How can I best learn the French language, grammar, and pronunciation?
The best way for something like this, IMO, would be to get a couple first-year French texts and some children’s books, and start hacking it out. The pronunciation rules aren’t very hard, and I found it much easier to pronounce the words to myself than to actually say them out loud. The problem with French writing is that a lot of it tends to be very ornate. Reading something like L’Etranger would probably be possible with a dictionary after a decently intense summer of study, but I’m pretty continually surprised at how twisted the language in some literature (and a lot of academic writing) is.
molybdenum is right. You can learn French through immersion, sure, but you will not be able to understand complex texts. There are five levels of fluency in any language – most of us operate at about level 3, with forays into level 4. Level 5 is for diplomatic use, meaning you understand tertiary meanings of words and use them accordingly. If you’re realistic, you might get to level 2-3. Complex texts are simply going to take you a while (and a lot of study) to achieve. Literary French – you’ll need a formal course. There’s more to literature than just the words on the page (allusion, context, style, idiom) come to mind as examples of where some guidance would benefit you. Spoken French – choose your region well (some regional accents are “better” than others) and just go. Full immersion works best when you are fully immersed, meaning no contact with another person who speaks your mother tongue. You go with your wife, you will speak in English to eachother, which dilutes the immersion
No disrespect meant to your or your language skills, but how good are translations of texts that have never been translated before going to be when you’ve got one summer (or one year) worth of language under your hat, most likely outside of an immersive environment? Again I don’t mean to challenge your skills or good intentions but I can imagine your perceived contribution as having a negative effect when simple misunderstandings in comprehension could corrupt the meaning of entire passages unless you have everything checked by someone else, at which point it might have been easier to outsource the translation to begin with. I think it would be fair to say that in order to be sufficiently qualified in translating texts a minimum benchmark to aim for would be passing a high school level French language comprehension test for mother tongue French speakers. A similar equivalent test would be the TCF DAP, a comprehension test for French as a second lan
www.europe1.fr Buy the becherelle junior book. Its explanation of basic grammar and pronunciation is second to none (it’s in French though). Get a list of the top 50 verbs used in any language and then write the conjugations out 50 times per verb. Do it so that you can associate by sight any conjugation of that verb with its infinitive meaning. Go to lemonde.fr or lefigaro.fr and just write out by hand, or by typing, the newspaper articles for a couple of days. Nothing will get you familiar faster with how the language is constructed than by simply writing it out at long lengths of time for at least a couple of days until you start noticing patterns. Once you start noticing the patterns, start underlining the verbs, the nouns, the articles etc. If you rely solely on grammar books then you won’t know which rules are archaic and almost never used and which are super important. I could go on, but that right there is a solid summer’s worth of intense French that won’t cost you a penny (exc
Thanks for all of the fantastic advice! Unfortunately, I think I have misrepresented my goals, I’m hoping to begin this summer but don’t expect to have made nearly enough progress to be reading many of the texts. To narrow in on what I’m looking for (or maybe what I’m not), I feel as if a lot of language programs are designed to give the appearance of understanding a language, or the ability to not feel hopelessly lost and alienated when visiting a country. I don’t care to learn French quickly or have useful words, though that might happen. I am much more interested in a ‘complete understanding,’ one based in grammar, history, and flexibility. Put simply: avoiding Rosetta Stone-like programs and sticking with texts and academic tools.
