Learning another language

I can barely speak English properly, but I fancy learning another language. Let's be honest, the French make better films than Hollywood and it'd be cool to watch them without the subtitles. Also, I'm European but I can only speak one language and I feel a bit guilty about it.

Plus, all teh laydiez loves the French accent, non?

So, does anyone have any advice about learning to speak another language? How would I go about doing it? Can anyone recommend a cd course, or are those to be avoided?

Avoid CD courses. Take a class which includes both conversational practice and thorough grammatical instruction. It wouldn't hurt to study up on English grammar as well--that will give you a framework to fit things into. If you already know what a subjunctive is (e.g.) and what its uses are in English, it will be easier for you to wrap your head around similar concepts in other languages.

Go to the country and live--the sink or swim method. Of course, everyone seems to speak English these days...

CD courses are no substitute for the real thing. You can get a reading knowledge from those, (sort of.) But if you really want to get anywhere near fluent, you need to converse. Practice-practice-practice, with a real speaker. I've no idea what programs there are in the UK, but maybe the EU offers something? Some sort of "teach the anglos French" deal?

An exchange would be ideal, or an immersion course. The best way to learn any language is the same way you learned English: total immersion. (Or as near total as you can get.)

My $0.02.

The French make better movies than Hollywood?

Ummm, no.

Immersion is obviously primo, but that's not a luxury everyone has. I would recommend first buying a dictionary. I personally like Langenscheidt. They're easy to use.

Make a friend whom speaks the language and has a lot of patience.

Start easy: find a good online newspaper--one that does celebrity interviews and such. I think if you begin trying to read pieces on tax reform, you're going to get discouraged.

Be persistent. Every day for a half hour is better than once a week for 3 hours.

Private tutors and courses are good, too.

And if it's French you're working on for sure, you'll REALLY want a Bescherelle conjugation dictionary. Every conjugation of just about every major verb. Handy as hell.

How is it possible you grew up in England ( i'm assuming you are born and raised), but you haven't had french courses? When i was there (Birmingham schooling) we had years of french classes.

Off course, i can't speak it too save my life anymore.

I'm really embarassed that I can only speak one langauge and most people in Europe can speak like six fluently.

I took out these "Learn to Speak Spanish" tapes from the library once. Needless to say that didn't work very well.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/learnwelsh/

Not that I speak it, but...

I had lessons at school, but I am both lazy and thick, so I didn't do very well.

I had about 8 years of back to back study. Plus two trips to France. But the older i get, the more i forget.

Bloody hell.

[Edited on Feb 08, 2005 by Dizzy]

First of all, the French do not maker better films. Germans make pretty crazy films, Japanese, Chinese, and other Asian films are usually good, Spanish, some Italian, several Latin American, and even your country make good films, but aside from Amelie I can't think of any good recent French films. They usually all suck.

Now onto the matter at hand. I wouldn't pick French is my second language. French is almost as stupid a language as English, with weird grammar rules, funky pronounciation, and non-phoenetic spellings. Plus, French has entirely different grammar than English, so you have nothing to relate to.

When I learned Italian, it was easy because I already spoke Spanish (my native language) and the grammar was the same and a lot of the vocabulary is similar. In fact, learning almost any Latin-based language will be easy for me because the root is the same. I can already understand Portuguese for the most part, and even languages like Romanian I can pick up words in.

If you learn a language that has very little to no similarity from your last one (like English and French), you will have a lot more trouble learning. It'll be literally like learning to speak again. I would recommend another Germanic based language, like well the obvious, German. Especially considering that German I believe is spoken natively in more countries in Europe than any other. So it would be a lot more useful than learning French.

If you're going to learn a language with a different grammar structure, I would pick Spanish. It's the second most spoken language in the world (after Mandarin) and it's much easier than French. Spanish is a very phoenetic language, you read it how you see it.

As far as the best way to learn a language, that's easy. The best way to learn a language is to go to a country that speaks it, with no money. I guarantee you'll be fluent in probably a few months. Short of that, I would take classes (to pick up textbook language rules), and this is important, watch lots and lots of TV and movies in that language. This is so you can see how the language is spoken in the real world, which is very different than in books and tapes. When I was learning Italian our teacher would make us watch Italian TV and movies all the time, and it really helped. Likewise, the people that speak the best English as a second language learned it from watching American TV.

I would not try to learn it on your own from a book, that's a recipe for disaster. Tapes aren't much better. I would go to classes, and do everything else I said. Good luck.

British accents are hot enough. You're just in the wrong country for yours to be properly swooned over. But, immersion is definitely the best. For all the classes and studying I did, I only really learned sign language when I was in an environment where it was used daily. Now, it's second nature.

hehe be born from parents with different nationalities...sorry I'm just being a show off, ça doit etre mon coté français...

no but more seriously go to France to learn real french, the one in books isn't always the best, oh and yeah we don't wear berets, or carry baguettes under our arm all day,
and because they used to ask me in the US when I was a kid if we had microwaves and running water...yes we do!

I've heard word gender's pretty weird for you guys though...so good luck with that!

This is true. English is so stupid they don't even have gender specific definite articles!

The teacher can be either a man or a woman and you'd never know.

J'écris ceci qui emploie une de ces choses en ligne vraiment épineuses de traducteur ainsi wordking exact ne pourrait pas être ce qui être il devrait. Quoi qu'il en soit, je pense qu'apprenante une autre langue est une bonne idée. Je peux parler allemand mais des thats à son sujet vraiment. La chose drôle est, quelqu'un va essayer et traduire ceci et voir que je suis les bollocks parlants justes. Je me demande s'il y a un mot français pour des bollocks. Oh bien, fredonnement de ho, de nouveau à lui je devine.

Is this a problem? It places the stress on the office rather than the person, certainly. Is that a bad thing?

Why do inanimate objects need to be personified? It's about memorization of something that seems to be completely arbitrary.

French is probably a good one to learn because it's easy to pop over there from England...but I don't think you can beat Russian for a cool alphabet and for a sexy accent. German also scores well with me for hot accentness but I realise it doesn't float everyone's boat...that said, it's a bit easier to get into because of the similarities to English.

Anyway, from my experience, it's good to have a book/CD set. I like the Routledge Colloquial ones. They do lots of offbeat languages as well so if you want to learn Mongolian or Lithuanian, you're well away.

Next up, join a class so you get some practice speaking and listening with other people - it also means you've got access to a teacher for questions and problems etc.

Finally book a holiday and have a few beers to get over the initial nervousness you might have when using the language for the first time. My fave way to improve my foreign language speaking is to go out, get plastered, and yap away to people in bars all night. By the end you are likely to have learned many interesting and useful new words which will strangely not be covered in your language course, nor mentioned by your teacher.

Bonne chance!

It's inefficient and inflexible. English requires more words to say the same thing.

Youth is definitely wasted on the young.

There are so many languages I want to learn but I'm past the point where it'll just stick, like when you're younger. But when I was younger, I didn't give a shit about learning new languages.

That's why I'm mad at God -- the ironic son-of-a-bitch!