Unique Original Articles » Teaching Yourself French: The Pain is Worth the Gain!

Teaching yourself French can be very rewarding and it will broaden your cultural and social horizons. French is a very beautiful language despite it's complexities. Despite that, French still sounds like one of the most disarming and flowing languages of the world. To me it’s sort of like ballet, the way stiffness and rigor become, ironically, the very means to attain grace.

Indeed, learning teaching yourself French depends on dedication, training, and most importantly, passion. if you speak English, you have to begin training your mouth and tongue to make very awkward movements and sounds, very similar to how a beginning dancer would take up the basic ballet forms and exercises. With a bit of practice, and with a bit of help from multimedia resources that you can find online, you can teach yourself French. A good place to start might be to get the hang of the many vowels and consonant sounds that French has which are not found in English.

A related and perhaps equally difficult aspect of the French language is the way words are spelled. Although the letters pretty much resemble those in English, many of the phonetic structures produce sounds not used in English speech. As if that were not enough, many words are spelled with silent letters, while others, when combined, imply the addition of a consonant or vowel sound. Add to this the sometimes confusing use of accented vowels and you can see why a beginner might be easily discouraged and might direct you to a foreign language that is closer to English.

Challenged yet? Congratulations, if you are still reading on! Maybe you’re thinking of some simple methods of teaching yourself French. Here’s a tip you’ve probably already thought to yourself: you can definitely benefit from memorizing the French names of numbers and the French alphabet, and I highly recommend that you do just that. You can also try memorizing lists of other things like the days of the week, names of the months, or the names of colors and shapes. Don't forget that nouns in French, even inanimate objects and ideas, all have gender. That is why I strongly suggest that you memorize nouns along with their gender.

French verbs are a complicated matter because you must congregate them based on tense, singular-plural form, and yes, even gender. Conjugating verbs can be confusing especially when each verb has 6 conjugations for every tense/mode. That’s like 20 plus ways of writing just one verb! On top of that, after you finally learn how to conjugate, you’ll realize that there are thousands of exceptions to the rules.

Finally, you must consider grammar when constructing your sentences. Although there are three basic sentence structures in French, namely: normal sentence structure, negative sentence structure and interrogative sentence structure, you will find that just like everything else in the language there will always be exceptions to the rules.

You might be thinking that they designed their language precisely so no one else could learn it! But don’t be misled. Countries in Europe, Africa, and even Asia, more than fifty, speak French!

So if you want to know how to teach yourself French, honestly there’s no shortcut method. But that’s really the charm of learning anything worthwhile, isn’t it?
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