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LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

Thirteen free and easy ways to learn French

Struggling to learn French? Not everyone can go back to college or afford private tutors. So with the help of our readers and an author who's written a book on the subject, here are some free and easy ways to help you conquer French.

Published: 22 July 2016 16:16 CEST
Thirteen free and easy ways to learn French
Photo: Runs With Scissors/Flickr

1. Pillow talk

Photo: Henrik Berger Jorgensen/Flickr

Improving your understanding of irregular verbs is usually the furthest thing from your mind when lying in bed with your French lover. However, some expats have found that exchanging sweet nothings can be a great way to pick up a phrase here and there. “Seriously, nothing focuses your mind quite like sex, and later on, you’ll find you were really paying attention to every word,” says American burlesque dancer Brian Scott Bagley.

2. Listen and repeat

Your best, most easily-available French teachers are the French. So when they speak, mimic all their little phrases. “There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when trying to express yourself,” says English blogger Victoria Wall. “If you say ‘merci’ and a French person replies ‘Je vous en prie,’ then say that next time for ‘You’re welcome.’ No need to scratch your head and blurt out ‘Vous..etes..bienvenue’ – the French have already figured it out, so just repeat after them.”

3. Get smarter with your smartphone

These days there's an app for everything, including learning French. Several of them actually. The benefits are that many of the apps feel more like games, you can learn on the go or whenever you have a spare minute, and many of them are free or very cheap. Try checking out Duolingo to start, and see our list of top smartphone apps for learning French.

4. Turn subtitles on

Photo: Gomazio ASBL/Youtube

Watching French movies with French subtitles on can be a huge boost to your understanding of the language. If reading French is your forté, then hearing the words spoken alongside the text will vastly improve your ear. And if you hear and understand the sounds and phrases of French just fine, then having it written down will help you link the two together. And of course, you can watch your favourite English-language films with French subtitles too.

5. Listen to the news

You can keep yourself up to date on current events and learn French at the same time just by listening to some French radio in the morning. If you find that they speak too quickly for you to understand, try the News in Slow French, a weekly news roundup that you can listen to in slowly-spoken French. A surefire way to get your comprehension skills up to speed.

6. Go back to your childhood roots

Several French-speakers who taught themselves recommended this one. Watch cartoons on TV, read children’s books, and don’t be ashamed to enjoy it. “The French is at a beginner’s level, it’s very easy to pick up, and the TV shows especially are full of little word games that will really help. And it’s fun!” says Brian Scott Bagley.

7. Play

Photo: The Local

Learning a language cannot be all work and no play or you will soon lose interest. “Do crossword puzzles in French or play scrabble or learn the words to your favourite French songs,” says Lynn McBride.

8. Phrase of the day

“I put French phrases on my calendar so I can learn one each day,” says Lynn McBride. “I will try to learn and use that phrase during the day.” This tip requires a bit of discipline, organization and a decent-sized calendar. Although it may not sound like much, if you really learn the phrase each day you will soon find it easier to pick up and use other words and expressions.

9. Turn GPS to French

Photo: Cheon Fong Liew/Flickr

Driving in France might be daunting enough without having your GPS barking orders at you to “tournez à gauche” or continue “tout droit” at the “rond-point”. Nevertheless, asking your GPS guide to speak to you in French instead of English is a handy way of forcing yourself to hear and understand the language you are trying to learn, says author Lynn McBride. Just give a little bit of extra driving time to cover for getting lost.

10. Get sporty

Not on your own of course, and not just with expats. The French love their sport and there are thousands of local clubs up and down the country that cater for everything from running to rugby and probably darts too. Join up. “You just have to throw yourself in at the deep-end. I joined a local rugby club, which helped a lot. You socialize and mix with the locals,” reader Nick Ord says.

11. Cooking

Combining work and pleasure is always the best way to learn. If you enjoy cooking then force yourself to ditch your Jamie Oliver English cook book and opt for Raymond Blanc’s recipes instead – in French of course. Not only will you learn plenty of names for ingredients, but there’ll be plenty of useful verbs in there too and you might just become a Michelin star chef in the process.

12. Talk to yourself

This might sound a strange tip and it might raise a few eyebrows from other patrons in the café you're in, but Lynn McBride says “you’ll come up with lots of phrases and words that you don’t know and will then want to look up.” If you get bored of talking to yourself you can always do a little bit of role play with your alter ego – the moody French waiter, your French boss at work or even the French man or woman of your dreams… but maybe not in public.

13. YouTube tutorials 

There are so many of them you can get lost. But just do one a day for the rest of your days and you'll improve your French to a point where you can start doing your own YouTube tutorials.

A previous version of this article was published in 2013. But seeming as though we are all still struggling with French we decided to publish an updated version.

 

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LEARNING FRENCH

Is the English language really just ‘badly pronounced French’?

A French linguist has been making waves with his boldly-titled book 'The English language does not exist - it's just badly pronounced French', but does the professor actually have a point?

Published: 23 April 2024 14:35 CEST
Is the English language really just 'badly pronounced French'?

The French linguist Bernard Cerquiglini is clear that the title of his book should be taken with humour and a pinch of salt, beginning his work by explaining that it is a ‘bad faith proposition’.

Clearly, the English language does exist and equally clearly the French are a little uneasy about it – with numerous laws, national bodies and local initiatives attempting to fight back against the anglicisms that now litter everyday speech, from ‘c’est cool’ to ‘un job’. 

But Cerquiglini argues that the supposed ‘influx’ of English words that are now used in France, especially tech-related terms, is nothing compared to what happened when French literally invaded English in the Middle Ages.

And the close similarity that the two languages enjoy today – around 30 percent of English words are of French origin – speaks to this entwined history.

“You can also see my book as an homage to the English language, which has been able to adopt so many words… Viking, Danish, French, it’s astonishing,” he told AFP.

The history

The key date in the blending of English and French is the Norman conquest of 1066, when Duke William of Normandy invaded England with a small group of Norman knights and made himself the English king William the Conqueror.

What happened next was a radical re-ordering of society in which English nobles were displaced and William’s knights were installed as a new French-speaking (or at least Norman-speaking) ruling class. 

The use of French by the ruling classes continued into the 13th and 14th centuries, by which time French was the official language of the royal courts, diplomacy, the law, administration and trade – meaning that ambitious English people had no choice but to learn French in order to take part in official or legal processes. 

Cerquiglini says that half of all English’s borrowings from French took place between 1260-1400, with a heavy slant towards words related to nobility, trade, administration or the law.

But a large group of non-native speakers meant that the French spoken in England was already starting to evolve, and the French words ended up with different pronunciations or even a different meaning. 

As early as 1175, the records show a Frenchman in England snootily remarking that: “My language is good, because I was born in France”. 

English and French started to part ways from the mid-1400s, by which time the two countries no longer shared royalty (the last English possession in France, the port of Calais, was lost to the French in 1558) and gradually systems such as the law courts and trade began to be conducted in English.

French remained widely spoken as a second language by the nobility and the elite right up until the early 20th century and French is still the most widely-taught language in UK schools.

The similarities

It’s not always easy to distinguish between English words that have a French root and those that have a Latin root, but linguists estimate that around 29 percent of English words come from French, another 29 percent from Latin, 26 percent from German and the rest from other languages.

But many of the English words that do have a clear French root are related to nobility, administration, politics and the law.

For example the French words gouvernement, parlement, autorité and peuple are clearly recognisable to English speakers. Likewise budget, revenus, enterprise and taxe, plus avocat, cour, juge, magistrat and evidence.

Amusingly, the French and the English obviously found time to share many insults, including bâtard [bastard], crétin, imbecile, brute and stupide.

Adaptation

But most of the people in England who were speaking French did not have it as their mother tongue, so the language began to adapt. For example the French à cause de literally translates into English as ‘by cause of’ which over time became the English word ‘because’.

There are also words that started out the same but changed their meaning over time – for example the English word ‘clock’ comes from the French ‘cloche’ (bell), because in the Middle Ages church bells were the most common method of keeping track of the time for most people.

When the mechanical clock began to appear from the 14th century onwards, the French used a new term – une horloge – but the English stuck with the original.

The differences

One of the big differences between English and French is that English simply has more words – there are roughly 170,000 words in the English language, compared to about 135,000 in French.

And at least part of this comes from English being a ‘blended’ language – that English people hung on to their original words and simply added the French ones, which is why you often get several different English words that have the same translation in French eg clever and intelligent both translate into French as ‘intelligent’.

Another difference represents the class divide that the Norman invasion imposed between the French nobles and the English labourers.

For example the words pig and cow both have Anglo-Saxon roots, while pork and beef come from French (porc and boeuf) – so when the animal is in the field being looked after by English peasants it has an Anglo-Saxon name, but by the time it is on the plate being eaten by posh people, it becomes French.

There’s also a tendency in English for the more everyday words to have Anglo-Saxon origins while the fancier words have French origins – eg to build (English) versus to construct (French). In French construire is used for both. Or to feed (English) versus to nourish (French) – in French both are nourrir.

Faux amis

One consequence of English and French being so closely linked in the bane of every language-learner’s life – les faux amis (false friends).

These are words that look and sound very similar, but have a completely different meaning. If you don’t know the French word for something you can have a stab at saying the English word with a French pronunciation – and often you will be right.

But sometimes you will be wrong, and sometimes it will be embarrassing.

READ ALSO The 18 most embarrassing French ‘false friends’

Often, faux amis are words that have changed their meaning in one language but not the other – for example the French word sensible means sensitive, not sensible – which is why you can buy products for peau sensible (sensitive skin).

But it once meant sensitive in English too – for example in the title of Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility – over time the meaning of the English word adapted but the French one stayed the same.

The title

And a word on that title – La langue anglaise n’existe pas, C’est du français mal prononcé (the English language does not exist, it’s just badly pronounced French) is actually a quote from former French prime minister Georges Clemenceau.

He did apparently speak English, but doesn’t appear to have been very fond of England itself – his other well-known quote on the topic is: “L’angleterre n’est qu’une colonie français qui a mal tourné” – England is just a French colony gone wrong.  

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