If you’ve decided to learn French, here are a few tips to make the whole process much easier. These important tips can help make learning a lot more exciting and help you pick up the language much more quickly.

Whatever your reason for picking up the French language, there’s probably a certain level of intimidation that you feel. Many of the students we speak with feel that they are embarking on an impossible journey and that it will take them years to actually be able to speak a new language.

The good news is that this doesn’t have to be the case. While many courses and schools do still use outdated methods that make learning a new language seem a lot more like a chore, there are also some great self study courses out there. They use a wider variety of methods, developed by psychologists, to help you reduce the time and effort it takes to learn a new language.

While you might be thinking about enrolling in a course at a school or hiring a tutor, remember that these might not give you the kinds of results you want. That’s because most classes have too much of a focus on reading and writing, and not enough on speaking.

Since many students are in class to learn to speak French, this can be pretty frustrating. The best bet is finding a self study program that’ll allow you to learn on your own and help you become fluent in conversational French.

Here are a few tips to make your learning experience even better.

1) Remember what your mother said and be sure to listen!

It’s amazing hoy much information you can pick up just by listening to other languages. You won’t necessarily understand all that’s being said, but listening to others talk in French allows you to pick up the flow of speech, new words, and the basic language structure.

Watching French movies with subtitles in English is another smart idea. This method allows you to listen to the language while reading the meaning, and eventually absorb the French words.

In fact, one student once downloaded an entire season of a television series in French. She watched them all, and by the end had improved her skills significantly. She even picked up some interesting nuances and had a good grasp of slang.

2) Don’t OVER-practice

You’ve probably been told that practice makes perfect. However, one of the big reasons that people give up learning French is because it turns into a boring chore.

You’ll need to vary how you practice, and make sure you do what’s needed to keep up your levels of motivation. It’s not a good idea to set a strict schedule to learn by unless that’s the way you learn best. Try to include a little French every day, in some form, instead.

This way you are engaging yourself in the language but you don’t feel restricted by any type of schedule.

3) Vary your practice and mix things up

Remember, you want to try to include French in you daily routine, but you don’t want to get bored by doing the same thing each day! Mix it up!

You could throw on a French TV or radio program or do a lesson from the course you decided to take part in. Maybe you have a friend that speaks French that you can converse with. Or while you are reading the newspaper, pick a couple of paragraphs and think to yourself how you might translate it into French.

There are many different ways to engage with this language.

This last point is a crucial step in truly learning the language. By varying the way you learn, you are using different parts of your brain which helps you not only learn faster, but retain it much more effectively as well.

This is a big reason for the recent success of some of the online study courses. They do a great job of providing a variety of learning material which keeps students interested while stimulated the brain in the “right way”.

Learning French shouldn’t feel like a job. If you do it correctly, it’ll be exciting and fun. Just find the right course, stick with it, and follow the above tips and you’ll be able to speak the language in no time!