The way I ended up going about it may not be the best for everyone, but it helped me go from knowing absolutely nothing in French to studying A2 grammar in about 6 months! My method is not considered perfect in any way, but I wanted to share how I approached my French language learning journey and what I used to get started!
Before we get into the main content of today's post, I wanted to share a FREE printable I thought might be fitting for today's post. I designed a daily schedule printable that may be useful for anyone looking to make an organized to-do each day while studying (or anything else)!
You can find the download link right here, or by clicking the photo! My comments are up and working again (thank you to my amazing blog theme creator Gabriela from LovelogicDesign on Etsy) so please let me know if you like this kind of instructional type content :)!
Getting Started
First, let's talk about the basics. I found a blank notebook that I had laying around the house and dedicated it solely to my French notes. I think having a specific notebook solely for one subject is super helpful for keeping me motivated, I can't tell you why, but it just works!
I'm going to include some photos of my first completed French learning notebook (I'm currently more than halfway through my second one!) and put them below. It's important to keep in mind that everyone starts somewhere, so though my notes look cute and somewhat embarrassing to me now, I try to remember that things seeming "easy" is evidence that I've mastered that material.
The most important thing is making sure you're training all your skills, no matter what language you're learning. I tried to diversify how I studied so I could have a diverse routine and exercise each skill.
Textbook
The first textbook I used was The FSI Metropolitan French FAST book. I picked this one because it was free, seemed really comprehensive, and also included audio I could listen to. It took me about 3-4 months to get through this entire textbook, but keep in mind I was studying 2 to 4 hours a day.
I strongly recommend doing the exercises included in each chapter and trying to read the dialogue out loud while listening to the audio. You can listen and try to "shadow" the speaker shortly after they speak, I found this helped a lot when I was trying to figure out how to pronounce things. Sometimes I would listen and read, then try to read it on my own, then try reading it while shadowing.
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| Day 1 of Starting A2 which was the end of the notebook :) |
I highly recommend looking at this website LiveLingua and browsing through the many free textbooks they offer. Depending on what you're learning French for, one may be better suited for you than another.
Media
I wanted to make sure I was training my listening comprehension, and I found an amazing show on Youtube called Lou! that became my main listening practice. You can find their full Youtube channel linked here.
The amazing thing about Lou! is that it has French subtitles. I liked to watch the show with the subtitles on and take note of words I didn't know, then ask Guillaume about them. Sometimes I even watched the episode over again to see if I better understood it after looking up all the words. I've seen episode 37 more than 3 times since I had to look up so many words!
If you're interested, take a look at episode 1 and let me know what you think!
No language learning post is ever complete without talking about Peppa Pig, so here is a Peppa Pig episode compilation video in French! The subtitles are auto-generated so they aren't as reliable, but it's better than no subs at all.
Reading
The first book I ever read in French was a children's book Guillaume and I found in his local library called Nina a été adoptée, which was a very sweet story about a young adopted girl explaining what it was like to be adopted. It was so unexpectedly touching that we both cried.
This is one of the many books in the series Max et Lili and I absolutely love the way they speak to children in this book. It describes life events that can sometimes be difficult to explain in really easy to understand ways, and this makes it an amazing learning resource for those studying French. You'll be hard-pressed to find many of these books online for free, but if you're looking into reading content aimed at children, I recommend the "news" site 1jour1actu. They also have a youtube channel that explains world news events in a comprehensible way for children.
I also recommend reading some famous bedtime stories translated into French. You can take a look at some here! This site is great because it offers an audio and video recording of the story, line by line translations in English, and cute graphics.
Everything listed above is 100% free, by the way!
Paid Content
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| My account after 9 months of learning |
There is one paid platform I'd like to talk about since it's been a pretty big part of my relationship with French grammar. Kwiziq is an online grammar learning platform for French and Spanish that uses a quiz based testing system to help you learn various grammar points. They call it "AI" but it's really just a system of recommendations for lessons based on what you've answered correct or incorrect on previous quizzes. These are usually in a "fill-in-the-blank" type format.
Without the premium version, I believe you can only take 10 quizzes a month in the free version, which makes it incredibly hard to make progress since I usually try to do at least 10 quizzes a day.
I normally never use subscription-based services. In fact, I'm very much against subscribing to content that requires me to pay X amount every month, so I usually steer clear of them. However, I fell in love with this platform and how much there was to offer, so I decided to use the yearly subscription and then never subscribe again.
Let's talk money: It cost me $100 for a full year, which I completely understand is a lot of money to pay for a website. However, I make sure that I get my money's worth and I've cleared every level before B1 to 100%. My goal is to complete B2 before my subscription ends in April, so I hope I can get that done!
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| As you can see, I started in late April. |
If you are someone that's really motivated by statistics and "evidence" of your progress via charts and data, Kwiziq will be your heaven. The brain map they give helps you target what areas you need to work on. Dark green means mastery, grey means it hasn't been studied yet, and red signifies subjects you have gotten wrong in the past.
Though this kind of program may be out of reach for some people, I think it's really helped me and it could possibly help you too. Giving it a try is totally free, so if you're interested you can check out the site here.
I hope the resources provided in this post are helpful! If there are any sites that you've found helpful in your studies, please don't hesitate to let me know. I love finding new sites and books! As always, thanks for reading.
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