French
j'ai étudié la langue français pour il y a un ans et demi. Je l'ai laissé pour quelques mois et je voudrais le practique encore. Mais dans mes études je toujours eu de problèmes produire la langue come parler ou écrire. je peux comprendre ce que je lis et entend mais quand je dois parler ou écrire ca deviene dificile: Surtout le participe passé, je l'étudié beaucoup de fois mais je peux pas le produire, je peux le comprendre mais je peux pas le produire. Je le pratique; j'ai pris des cours de conversation, je lis etc. Mqis je peux pas le faire c'est trés dificile pour mois. s'il y a quelqu'un qui avait le même probléme que mois et l'a résolu s'il vous plaît mettez le dans le commenaires.
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I hope you get a lot of answers here, because I too am interested in the answer, and I suspect that success lies in a variety of activities and attitudes, not one magic pill.
One thing I believe is that when someone else talks about their own success, they maybe are not as successful as they are describing themselves to be — and that is ok, they still might be describing something very helpful but they might be exaggerating how thoroughly that activity or attitude or even “knack” or “talent” has contributed to their success. I think that in the end it just comes down to hard work, realizing it takes a lot of effort, belief in yourself, patience, and never giving up.
When I was studying to pass my CPA exam, there were always some posts on the internet from people who would write that they studied for two weeks and passed. I think the only purpose the people had in writing something like that was that they were proud of themselves and maybe it felt like two weeks, because they ignored years of school, or sitting in front of the tv with the preparation book in their lap for years before they decided to do it “for real” and they buckled down and studied really intensely for two weeks finally at the end, or maybe they are ignoring their own curiosity when they couldn’t understand something and they googled the answer and how many hours they did this for months without considering this “studying,” who knows. But it is certain in my mind you cannot pass that exam by studying for two weeks. I told myself, when studying, that such an estimate of time and effort would be dangerous, I wanted to be like an engineer and over-engineer a bridge, to guarantee I would pass the first time I took the exam, because it was an expensive exam and I could not afford to pay to take it more than once. To pass requires 75% score average. I decided to aim for 90% so that if I choked or encountered something unexpected I would have a margin of safety. So I studied 2.5 times longer than the recommended amount of time. Each section is recommended maybe a quarter of a year to study for and there are four sections. So the recommendation is study a quarter year (three months), take a test on the section, study another three months, take the next test for the next section, etc. But the pass rate is very low: only 50% of people who take the exam pass it on their first time. So I studied 2.5 years before taking the exam for the first section. I studied all four sections in a spiral, one after the other repeating but going deeper each round of repeating my studies, working my way up to understanding concepts that in the first few times encountering them I simply could not grasp, and doing problems that were too hard in the beginning. I used concepts from one section of the exam to deepen understanding in the other sections / I didn’t study them in isolation. Then, after 2.5 years I took the four exams, one after the other, and averaged 90%, which was the over-engineered goal I had, in my fear of failing, set for myself. While taking the exams I couldn’t believe how easy and effortless they were, and couldn’t understand how it was possible for 50% of test takers to not be able to achieve even a 75% on them. But knowledge and skill is always effortless in hindsight.
My father taught French and linguistics at Harvard for seven years. He and my mom, neither of whom were native French speakers, would speak (or should I say, yell) in French whenever they needed to argue about something, so my brother and I wouldn’t know what they were arguing about. My mom was born in Germany, and hitchhiked to France when she was 18 and lived there for a couple years, then went to Italy and lived there, where she met my dad who was a student traveling at the time. My mom only had a high school education but she knew seven languages by the time she died - she was the kind of person who was never inhibited or self conscious or ashamed of anything she did, so she had no problem opening her mouth and saying outrageous things and not caring about other people’s reactions or whether she said things right or wrong.
My father must have been fascinated by her, here is this barbarian able to do what he himself had a hard time doing and what he himself trained in all his life - he was super super smart but language learning was HARD for him. He himself went to Harvard when he was only sixteen years old, I am talking super smart. He died unexpectedly when I was fourteen, so there are many secrets to his smartness and approach to life and discoveries that I will never know, because what kid or especially young teenager thinks it is important to pay attention to their parents.
So most secrets that my father had in learning French are gone forever. Not only that, but my brother found all his notebooks and had them in a basement of the apartment he was living in and the landlord threw them all out. So most written secrets are lost.
After my mom died, we cleaned out the house and I found some letters, but they were very few. I also found lots of index flash cards with French words. I read through my fathers letters and in one he wrote to his friend and he was saying exactly what you are saying - French is really hard, he doesn’t think he will ever get the hang of it, and no matter how much he tries to learn the same thing over and over, it doesn’t stick, it doesn’t come fluently to mind, it is stilted, stuck, broken, in pieces, hopeless. He really despaired. ... and then look, years later, there he was — at a level where he could teach French at Harvard, and linguistics in general.
I don’t know French - my parents purposely never wanted us to learn so they didn’t speak directly to us ever in French, and you need someone communicating directly to you in order to learn. Just overhearing two people shouting at each other is never going to teach you anything. I studied French for a couple semesters in college, to get through my language requirement, but years later the only words I can speak are the numbers up to ten, the word for cat, and the sentence “close the door.” In the US there is usually no necessity to learn a foreign language in order to survive, so nobody places any importance on it, and believe it or not, my parents, with all their language knowledge, never thought it important for us kids to learn foreign languages. My mom spoke to my brother and me in German when we were young, and we had to learn Hebrew as part of our Bat/Bar Mitzvah, but other than that — never ever suggested that we should learn any language, so all my life I grew up never caring or needing to learn another language.
Now, however, I am learning Hungarian, because my husband is Hungarian and his mother, sister and niece don’t speak English. I have been studying for three years and same issue as you - impossible. Yet I keep working at it. Hungarian is a notorious language for people to give up and claim as impossible unless you are born into it. It certainly cannot be guessed at, like your French writing was simple enough that I could read it and guess what it was saying because English has borrowed all its high-level words and structure from Latin, and even the things that are not traced to Latin can be traced further back to a common Indo-European root. But Hungarian is something else. Three years later and I look at words and structures and I CANNOT guess. They don’t trace back to any Indo-European root that scholars can locate - they are on their own language tree. So I look at what you wrote and say, hmm, I can understand everything you wrote, even though I don’t know French. It is all the background knowledge that enables me to passively understand it. Not only that, but also my mind has grown into a grasping, groping, desperately questioning machine from three years of staring at words and sentences in Hungarian looking for clues what does it mean ... what does it mean? Are there roots, suffixes, word orders, grammatical markers that give any hints? It is like looking for the tiniest berry or root or bark when lost in a forest for three years and starving. There has to be something to keep me alive... so when I see something like your writing, I eat! It’s all Indo-European words and a familiar grammar and a familiar word order. It doesn’t give me anxiety. If I had to speak it, yah I know the French are notorious for cruelly not accepting fumbling attempts at pronunciation, however I wouldn’t worry about it if I had to speak it, because I don’t have a NEED to learn French, and I wouldn’t feel embarrassed. Just like my mom was able to learn languages - she didn’t care what people thought about her mistakes, and she could figure it out eventually, she simply wasn’t worried about it.
One thing that I have found helpful is to memorize entire sentences. Use a flash card system like Anki, and don’t put any English on the card at all: the face of the card is an image which represents a sentence. You will need to memorize the sentence like an actor memorizes a script - exactly, word by word, with correct intonation and pronunciation and emotion and speed and rhythm. This will develop muscle memory. Look for an image on the internet that strikes you as a funny way to trigger the sentence in your mind. “My father is an exceptionally good driver” and it is a picture of a car driving off a cliff. “YOU were the one who ate my sandwich?” (With the word order emphasizing the surprise that it was YOU) and it is a picture of President Obama wolfing down a hamburger. These images will only make sense to you, but the joy of the inside joke or the smile you get when you search a phrase on google images and see one that you say: “that would be a funny situation in which I would say this sentence!” - that is what makes the process fun. Language learning needs to be fun. Then when you go through your flash cards, it will be like participating in a funny conversation, and you will want to do it every day.
Using this whole sentence method will help you with those particularly troublesome grammatical structures. You need to develop the muscle memory for certain grammar structures. You can’t think and reason every case ending and preposition - it just has to come out in an engrained pattern of words, that is how kids do it. After enough sentences that convey concepts, the patterns will equate to time and space and point of view and other mental relations that grammar represents.
The flash cards won’t solve the problems in their entirety until you actually encounter similar situations in real life and need to say the sentences you have been practicing, for real. “YOU were the one who ate my sandwich?” will probably escape your mind when you need to say it for real, and you will probably just be able to croak out some barely understandable bunch of words that are close but not perfect. But that happens with actors too - what comes out of their mouth when the camera is rolling are not the exact words, they are just an approximation, just like the CPA exam results were only 90% and not 100%. But hey - they were good enough to start real life. The hard part is building enough of an ability to simply get people to agree to talk with you in the language. Just like babies have horrible pronunciation and grammar - however they have practiced enough goo’s and gaa’s to be able to refine and perfect their language in real life when they finally do start talking to people.
Another thing you may enjoy, since I noticed from your other post that you appreciate music, is memorizing songs. Songs are great for memorizing because by their very nature you want to listen to them a hundred times and because it gives you a bit of a spiritual high to sing them yourself. If you like rap or hardcore music you can gain really good muscle practice because that kind of music is so rapid that your mouth muscles learn to switch from one area of your throat or mouth or nose to other areas so rapidly that it strengthens the muscles. If you don’t like such genres, ok you will need to figure out other ways to develop the muscles - but even slower genres are really good ways of developing pronunciation muscles.
In summary, my opinion is that if you find a way to spend more time in studying and practicing and don’t give up you will eventually acquire the skill. One and a half years, even with conversation classes, is evidently not enough practice. In the conversation class, how many hours did you yourself speak one-on-one with the teacher? Not how many hours did you sit in class. Not how many hours did the teacher speak to the whole class or to other students. Really, how many hours all together did you open your mouth and get guidance on what came out of your mouth, and were coached into saying one sentence over and over correctly until it was perfect, like babies get coached to do?
Hello! Like @Nemvagok just said, one and half years aren't enough. You've come this far so you should try to keep going. I am learning German and one year and a half after starting I really couldn't say much and I couldn't write anything longer than two sentences, but now that I'm in my third year of learning it I can do much more. So if you have good habits of reading the language and listening you should keep doing it, and maybe pay a bit more attention to your writing and speaking.
What I personally did was try to practice all the words/ grammatical principles from my early lessons, beginning with the A1 level for example. You might be able to understand them now if you read them/ listen to them now, but have you tried using them to write/ saying them in a conversation? It might help. There might be things from the beginning stages you haven't fully understood that you could review and have a better grasp of now that you know much more about the language.
So for example taking this text you wrote, you could chose to refocus on passé composé because it seems like you sometimes forget the auxiliary in your sentence. You could review the conjugation of some verbs. Try to find texts that contain these verbs so that the right spelling becomes natural to you. Ask yourself, why are you writing "deviene" instead of "devient"? Do you have trouble differentiating the ending sounds of "devienne" (which has a final "n" sound) and "devient" (which hasn't)? This can be something you could work on.
Do you know the website Youglish? You can use it to search in the subtitles of youtube Videos. For example, you could type "Je peux comprendre" and you would find hundreds of videos wher people say that, this might help you tie the written language with the spoken one. https://youglish.com/pronounce/je%20peux%20comprendre/french/fr?
If you need additional resources for French (like cartoons), feel free to ask!:) And I'd also like to know, what do you read/ listen to in French?
Have a nice evening and good luck with your learning!:)