How to Learn French as an American

This is for Americans who are not already proficient in another romance language. This is my personal advice from my own experience, not from research.


The Efficient Way

1. Learn pronunciation Worry about vowel sounds, silent letters, and liaisons. Don't fret about R.
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2. Memorize a ton of vocabulary
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 This is the bulk of the effort and it's what this site is for.
Also use this opportunity to verify your pronunciation.
3. Immersion and grammar study Practice listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Learn grammar along the way.



Why Your French Classes Didn't Work

Have you wondered why you can't follow a dinner conversation after 4 years of French classes?
They do all these steps in parallel and vocabulary is severely under-weighted compared to what it should be:

In parallel - Learn pronunciation
In parallel - Memorize vocabulary This is usually done as homework, and with relatively few words per week.
In parallel - Immersion and grammar study This makes for good practice, but doing this from the get-go also means explaining things in a language the student doesn't understand - and leaving them confused.



Why the French Give Bad Advice

Have you heard this from French people?

For French people who have only achieved proficiency in English, Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese, these expectations are natural because this is how they did it:

1. Memorize a ton of vocabulary

For a French person, they've been absorbing the following vocabularies their entire lives. That means this step occurs first, before beginning language study.

For learning another romance language, consider the following comparison:

  • Their lexical similarity is 89% with Italian and 75% with Spanish or Portuguese.
  • Compare that to an American who only speaks English and has a lexical similarity of 27% with French

For learning English, English is the world's lingua franca.

  • The French are regularly exposed to English through music, film, TV, technology, science, restaurant menus, travel, world news, etc.
  • English is the world's most spoken language at 1.5B speakers, compared to 300M French speakers.
  • There may also be some denial about the relative prevalence of French-in-the-English-speaking-world to English-in-the-French-speaking-world.
2. Immersion, pronunciation, and grammar study This becomes the most important part that takes dedicated effort. If the French person is learning Spanish this part is even easier because Spanish is a phonetic language.