villandra

The best way for you to learn French depends in good part on how you best learn a new language. There are a number of methods of learning a language. You might do best with a systematic approach to the grammar and a lot of drill work, an intuitive approach that gives you sentences or stories to read and you infer the grammatical features, which works well for many people who learn vocabulary and grammar easily and quickly, or an immersive technique like watching videos and changing the language your computer uses to communicate with you. Your chosen method also depends on your schedule and how you generally like to use time. Duolingo has some drill work (and you can repeat it), and its French lessons offer a lot of drill work and eventually you can test out (repeatedly) if you've really got it. Its biggest advantage is it's easy to use if you have small snatches of time available throughout the day or you're trapped on the bus for an hour getting home. Your ability to pick up spoken language will also have an impact on whether you're going to go with the learn from videos method. It took me nearly until I was in kindergarten to learn my own native language by that method. My memory isn't that great, a problem I share with my father, though we're both quite bright, so drillwork usually works better for me in any case. I'm bright and analytical and I usually need things explained to me in detail. Trying to learn to read, I hung up on where's the letter for the glottal stop - the uh sound that begins a word that starts with a vowel, like apple and egg. Finally a remedial reading teacher answered the question! In any case, I've never learned a new language from spoken speech in my life - I can't even UNDERSTAND it unless I already know the words, and know them well, and people speak clearly and distinctly until I'm used to understanding the spoken language! When I was in grade school they tried to teach us French by having us read sentences out loud, and everyone seemed to get it but me, though to be fair if noone else got it either we'd never know it. Maybe the other kids were more willing to lie about it. That doesn't necessarily mean you won't learn from the videos, particularly if you're already able to make out what they're saying. We've already heard here from someone who said it worked for him. I have proven able to learn in conversation with Spanish speakers if I already know many of the words and they're trying to be understood, besides which, Spanish on the TexMex border doesn't sound very different from English plus it's strictly phonetic, unlike French, which has such weird sounds Welsh and Gaelic are easier to understand, and French words aren't pronounced much like they're spelled. If you try to do four different methods at once you're likely to burn out. I've tried it - never had it last long. In addition to four times the work, there is no such thing as two programs that teach the same features and vocabulary at the same time. French Made Simple and French the Easy Way are two of the books I've found most useful at the beginner level. French Made Simple emphasizes the experiences and language needs of a businessman and tourist, and beyond that, emphasizes culture. French the Easy Way has more general interest exercises. When I was in high school I did well in French for the first time. There was little spoken French. We had a series of textbooks through the three years, which taught grammatical features and extensive drills where we wrote out sentences repeatedly, changing them so the grammar matched up. This is exactly how I best learn a new language. Today's high school language texts are far more likely to combine the intuitive method with immersive techniques, and they start out throwing a great deal at students all at once. The texts I once succeeded with have gotten hard to find. French has far more complex grammar than English does; verb endings that change by tense and by who is the speaker; three regular conjugations and numerous irregular ones. Nouns vary by gender. Adjectives have separate endings by singular/plural and gender. French has a couple of dozen KINDS of articles and determinatives. Unless you truly have the sort of memory that sees something once and you have it down, then if you don't use something like duolingo or a book that provides drillwork, you're going to be making up your own, which takes even more time. Warning about duolingo; you have to take many ways they say you must do things with a grain of salt. They're a snooty and peculiar bunch. I'm told I should respect them because they're volunteers who don't know what they're doing. ??? Still you can usefully learn the language from them. What you probably MOST need to look out for with duolingo, though, is that it's highly unlikely duolingo and your videos will pronounce French the same way! Not only do they pronounce French by different rules than those I've been consistently taught before, not to mention their own eclectic version of rules that have always confused me because everyone has them different, but, their Chilean accents come into it. So, "nous avons" should be pronounced, "Nus avon". The s on the end of nous is pronounced because the next word begins with a vowel. Duo lingo will TELL you that it should be pronounced "Nu avon", and SOMETIMES pronounce it that way. Often you will hear "Chu avon" or "Ju avon". This is their Chilean Spanish accent at work! Weak consonants just mysteriously morph into j and ch. You'll only ever encounter this on duolingo, certainly not in your videos! It gets even better with regular verbs. By Duolingo's pronunciation rules, regular verbs are generally pronounced alike no matter how they're conjugated. If you can't make out what the pronoun is, your guess of whether it's tu parles (you speak) or nous parlons (we speak) may not be what you were meant to write out what you heard, and you'll persistently fail the exercise. If you heard a gravelly "chu parl" you don't know what they're saying. This problem was driving me buggy, and a key reason why I just turned off the sound. Sorry, duolingo my computer has no speakers. So you know, French sets of pronunciation rules differ on when you pronounce ending vowels and ending consonants. I don't know who pronounces what how, and it has always made it impossible for me to read French out loud. (I happen to be very sure about how to pronounce nous avons, though.) It almost certainly has to do with dialectical differences and shifts in how the language is pronounced over time. Spanish and English are both worse in that regard. (The chaotic spelling of English stems from a time when English had six or seven very different dialects. Then, like Spanish, only since written English is younger not as badly and not as many different ways, English pronunciation has changed considerably since its spelling became standardized.)