggest (besides the obvious time spent listening) to listen specifically to children's audio books and to "bad" movies.

The reason is that in these settings there are over-emphasized phrases that are "over-pronounced" and this is one of the ways to actually get your auditory brain to decide what kind of new sounds are important before putting in dumb exercise time.

For speaking nothing really replaces speaking which is conspicuously absent from your list. Do you have the opportunity to set up skype tandem sessions with someone who wants to learn your language in turn?

Another thing that somewhat helps with speaking is to form lots of sentences in your head. For example, in the metro, I would look at the ads and speak any number I saw in French in my head, and my number-to-French conversion has indeed become automatic very quickly. Or I play shopping conversations in my head while going to the shop.

Answer 2

http://www.memrise.com/ has a French flashcard system for English speakers. I haven't tried the French version, but I find the Mandarin version very good, so I expect the same for French.

Answer 3

I'd strongly suggest finding a local group that speaks French socially, and going along!

Meetup.com is a good way to do this, but it isn't the only way to find groups. (It just so happens to be very strong on French language groups near where I live, which is why I know about it).

Once you've located a nearby group that welcomes people at your level, go along and practice. I find it's a very different feeling talking during a weekly class, more relaxed and often with a wider variety of discussions on things that interest you. It's a great way to pick up vocab and confidence, for both speaking and listening. The only possible downside is that people are usually fairly forgiving of small errors at that sort of event, so you'll want to still do some classes so you've got a teacher to pick up your mistakes!

Answer 4

In big cities in France, you can take lessons at L'Alliance française. Many foreigner friends of mine found that this is a great experience, not only because of the high quality of lessons but also because of the social events with all the students and french as the only common language.

Answer 5

Immersion helped my French extremely and attempting to be friends with French. Don't be shy, attempt to talk to everyone.

Also, try to learn the tenses for some important verbs.

ex. to go aller irai (future, je) je vais aller (near future) I'm going je suis allé (past tense) i went

Answer 6

This is maybe not a tool to begin with, but it helps a lot when it comes the time to write a sentence with maybe, some medium skills. When I'm writing a text in french, I usually use this online tool: http://bonpatron.com/en/. It is easy to use and gives you reason of why you made a mistake somewhere.

Although I speak French all day long, this tool always helps me with my errors: such as masculine and feminine, conjugation, punctuation, verbs. So I think it can help everyone when it comes the time to write something and understand why it should be written like this or like that.