My French is conversational at best. I can go to a restaurant or a supermarket and mostly make myself understood but I couldn’t talk to someone at random in a cafe. I’ve been lots of times and I gain confidence when I’m there but it quickly drops off once I’m back in Blighty. I want to develop further and short of going to live there for a while, I figured the best bet would be some of the audio learning courses like Rosetta Stone. Once I’ve got myself to the stage where I can listen to French radio or TV and read books in French then I’ll keep doing that.

The trouble is the ones I’ve looked at are quite expensive. Can anyone recommend a good course they’ve had success with?

I can’t help, but would be interested in the discussion.

Noticed that your URL is a -1, so there’s an original at http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/learning-french

Tried clubs/courses etc.

Nothing worked until moving out there (job) for 6 months.

Got sky? Watch or listen to French channels.

Same as when I worked in India and Japan.

Currently trying to lose my ‘f’ for ‘th’ for living in Peterborough although lost my Bristol ‘rrr’…

Thanks Cougar. Michelle Thomas, right. Other than that, living there isn;t an option.

The thing is, I want to spend more time touring France on my bike. I’ve ridden in France twice and absolutely loved it, next year I want to spend a week or more just pottering about the place. But I need language to make it really good. I’ve been to France many, many times but usually in tourist places where everyone speaks English. I prefer the rural villages where people poo in the shower and speak a rough kind of French. 😉

can you find a french person local to you and go ride or a pint once a week ?

Duolingo App is pretty good.

A work colleague of mine learned Italian pretty quickly from an italian colleague. He just met up with him at lunchtimes and learned through conversing with him through the cours of the day at work, and he was picking up Italian newspapers and books. After about 18 months he left and went to work in Italy. He was Welsh though so was already multi-lingual.

I think you ideally need that interactivity you can only get from real people. I find when I deliver my well practiced phrases to locals in other countries, it’s the response I get back that totally throws me – its never the response you’ve been fed in the staged scenario’s, or said in the precise and specific way you’re used to in a structured course. Its usually something much more casual/informal possibly involving slang or with accent differences I don’t recognise, or the speed of delivery. I don’t think you can ever learn that from anything other than conversing with real people. In fact often getting them to respond in the local language is difficult – they seem to always respond to me in english, so my ‘well practiced phrases’ are obviously showing me up as inept and its pointless responding to me in their local language.

I’ve been struggling for years trying to learn French

Been to a few local authority night classes which are generally not much cop

Went to alliance française too on Saturday mornings but as is generally the way with these things the follow on course was cancelled due to lack of numbers. This also happened to the course at Hope college and the local authority one in New Mills.

The alliance française was a good course, it’s just a shame they don’t run it on Saturday mornings any more

I’d love to go and live in France for a year or two to learn the language, I just don’t know how I could make it happen

I’d be in no rush to return 🙂

Oon grond bee air miss your sea voo play

What more is there to know?

Download French movies or TV shows and watch them with the French subtitles on. I watched the first two series of Game of Thrones dubbed In French with French subs. It helps if you watch on a laptop so you can easily skip back 30 secs

I read ParisMatch online – there’s a bit of gossip but a lot of high quality current affairs stuff and the “royal watching” pages are good because I can relate it to what you see in the UK news.

ParisMatch.com

Rich.

Have a look at http://www.babbel.com

Subscriptions are available for monthly, quarterly, or annual.

Prices https://www.babbel.com/prices?utf8=?&learn_lang_iso=ENG&country_iso=GBR

This book is good (hate to link to Amazon but ..) Practive Makes Perfect (Conversaton)

I tend to read French papers Le Figaro and Le Equipe (sports paper) too, both online. I find adding the sub-titles to French TV/movies very useful although it’s frustrating as the sub-titles are frequently different than the spoken word.

However I cannot hold myself up as any expect as after living in Paris for 12 months my French is still terrible !

It’s mainly aimed at women, but you can get a free weekly email from http://www.commeunefrancaise.com/ which has lots of tips and is good fun.

Don’t know if this is of any use Amazon local doing Rosetta Stone for £49? Click

That’s great, thanks.

I’ve just started learning again after a strange experience in my local Sainsbury’s.

For some inexplicable reason they stock France Football magazine. I saw it, flicked through out of curiosity and realised that I was picking up quite a bit. I bought it and dug out an old teach yourself french book.

A few weeks later and I’m pretty much back at the level I was when I left school, so not bad progress. I find the news pieces easier to read than the features in the magazine as the language is quite functional. I’ve also got some French language comics, like Asterix.

I’ve also just taken delivery of a Petit Nicholas book – this is a character created by the writer of Asterix who’se a schoolboy in the Just William sort of mould, but as it’s written from the perspective of a 7 year old boy who is mainly talking about his day the language is quite functional.

As someone mentioned it’s no substitute for spending months, or even years dans l’hexigone, mais c’est ne pas mal.

The biggest problem for many language learners is fear of making mistakes. You can overcome this by drinking Nature’s greatest dis-inhibitor: alcohol. But obviously you need a French person to be around when you drink that alcohol, which can’t be too hard if you live in London because half a million of them live there.

I commented on this thread a few days ago but it seems to have gotten lost.

Basically, if you have access to satellite tv/radio see if you can pick up the Swiss French stations TSR1/2 (tv) and RSR (radio) as they speak a lot slower than the French (which the French find hilarious).

Have a look online for DELF A1/A2 or even B1 training materials. DELF is an French language qualification aimed at adult non-native French speakers so you get basic French tutorials but on useful topics not childish ones..

This looks good for starters:
DELF

Mrs Daz went to these for a couple of years… Alliance Francaise

She did one night a week starting from the usual ‘did GCSE and forgot most of it’ level and within a year or so got up to decent A-level standard. She also used to meet up with her fellow students regularly where they spoke French all night. One thing the tutors there encouraged her to do was to watch French children’s films or tv as the language used is more basic and easier to follow.

I always keep telling myself I’m going to learn but never get round to it. The furthest I’ve ever got is learning some vocab using the french courses on Memrise

A annecdote on language. I find it easier to speak with my gf’s parents (in their 80’s) as they speak slowly and clearly and use traditional text book language rather than modernisms.

As others have said above find a topic you are interested (eg velo-tout-terrain ?) and read websites and/or out loud.

A mate of mine who now lives out there and is happily married to a french lass with kids had a very simple answer to learning the lingo.

“Shag french birds”

Shag french birds

That sounds like a superb solution to learning the language but easier said than done I suspect. 😀

A few years ago my employer sent me to a language school for a year to learn French on a Mon-Fri, 9-5 basis in a class of 4 with French instructors with the intention of working as a translator/interpreter afterwards.

The big advances come when you can immerse yourself in the language for fun – watching DVDs in French with/without French subtitles, listening to music (Edith Piaf FTW!) and reading magazines etc etc. I first found out about “The Walking Dead” series in a French comic store which was great and obviously pretty straightforward. The novel “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell” on the other hand was a bit of a nightmare!

I also regularly used a radio news broadcast called “francais facile” to get a round up the daily news and was signed up to STW.Fr or whatever it was called. It’s also worth mentioning that Canadian (and African) French is generally slightly easier to understand so that may be worth thinking about – Canadian French mountain bike websites must exist?

Obviously these will help your understanding of the language but the only way to improve your fluency is to do more speaking, the Michael Thomas cds etc are good as they get the basics well embedded so you can rattle the stock phrases out without thinking and let you concentrate on what’s coming back at you without worrying whether you’ll be able to reply afterwards.

A mate of mine who now lives out there and is happily married to a french lass with kids had a very simple answer to learning the lingo.

“Shag french birds”

Also works when learning Spanish. Not entirely risk free: marriage, a mortgage and two kids in my case.

For the record, I found Michel Thomas really irritating. The female student seems to have a learning difficulty. The Paul Noble CDs were better.

Have you seen this? http://fourhourworkweek.com/2014/07/16/how-to-learn-any-language-in-record-time-and-never-forget-it/

For the record, I found Michel Thomas really irritating

yes the constant saliva sounds get annoying, and if you compare a real french person speaking to his french, the pronounciation is quite far off.

If we’re talking French Music – I’m quite a fan of this artist

And this ones just brilliant