Imagine what could happen if you were to learn one new element of French each day and put it into practice, even if it were for just a few minutes a day.
By the end of the year, you would have mastered 365 new elements of the language! That may not seem like much but let me tell you about my own experience to encourage you.
Many years ago, I spent several months in Italy, working to develop a new language program for the EEU. At one point during my stay, I had to go teach in Germany for a week.
I only knew one sentence in German: “Ich meste einen caffe kaufen, bitte.” I’m not sure if the spelling is correct, but that was the essence of what I could say and it meant “I want to buy a coffee, please”.
I learned this sentence early on in my teaching career when a friend taught it to me.
After he showed me the sentence, I repeated it over and over again, using various tones, inflection, saying it loud, saying it soft, saying it as though I were a German soldier, etc. until I felt that I really “owned” that sentence.
By the time I went to Germany, I had not repeated that sentence for at least 20 years or more. But guess what?
I used that one sentence to survive in Germany for an entire week!
I repeated the sentence substituting “das” (which means “that) for “caffe” whenever I wanted or needed something.
The first night I went to a restaurant, the waiter asked me what I wanted and I pointed to the table next to me and said I wanted one of “that”, which he called wiener schnitzel when he brought it to my table. Voila! I learned a new German expression!
This scene was repeated over and over again throughout the week.
I managed to get a hotel room, buy a train ticket and do a number of other things, all thanks to the fact that 20 years earlier, I had practiced one sentence over and over again until I “owned” it.
Do you see my point? Practice really does make a difference when learning a second language so keep practicing, even if you only have 5 minutes to do it and use what you know, even if it’s just a little French, whenever you can. The rewards will be worth it!
A la prochaine………
Robert
