How Can You Learn French As An Adult?

Learning French as an adult is totally possible, but how exactly do you go about it?

In this article I will go through some of the basic principles you need to have in place. If you can get these right, your French learning experience will go pretty smoothly and you should see steady progress.

A lot of people fail at learning French as they get this stuff wrong.  What I talk about here isn’t difficult, you can do it.

(You can read more about – Can You Learn French As An Adult?)

It Takes Time And Effort To Learn French

Probably the biggest thing you need to learn French is time and effort. Without these you will get nowhere.

We don’t live in the matrix, we can’t just download the whole French language into our brains in a few seconds. We have to manually put it in there, piece by piece, which takes a long time and lot of effort.

Basically what I am saying is, it doesn’t matter who you are, if you put the work in, you will learn French.

If you know it’s going to take a long time and a lot of effort, you can prepare yourself mentally for the challenge. You can’t get around this, there is no shortcut, but it will be worth it. 

You Need Motivation To Learn French

As I’ve just said, it takes time and effort to learn French, so if you are going to do something so challenging then you better have some motivation to do it. 

You need a good reason for why you want to actually do this. It’s easy to give up on something like French and many people do, but if you have a strong enough reason you will stick with it.

I would say that motivation is not always needed and you can get by with just pure discipline. However, this is quite rare as not many people are going to sit and learn French every day simply because they have told themselves this is what they are doing.

Most of us will need a little more motivation in the form of a strong reason to keep us going.

You Will Need A Plan

When it comes to learning anything, especially French, you need a plan. The French language is huge and you really need some direction with what you are doing or you are going to get nowhere.

You can make you own plan, get a French tutor or even join a course. It doesn’t really matter, just so long as you know what you are doing.

Having a plan will allow you to study properly and use your time wisely. I’ve already said learning French is a long process and you really do not want to be wasting your time by being ineffective.

A plan will help keep your progress moving in the right direction at the right speed.

You Have To Learn French Grammar 

Unfortunately it is unavoidable. You will need to tackle French grammar. You can take things slow and gentle, but you still need to end up with a good basic grasp of the grammar.

Grammar is the frame work to how the language is put together so if you want to get good at French you will need to know how to use it properly. I know it’s boring, but it is worth the effort.   

Learn As Much French Vocabulary As You Can

Vocabulary is also another huge section of French that you need to dig into to get good at the language.

The more vocabulary you learn about, the more you can talk about. You really can’t learn a language without it. There are a number of ways to go about it this, from using anki to immersion, but regardless, you need to learn the words.

Luckily a lot of French words are very similar to English, which can really help your comprehension levels without much effort.

(You can read more about – Using Anki To Learn French)

French Immersion Is Vital

Having a plan to make sure you learn the right things is only half the battle, you also need to spend a lot of time immersing in French.

You need to be surrounded by it and let it absorb in to you. If you see your lessons as your conscious effort, immersion is your subconscious effort.

Immersion may seem like a waste of time to some people, but it helps your subconscious make sense of things and start to piece everything together. Spending a lot of time with the language will expose you to the grammar and vocabulary you have learned, as well as introduce you to new ones too.

Immersion can be anything, reading, listening or watching shows. It doesn’t matter so long as you can comprehend the material it will help you massively and really speed up you learning and solidify what you know. Just do a lot of this and it will benefit you. It’s easy to squeeze a few hours of French TV or radio in your life and the benefits can be huge over the long term.

Learning a language through lessons will only get you so far, you really need immersion to get everything to click.

Consistency Will Help You Learn French

Everything I’ve talked about so far is how you are going to learn French. However, you need to do this consistently.

Learning French every now and again or when you feel like it is not going to get you anywhere. It’s like anything in life, you need to be consistent. If you can put the effort into learning French regularly, it will come. You will learn the language if you sit down and focus on it every day.

You need to make your French study a habit or even a part of your life. The sooner you live with French in your life, the sooner your life will be French.

Repetition Is How You Learn French

The last piece of the puzzle of to how to learn French is to focus on repetition. If you are doing a lot of immersion and doing this consistently, then the repetition will happen naturally.

You are going to see the same words over and over again. They may seem like a waste of time or boring, but it’s not. This is training your brain to understand these French words automatically and if you keep doing this over and over again, you will not need to think about these words. They will just be like any other English words already in your brain.

This is usually the step that most people don’t do. Then they struggle to remember a word or feel like they really need to strain their brain to understand it. Simply repetition over time is going to sort that problem out and make French more automatic for you.    

Conclusion

If you put all the aspects I have talked about above into action you will learn French. Get a reason to learn French, get a plan, then just knuckle down and learn the grammar and vocabulary. Then do as much immersion in the language as possible and if you do this for long enough and consistently enough, you will learn French.

Everything I’ve mentioned here is not hard. It’s just a lot of small steps over and over again until you are there. You can do it.

(If you are wanting to learn French you can check out my unofficial French Course and get a grasp of the basic structure of the language)