This post is addressed to you if you’re a beginner, a false beginner or rusty.

That said, much of what you’ll read will also help intermediate learners who are ready to move swiftly to the next level.

Rapid French: a reality check

First, a reality check!

There’s no hiding it, getting really good at French is a big undertaking that takes a lot of time. You’ll need maybe 300 hours study for a basic, functional “working knowledge” at the “lower intermediate” level (sometimes called “B1”). 

Learning French also takes a shedload of commitment.

But here’s the thing! If you’re motivated, you can achieve specific goals a lot more quickly. 

It’s a question of knowing what you need your French for and consistent application of effective methods that will take you there. Then, once you get airborne, anything is possible!

Another home truth before we start!

To learn French more quickly, you need to take responsibility for your own progress.

No teacher can beam the language into your head.

“School style” group French classes very inefficient if you rely on them on their own, though group language classes can give your learning a clear framework, a welcome social dimension and help with motivation.

Much more efficient are one-to-one classes with a paid teacher. If you can’t afford that, you could do language exchanges (where half the session is in French to help you and half in English to help your French-speaking, English learning exchange partner).

If you’re an adult learner, make effective self-study and lots of practice your two French rapid progress boosters.  

Let’s also be clear from the get go on one other thing: nobody ever got fluent in French just by using an app. Some apps are better than others, many are “gamified” to, erm, keep you on the app. What are they good for? As a supplement or for some extra down-time engagement (if you don’t feel like doing something more effective instead).

1. Learn with your specific French goals in mind

You might want to be able to connect with in-laws or grandchildren or use the language to get things done and make wonderful memories when you’re travelling. You could already be into aspects of French culture and want to experience it from within.  Maybe yoy want to forge new business contacts by giving a presentation in the language or bond less formally with potential customers afterwards.  

You’re sure you’re clear on what you want your French for?

You’re sure you REALLY want it?

And you want it, like, yesterday?  

Ok, let’s look further at what you need to do to learn French fast.  

2. Master pronunciation fundamentals

Time may be short, but don’t be tempted to neglect the key elements of the French soundscape. If you haven’t tuned your ear in properly, your listening skills will suffer even if you know the words or grammar “on paper”. 

You’ll sound dire, too.  

Focus on sounds that are different from English. Understand that getting the rhythm and intonation of phrases right can be even more important than the pronunciation of individual sounds and words. 

You don’t need to polish so much that you could pass for a native. but if you pay attention to the right things and you can “sound” better than you are. 

That matters because you need to win the confidence of the fluent French speaker you want to talk to. 

If you fail at key aspects of accent, talking with you can be a real strain for them.

There’s a risk they’ll just switch to English…or avoid you altogether. 

3. Get the main sentence patterns 

If you want to learn French fast, don’t get distracted by abstract French grammar for its own sake.

Don’t get bogged down in tables showing French verb and case endings. 

Instead, think of grammar as the most important repeatable French sentence patterns. Focus relentlessly on these patterns. 

Grasp rules of thumb that explain what’s going on and that you can apply on the wing (like the ones for the French case endings). Learn the highest frequency exceptions. 

Later, when you’ve developed more of a feel for what sounds right, you can work some more on “grammar” to help you fill in the gaps, refine your expression and explain surprises. 

4. Learn the most frequent French vocab

Raw word power matters but did you know that just 250 words or so make up about 50% of everyday French? 

Build up to six or seven hundred “essential words” and you’re very much in business. 

Reach 1000 words, you can understand 80% of an everyday French text and say a lot of what you want, even if you have to explain things in a roundabout way.  

Your “first thousand” should include the 650 most common words (the top 50 French verbs are of course, important among them). And then?

5. Add three types of fluency booster vocabulary 

Add to those 650 or so most common words another three classes of words and phrases (think of them as special fluency weapons in your drive to learn French quickly): 

Filler and conversational connector words such as “alors” (well), “Quoi?” (What?), “hien” (uh?), “en fait” (in fact). They pepper natural speech and can really help move a conversation forward. 

“Tool kit phrases” that help you keep up and learn as you go, without switching to English. For example: “Common dit-on en français: ….” (How do you say …. in French?), “Parlais plus lentement, si’l vous plaît” (Please speak more slowly), “Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire?” (What does that mean) and so on. 

Your own personal “islands of fluency”, that’s to say, bespoke words and phrases that may not be so common but which relate to your personal need for French: talking about your profession, hobbies, goals and so on. 

6. Learn how to get French into your memory (and out again)

Ok, Dr P, but how do I actually remember the key grammar patterns and essential vocab well enough to use them in real life? 

Not by accident! Not in your sleep! Not with one magic method! 

First, you need to get words into your memory (“encoding”). 

Be on look out for the great many words that are the same as in English (pronunciation aside). Understand common French prefixes and suffixes that are added to the beginning or end of words to create other, often related ones. For example: dire – to say, to tell; contradire – to contradict (the prefix “contra-” means “not” or “the opposite of”.

Use memory association techniques to remember individual words that aren’t like the English. 

Learn “chunks”, that’s short phrases for every situation that native speakers of any language deploy without thinking.  

Second, you need to make sure you don’t forget what you’ve just learned. 

It’s been shown that reviewing material as soon as the day after you first tried to learn it and then at increasing intervals is the way to make it stick. The method is called the spacing effect.      

Paper flashcards or a flashcard app with the English on one side and the French on the other are great for this.

Flashcards aren’t your thing? Then you can double down on lots of reading and listening practice with your course materials and other sources that interest you.   

7. Make your learning more effortful for maximum efficiency

Work creatively with your new vocab, chunks and grammar patterns you want to focus on. 

Make up your own short dialogues with your words and phrases and practice with a conversation partner. Do the questions and other exercises that come with your course make your own. Dictation and translation back and forth can be powerful activities. They’ll get you working intensively with new examples of French that you’ve just come across. 

Test yourself to turn vocab and grammar review from just repetition into more effective recall.

Working with flashcards or translation from English into French makes for more effortful interaction, great for consolidating memories! 

Go back to your dictation, translation and or other exercises at intervals.  

In short, don’t be passive, be interactive with your French texts and audio.

Make your learning effortful. 

If you’re tired after focused study, that’s a good sign. No pain, less gain!

Yes! Deliberate practice like this is hard.

You may well finish a session feeling more frustrated than when you began or even that you’re going backwards. 

Get what I call the “fluency mindset“, stick at it and trust the process.  

8. Get a good beginner’s French course

With new sounds, grammar patterns and vocab to master, you could easily waste a lot of time gathering scattered materials for yourself. You can end up overwhelmed and not knowing where to start. 

If you want to learn French fast, do yourself a favour and begin with a well designed course that introduces the high-frequency French that ALL beginners need in a step-by-step way. 

Working through the course unit by unit, week by week is a great way to pace your learning. 

You can also refer back to your course materials if you hit questions when you’re out using your language “in the wild”. 

Make sure the course is dialogue based, has audio with transcript and parallel translations into English. 

Go for courses that have some explicit grammar explanation but made accessible and with a light touch. If you like exercises, make sure your course also supplies self-correct answers. 

You’re looking for a course that doesn’t just teach the key pronunciation, grammar and vocab that we saw are so important but one that you can use for the effortful practice that we’ve just been looking at. 

9. Get lots of enjoyable reading and listening practice

Focussed study with the aid of a good course will accelerate your progress in French remarkably, but it’s not enough on its own.  

If you want to learn French fast, you also need a lot of exposure to the language: listen, read.  

Once you’ve got some basics through your course – or earlier if you feel the urge – get started with more relaxed “extensive” listening and reading. 

Here the aim is to get enough to follow main thread of conversation or a story. 

Extensive listening and reading are great helping you remember what you’ve already seen. 

Plus: if the material isn’t too difficult for you, you’ll be able to “acquire” more French as well in a natural context, sub- or semi-consciously, without deliberate effort.  

So, find books to read aimed at learners at your level.

Try podcasts for learners in the language, ideally with transcripts. 

Some successful learners love diving into authentic content (i.e. made for natives) asap too.

To make reading native-level material easier, choose short articles on factual topics, read stories that you already know in English or use a parallel text with French on the right and an English translation on the left

As for listening, you may find it easier to watch the French (original or dubbed) films or series that you already know in their English versions.

As you start watching authentic French films, TV shows and YouTube vides, don’t be shy of switching on the subtitles to help (but, beyond the very earliest stages, use the French ones). 

The golden rule for “extensive” reading and listening practice is this: find things you find interesting and would want to listen to or watch in English anyway.  That way, it’s going to be so much easier to clock up hours and hours of enjoyable practice.  

10. How soon should start speaking French? 

Whether you should speak from the very beginning depends on your personality. 

If you’re the gregarious type who loves talking, learn the absolute basics and then throw yourself into using the language. Otherwise, there’s a risk your motivation will flag and you’ll give up. 

If you’re not so social, it’s also not a problem.  For you, conscious vocabulary and pattern building, reading or listening will be more efficient activities in the early stages.  When you start to speak, you’ll then have a larger vocab and more experience of what sounds right and better listening skills. All these will help you activate your speaking more rapidly than somebody who focusses on speaking from the very beginning.

Most of us want to speak as well, though, and you can’t get good at speaking without speaking a lot. 

Don’t put off speaking too long, just because you don’t “feel ready”. You don’t want to pass up on opportunities to make new friends in your language.

More than that, if you want to learn French quickly, don’t be a perfectionist. 

Don’t fixate on mistakes. Nobody cares. Instead, focus on your message and on the other person.

Prepare and practice short, relevant “scripts” on conversation topics that you’re going to need. 

Guess intelligently, pick up non-verbal clues to meaning. Use those filler and conversational connector words to sound more authentic and win some time. Ask questions for the same reason and to check you’ve understood.  

If you already know French speakers with whom you can practise, great.

That said, will they always have time to help you as you strive to move forward at pace? Will they have the knowledge of the language to explain why things are said a certain way?  Do they know how to give feedback constructively?

Don’t pay for a teacher to explain things you can get much more cost and time effectively from a good course.

No, where a teacher can really help is to explain things you’re stuck on and to ensure that you get consistent deliberate practice speaking. A good teacher will be able to give you reasoned feedback on your speaking and writing.  

Try out different teachers over Skype or Zoom on a platform like italki.com. When you’ve “clicked” with one or two, book a series of sessions in advance to make sure they really do happen.

The platform I use for this is italki.com. I’m such a fan, I’ve had over six hundred lessons (for several languages).

Want to learn French fast? Let’s recap   

• Get real! It takes hundreds of hours to get really fluent, but if you’re clear on what you need your French for and you use smart methods, you can make rapid progress.
• Don’t skimp on sound. Get key aspects of pronunciation right and you’ll win friends and influence people (well, they won’t run away or switch to English, at least
• You don’t need all the grammar, just the main sentence patterns.
• You must learn the highest frequency vocab. The first 650 words, plus “toolkit phrases”, conversational fillers and connectors and the bespoke vocab that matters for your, personal needs.
• Apply “brain savvy” methods to remember patterns and vocab. Effortful intensive, deliberate practice will speed things up.
• Use a course to present you with just what you need, to avoid wasting time, confusion and overwhelm.
• Read and listen for pleasure as much as you can. You don’t have to “speak from day one” but to get good at speaking, you need to start and practise, practise, practise. One-to-ones with a teacher or exchange partner are great for this.

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There’s good news as you start learning (or revising) the most useful French verbs: many are very similar to the English equivalent. Try guessing the meaning of “commencer”, “continuer”, “décider”.

The dictionary form of the verbs is the “infinitive”. In English that’s the “to” form: to be, to go, to say.  In French, infinitives end in –er, –ir or –re (aller – to go; venir – to come, être – to be).  The three verbs above (to commence, to continue and to decide, in case you were stuck ) are all “-er” verbs.

French verb endings change from the basic infinitive -er, -ir, -re most often that is to show who is doing the action (the “person”) and when (the “tense”). We see the same in English, though the patterns are different: I eat, you eat, he eats; je mange, tu manges, il mange).

How should you learn the most important French verbs?  

Don’t learn the list below in a set order: mix it up, for example by making flashcards with the French on one side and the English on the other. 

Besides the infinitive, you need to get the right endings. The endings (or “the conjugation”) of most verbs depends on whether they end in -er, -ir or -re.

However, just like in English, some French verbs are irregular (including some in our list). 

Learn the infinitives by all means but it also helps to learn the verb in an example phrases. Context helps you remember and makes sure you’ve got the ending right and you’re using the verb in a natural-sounding way. As you read, listen and speak, collect sentences that contain examples of the verbs.  Test yourself with your flashcards, try to make sentences of your own (modelled on your examples) and get feedback.

Keep coming back to the verbs and your illustrative sentences – you’ll forget them many times… ….until you don’t.  

Practice leads to learning. Conscious vocab building is powerful but it won’t work if you don’t get lots of exposure to French too. Find a good beginner’s course, start listening to podcasts or YouTube aimed at learners and start reading simplified texts, even if, at first, there’s a lot you don’t understand.

Bonne chance!

The 50 most common French verbs: a list

Here’s the basic German verb list, to get you started.

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How to learn French fast

How I learned French

The post The 50 most common French verbs appeared first on How to get fluent, with Dr Popkins.

I got the idea for this series in Tenerife, where I shot the first video.  That cinematic masterpiece ended with rather comic – and totally unscripted – fall into the pool.  I had the camera running as I was shuffling along the edge, trying to work out the best position for a dynamic dive in as a finishing shot. 

The best laid plans….

The “Dr Popkins Method?” project

The reason I was paying my first visit to the Canary Islands was to attend a retreat with a group of very talented group of language learners and teachers, vloggers and bloggers. 

They were pressing me to tell more about how I’ve got fluent in my ‘best” foreign languages and got a basic working knowledge in several others.   

Did my approach amount to a method which I could package to help you better than I have been doing so far on this site and the YouTube channel?  

I’m a bit uncomfortable about this as an exercise for a couple of reasons. 

First, it’s true that I’ve got a doctorate, but I’m a doctor of Russian history not applied linguistics.  On the other hand, I have qualified to teach Welsh and English to adults.  I also have the research skills that you need to complete any PhD successfully and use those skills both in preparing materials on this site and before I give talks at events such as the Polyglot Gathering.     

Second: yes, I’ve got vast experience of being a student in all types of language classes and in successful self-study.  

But it’s that very experience that makes me suspicious that there could be one method in language learning.   

That and the general critical approach that is another thing that goes with the territory when you’re a PhD, academic historian and lawyer.    

Still, l’ve risen to the challenge.  

There posts are very much my personal history.  

General conclusions are for a later stage.  Still, useful pointers may emerge for you (or maybe you’ll be more struck by the contrast with your own experiences – let me know in the comments below).

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A familiar schoolboy story

My story of French at school is a familiar one.

There were no foreign language taught in the schools I attended before I went to secondary school (aged eleven).

Then we had five years French, culminating in the GSCE “O level” (one of the exams that evolved into what is now called the GCSE exam).

We had to start German in the second year and I dropped it like a stone as soon as I could, after two years.

The only reason I kept going with French, I suppose, was because at my school it was compulsory to do at least one foreign language till aged sixteen.

At sixteen, I passed O level French with a “B” (the highest grade was an A, the subsequent A* grade had not yet been introduced).

On paper, that was not too bad but the truth was that I couldn’t speak or really understand any real French.

This became painfully clear on a number of family holidays to France during my secondary school days.

There, my intense embarressment and shyness didn’t help either.

For me, French to “O” level had been just another subject. The language I’d had to keep going with (because you had to do one language).

That was the only exposure I got in those years. It was before the internet and before home video recorders were widespread. So French video was totally inaccessible. You could pick up some crackly radio broadcasts and, of course, buy French books, but I had no particular interest.

Interest sparks and a need emerges

It was in the last two years of high school (aged 16 to 18) that I become quite excited by the idea of learning French and started to see the appeal of languages in general.

That was a paradox as I had decided not to carry on with French for “A” level. I was studying History, Government and Politics, Economics. I loved the subjects and a had a good time.  Looking back, though, we shouldn’t have been allowed to specialise so much.

I can’t really recall how or why this shift towards enthusiasm for languages took place, but the motivation was suddenly there.

I was studying a lot of French and wider European history all of a sudden and this cultural context may have been part of the picture. Also, several of my group of close friends were studying French, German or Latin for “A” level and getting to travel and explore books and films in their languages.

Maybe, at some level, I’d always liked the idea of being able to speak in a foreign language. Who wouldn’t?

It was just that I couldn’t see how you could get there.

I’d approached French like all my other subjects – as abstract knowledge.

While  getting fluent in a language certainly needs to involve a lot of study, it is also very much a practical skill.

In the autumn of my final year at school, I accepted the offer of a place to study history at the University of Oxford.

One thing, then is certain.  I now had a clear need for the language. At the end of the first term at Oxford, I’d have to sit a major exam on a text in French.

I started to do extra work on the language during the lunch hour, with one of my French teachers from the lower school who had very generously offered to help

The summer after A levels, I continued to work on my French.  I can remember sitting on the bed of the farmhouse my parents had rented for our holiday,  somewhere deep in rural France.

I was feeling overwhelmed at the obvious impossibility of remembering all the words you’d need.

I also felt somewhat angry at the university for expecting this obviously impossible task.

I was, though, starting to get into “France” and was busy reading a new door-stopper of a book all about that country (then in the early stages of Mitterand’s regime).

My themed French vocab book and John Ardagh’s book about (then) contemporary France.

The great leap forward: French “on the side” in Oxford

The French text we were examined on at the end of the first semester was Alexis de Tocquevilles L’ ancien régime et la révolution, which weighed in at about three hundred sophisticated, native-level paperback pages.  The English translation was out of print (again, in pre-internet days, that meant there was no practical way for me to get hold of it).

In second and third term, the exams passed, we historians were under much less pressure (people studying other subjects had there first big exams at the end of the first year, when we had none).

I now had the language bug big time.

I was a little envious of those who were doing modern language degrees. There were also one or two students who’d taken a year out before starting university and had gone abroad and learned languages.

I was determined to get fluent in French. I took control of my own learning and threw myself into self-study.

The summer before I’d been overwhelmed by the immensity of the task.  At least I’d understood that knowing a lot of words is central to real progress in language learning.

Now, in extensive language section of Blackwells bookshop (now a shadow of its former self) I found a book of French vocabulary for A level organised by themes and decided to use it to help me tackle the problem systematically.

In the course of the next nine months or so, I proceeded to learn the words off by heart.  I did this by making flashcards with individual French words on one side (or phrases, there were some of these in the book) and English on the other.  I colour-coded the nouns (red ink for feminine, blue for masculine).

I kept the cards in small brown envolopes of twenty and worked on them using “spaced repetition”.  The system was known of course then but I can’t remember reading about it.  It was something I stumbled on unwittingly.  It just seemed common sense to me, given my bad memory.

I also bought “Teach Yourself French Grammar” and worked through that in the same way, making flash cards twice the size of the vocab ones.  These had explanations and examples on one side and a prompting question on the other (in English).  I was using the “testing effect”.

I started listening a lot to French radio, which you could pick up on and off on medium wave in the evening (I have just discovered why tonight, as I write this post).

For the second and third semesters, I also took a once-a-week lunchtime class but, aside from that, wasn’t doing any speaking or production.

I wasn’t trying to do much reading either for the first year or so.  It was vocab, grammar and listening.

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The large French dictionary my dad bought me for my Oxford studies (still my main dictionary, despite the lack of any modern IT or internet vocab), plus the Oxford syllabus

The thrill of seeing that I could speak and understand French

In the long vacation at the end of first year, I went on a holiday with my parents to France for the last time.

This was the sixth consecutive summer we’d spent three weeks in France.

The three weeks in the gîte passed much as normal, with no real need to use the language and with me incapable of creating any situations where I could use it.

But then, at the end, we stayed for three or four days as the guests of a French family (work colleagues of an old family friend).

The family could hardly speak English. Thanks to all my efforts, I was now by some margin the best of the four of us in my family in French, so was doing a lot of interpreting as well as free speaking.

It was all very rough and ready but – zut alors! – I was communicating in French. It felt great and confirmed that a lot of listening, the grammar and a lot of words could make difference, even though hadn’t been practising much.

I kept going at French throughout the second undergraduate year in much the same way.

In my third year, I was able to read the language well enough to choose as my specialist “Further subjet” an option called “Literature, Politics and Society in the Third Republic 1871-1914”.

For this, I had to read several French texts as well as a lot of secondary literature in English about the period.

It was one of the highest marked papers in “Finals” (the graduation examinations).

In summer 1988, a few weeks after finishing university, I went off to Wales for nearly a year to learn Welsh.  I also started learning Russian.  More about those experiences in later posts.

Taking French further in my graduate student days and beyond

It wasn’t the end for me and French, though.

In summer 1989, back from Wales and waiting to return to Oxford to begin my post-graduate research, I enrolled on a summer course at Grenoble University.

This was a two or three-week course.  We lived in the university halls of residence.

My plan was to try to find a job there till the end of the summer.  In that, I failed miserably (it was difficult to find something for so short a period), so I was back in Yorkshire for the last six weeks before returning to university.

I was only back in Oxford for four semesters before my studies took me to Germany, Finland and Russia.

Those four semesters as communism collapsed in country after country in Eastern Europe.

I attended events at the Maison Française d’Oxford cultural centre and made several French friends.  I met one of them regularly to practice French.  I even considered going off on the Erasmus post-graduate student mobility programme to spend a semester at Sciences Po in Paris.

In the end, though, I went to Freiburg…  After all, I already spoke quite a lot of French.  German was beckoning, but that’s another story.

I was now able to read French fluently and hold conversations. In the years – now decades – since then, that’s what I’ve kept doing, every now and again.

French is still very much my fourth foreign language, quite a bit behind my Welsh, Russian and German.

One reason for that is that it’s never been a priority.

Another is that I’ve never spent an extended period in France.

Indeed, since the Grenoble courses in 1989, I’ve only even been to France at all five or six times.  I went twice from Germany (1993, 1994) to visit one of the French friends I’d made in Oxford.  Then there was a fifteen year gap until a visit for a week in New Year 2009. Spring 2011 saw me over in Brittany for a few days to take part in Ar Redadeg, the sponsored run for the Breton language. In summer 2016, on my residential Basque course, I crossed into the “northern Basque Country” (from the Spanish to the French state) for an afternoon.

A couple of years ago I did an online evaluation with the Institut Francais.  That showed me on the B2/C1 border. At some point, I’d love to take my French further to do the DALF C1 exam. I’ve got the books

Ready and willing. My French C1 books.

In the meantime, I  listen France Inter radio a few times a month as I got about my household routine.  How much easier that is now I can stream the channel on my internet radio or phone.

When I do get back to French big time, I know what my challenges will be: the colloquial language, including slang, plus writing, which I’ve never much done and is always the skill I find hardest. Maybe it’ll make more sense to start with the B2 exam.

So that’s my story with my first langauge love.  I’d love to hear how YOU got started with your language(s), too. That’s what the comments section’s for down below

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Next up: how I learned Welsh.  Check out my French and Welsh stories in the video:

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