I’ve been trying to learn French throughout the past few weeks. I think French is a beautiful language, and I’ve always been interested in it, but I never really thought I’d be able to learn it. (Considering that I completely failed two years of Spanish class in high school.) But I decided to give it a try anyway, since I didn’t have the pressure of being in a classroom and this way I could go at my own pace.

For the first week I listened to a few ‘Learn French’ podcasts, and I learned a few things, but it was all very slow. So I found an audio book (although I wouldn’t really call it a book) called ‘Michel Thomas: Speak French For Beginners’, and I absolutely love it.

He has a very different style of teaching. Instead of just making you repeat words and sentences and try to remember everything, he actually tells you to do the exact opposite. I was somewhat doubtful in the beginning because I thought “How could you learn a language without trying to remember anything?”. Well, he makes it really easy. You don’t think about remembering the words, but you just somehow absorb them, and you just know them. 

What I also really liked was that on the audio book there’s also two other people who don’t know any French either, so they’re learning with you. It’s interesting because most of the time, when they’re having trouble with something, you are too. It’s almost like you’re actually there with them, because you’re learning together. When one of the ’students’ gets a word wrong, Michel tells them to “Stop guessing, and to think about it.” and it seems to be helping me, because I think that’s one of my problems with learning a new language – I guess too much, and I don’t actually think about what I’m saying.

So far it’s going really well, and I’m going to keep learning.