Speak French fluently

booked private lessons starting next week Friady! So far, so good.

When I am back from my vacation I will have to start looking for a teacher for private lesssons. It will only be possible at weekends so I will have to find one that works saturdays as well.

My roomie and I started speaking french randomly with each other and also watching SATC in French (which sounds really weird by the way and has crappy subtitles). I realized that I really know quite a bit of French – both grammar and vocabulary are alright. The problem is I don’t really know how to proceed to those things that I don’t know, which are the easy relaxed talk among friends (in a cool way) and the professional things I would need for work. Neither are in any textbooks I can find.

At the moment I gave up on this goal, I actually found an opportunity to take inexpensive, flexible French classes with a nice Senegalese woman. So this goal comes up again….

Just wrote an email to Alliance Francaise asking about classes starting in April. I hope there will be one that would be appropriate for my very rusty French. The basics are still there (reading isn’t a problem), but opening my mouth around French people is just too scarry. I definitely need help for that.

... made me realise how good I used to speak french. I understand everything as long as it is reasonably slow and I potentially can say everything … and after two glasses of wine I do. What I am missing is the confidence to actually speak more than simple sentences.

I spent the last 30 minutes listing to a french radio station. The topic though was horrible. It was some weird show with people calling in to ask questions about hepatitis. Anyway, I could understand the answer’s pretty well, with the callers I was completely lost. They spoke so fast and with all the background noise, it was impossible. If they had better programmes, I might listen more often.

I am thinking about spending 4 weeks in France this summer taking a language class … yet again. I’ve done this 3 times so far, with mixed results. The last time didn’t improve my french at all. In the short term, of course, but I couldn’t keep it up. Honestly, I am getting a bit tired of learning the same things over and over again. Why is this language so difficult?

The original one was to find a french course I liked, but since I don’t know how long I will actually stay here there isn’t really a point. So I bought a french audiobook yesterday which comes with a course book etc. I seems a good idea. All I have to do is get back into the habit of speaking french. I used to speak it quite well, now I am just afraid to open my mouth.

over the next week