LadyGrey1986 wrote:Time for a little French update! I had a trial session with a tutor today and according to her, my spoken French is at a solid intermediate level. It just that I don't have to money to book a weekly session with her! I really would to reach an advanced level. Should I just read and listen a tonne and accept my spoken French will lag behind? At the moment, this seems the most realistic option. I don't want to cut down on my Arabic sessions. Arabic, especially Levantine Arabic, is my language love. Now if I were to win the lottery!
This is basically the best result most people get out of school in the Netherlands when they learn French/German. It's not so bad all in all, but in reality you need another push forward to get to being comfortable. Five years ago, I was stuck at intermediate French just like you were now for two years straight (and unlike you, I had a more pertinent use for it because I actually travelled to Belgium every month at the time). Intermediate French is how far I got before I actually got stuck in Brussels for a few months with flatmates that only spoke French. The thing that really sent my French into the stratosphere was dropping the reliance on other factors making my life easier at the time (even though a lot of that was actually not really desirable at the time). My experience was that you have both the cultural barrier and the linguistic barrier to overcome, and French was the first language I really improved on my own (with some help from the AF).
Reading and listening can never hurt. It really helped me out a lot. No et Moi is a good starting place. When you're at the intermediate level there are really three things that are going to help you:
1) a LOT of exposure to the written word. I'm not such a big TV fanatic, but I subscribed to a French popular science magazine that I would read on trains wherever I went. I read lots of books (I remember I went on a holiday in France and just kept buying Amélie Nothomb books). It really helped me out. Keep reading, and at this stage, go for volume and speed, not for intricate details. Most sentence structures should be easy to grasp by now. You'll encounter some weird, complex things, but you can tackle them as they come. Probably you'll study them under 3 and start recognizing them soon enough anyway.
2) Speaking exposure to real, colloquial French. I lived with flatmates that didn't speak much English. One day the bathroom flooded. You learn the word "fuite" quickly in that case. In my case, I also had some experience with an ex who used certain Belgianisms in her speech and how they were used. The two months didn't really build my grammar knowledge, but they developed the confidence to use French in situations where I would normally have deferred to English or Dutch (Belgium, after all). This can be the hardest thing to obtain if you're not living in-country, and it's the reason my French has stalled out at its B2-C1ish level (not a bad level to be at, but it would be better with more practice in real life).
3) Attention to grammatical detail. I'm not just talking about the verb conjugations here, most of these should be pretty familiar to you by know (I was ok with almost all of them except for the subjunctive, really). What I'm talking about is finer points of usage, textual structures, how to express deeper ideas in French that require a bit more elegance. When I hired my tutor, the thing she noticed was that I had a good grasp of colloquial French by that point but it lacked elegance and precision. French is a language in which nitpicking is particularly valuable because it's also how that culture works. Grammar here stops being about what form you are supposed to use, but rather when you should be using which form and why. Personally I did a lot of writing which really helped me up my game. But be prepared - if you go down this route, enlist someone who's critical and tough on your mistakes. The problems at the intermediate level aren't the fact you are making mistakes, but that you are going to make mistakes which are avoidable or easily remedied and weren't caught earlier on because you were relying on coping strategies that allowed you to circumvent obstacles. You've got to be very Dutch and accept fierce criticism of your work. This is a good thing.
I looking a bit at Cavesa here. I know she leArned French in the Czech Republic and she isn't too find of tutors...
I know a good tutor, but she's hella expensive and I can't afford her right now given I'm improving my Spanish. You don't need a tutor per sé, but I like them at intermediate levels as long as they're strict and push you out of your comfort zone.
