French for Beginners
During our first class, it soon became clear that we all had some things in common: a failure to shine at French in school, and an enthusiasm and increased confidence to do something about it now - many decades later!
For our first lesson our teacher John Curtis set an exercise: ‘Getting to know you example’ - about 24 sentences of information written in French about John, his family and his interests.
As an exercise, each of us read aloud a couple of lines, followed by the group doing our best to translate them into English.
Our second lesson was hosted by Debby and led by John. He introduced us to the work of Michel Thomas who made many videos, each one about ten minutes long. They are on the internet.
We then did a session on numbers from 1 to 100, and some larger numbers. Up to 70 is straightforward, 70 to 100 needs more care. Next John introduced us to telling the time. For example, “Il est cinq heures et demi.” It is half past five. The time is not too difficult; it just needs practice to become competent.
In lesson three at Lynda’s house, we did more practice in numbers and John introduced a sheet containing the French alphabet, “L’alphabet,” and how to pronounce all the letters. An exercise we can now do is read car number plates in French – letters and numbers!
In lesson four, John concentrated on Exercise 1 in our recommended text book, ‘BBC book, The French Experience.’ He also played a French song from his tablet.
I think we are all still enthusiastic to learn. In my view, we need to keep our learning enjoyable: we need to work at a pace that is not too slow or too fast, and do a little private practice every day to help the words stick in the memory. This method should eventually give us the confidence we need to speak the language.