Learn to Speak French: Essentials for Mastery

Do you want to learn to speak French? Check out these essentials for mastery.

 How long does it take? 

French is what we call a Category I language- fairly close to English. People who go through the Foreign Service Institute (training for U.S. diplomats) can generally learn to speak French to a B2 level (ACTFL Intermediate High) of French with 750 to 1000 hours of study. CEFR B2 and ACTFL Intermediate High might not mean anything to you, but suffice to say, it’s a pretty high level of language. You can speak and communicate with people, but in no way is it as easy as in your own language. You’re still going to be pretty rough with your grammar, still have some mispronunciations,still be grasping for vocabulary at times, but you can communicate with people. A native speaker speaks much more fluently and accurately than that level. 

While I talked about that general amount of time that Foreign Service Officers preparing for their assignments abroad can invest to attain that level of fluency that allows them to learn to speak French well enough for life in a French-speaking country, to hit that really high native level, takes two or three times as long, in my opinion. It’s relatively easy to move through the Novice and Intermediate. It tends to take a bit longer to move from that High Intermediate through Advanced, and up into that native-level language. 

Learning and acquisition. 

Dr. Stephen Krashen is a great teacher of second language acquisition. Learning a language is more like all of those rote things that you do. Flashcards and apps, exercises, going to a traditional language class, studying verbs, or going to a language lab. Those are all traditional, rote activities. They work by helping you get new patterns and words into your long-term memory to eventually all work together to the point where you can create your own language and sentences. 

Acquisition is something that’s slightly different. Acquisition is the way that you learned your first language. You were spoken to, you watched TV, you were read to, you went to school, or you listened to music. You were completely immersed in that language. Instead of learning separate words, phrases, verb tenses and patterns in the rote way that we talked about with learning, in the very deliberate, very mechanical way that we talked about with learning, you absorbed all that stuff naturally.

People who learn multiple languages, or learn languages to very high levels, understand how these two things work together. You want to be deliberate in your studies: journaling, making flashcards, making regular chunks of time to study, studying grammar, etc. But you also want to spend a lot of time in acquisition, not being perfect. Speaking to native speakers, traveling, reading, watching movies, listening to music- those immersive activities that taught you your own language. Your progress will skyrocket and accelerate when you learn how to combine these two important concepts. This is vital in your journey to learn to speak French.

Input versus output. 

We learn languages from messages (Krashen). This is great news, because it means we can spend a lot of time getting interesting input that we enjoy. 

Output is also critical. It gives you a way to process all of that input you got. It helps you problem solve, work on your fluency, improve your pronunciation, fill in any gaps of knowledge you might have and (last but not least), communicate in your target language.

I value both input and output.