Bonjour tout le monde!Welcome to the "Tips and Tricks for French Beginners" post. I have written this guide in the hopes that you might be able to gain some tips and tricks from it, but also in the hopes that we can start a discussion here about French to help each other out! I did French in my HSC and received a high band 5. I’m continuing French in my second year of Uni in 2017! French beginners is not an easy subject by any means. French is largely a game of strategy and skill in the HSC. Staying on top of vocabulary sounds easy, until you realise you need to be familiar with words in their written form, their conjugated form, and their oral form. Mais comment?! (But how?!)
Speaking:Personally, this was my favourite part of learning French. The mellifluous sounds of the language sound magical, and knowing that that magic rolled off my tongue makes the hard yards of French totally worth it. In saying that, speaking is a part that a lot of people struggle with. Part of this is the accent. You need to not be afraid of embracing the accent, even in fear of sounding silly! Sometimes I found myself trying a little too hard and slipping into a combination of a Spanish and Italian accent – quite off the mark. You’ve just got to laugh and slowly train your tongue into not rolling Rs, or train your voice to speak softer or lower, so that your words are correctly formed.
Once you are ready to have a good crack at the accent, you need to listen to how words are pronounced by someone who is not a novice French speaker. Your teacher should be able to express exactly how words would be accepted in an exam. Take note of this! If you are creating some prepared responses to speaking questions on palm cards, for example, write the word correctly spelt and then in brackets write the word the way it sounds in a different colour pen. If you are in a speaking exam and have been asked a predicted question, so you want to roll off exactly what you have on that card, the different coloured pen will stick to your memory so you can pronounce the word like a true francophone.
Of course, different areas of French speaking countries have different accents (watch the movie: Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis). So whilst watching French films, listening to French radio or watching the French news has merit, if you’re finding an inconsistency in pronunciation, speak to your teacher about that.
As for studying for speaking, I used palm cards. I made an exhaustive list of questions that I could be asked in an exam. On one side of the card, I wrote the question in French, and a few of the variations that the examiner could ask that question in. On the other side, I wrote a prepared response in French. I explicitly made sure that I used each of the tenses at least 6 times across all 40 or so cards, to increase my chances of being able to express proper use of tense. I incorporated idioms and qualifiers. I wanted my prepared responses to sound as natural as they could, at the same time ticking all of the syllabus’ boxes. You need to be prepared to be asked a question in a way different to how your teacher would express it. You also need to be prepared to expand on questions that you didn’t think you would be asked to expand on. For example, in my HSC I spoke for about 30 seconds about my mum’s career as a teacher, where I said she started as a Japanese teacher. Then my examiner asked if anyone else in my family knew how to speak Japanese, and why did my mum learn it. This was totally foreign to me and I could have prepared better by only talking about things I am comfortable discussing beyond what I have prepared. For example, I could have left out the Japanese teacher bit and only talked about what she teaches now, then I could have directed the conversation to saying that she has inspired me to be a teacher, for example.
You have a limited control in directing your speaking exam. You can’t sound like you are reading a monologue, you need to make sure that your conversation sounds natural. However, if your strengths of oral skills sit with talking about a certain topic, prepare ways to lead into that based on other questions you could be asked.
I had my sister ask me questions in French and then I would respond to her without looking at the card. This is important because you need to build up the skill of not relying on the cards in front of you. In a situation of panic, you need to be able to kind of wing it. You need to be able to string together a sentence to get you through the question, and be ready to move on to the next. My teacher also gave us “mock speaking exams” in the lead up to our final exam. We sat in a room, just the two of us, and she conducted a conversation in the way an examiner would while I spoke into a recorder (on my phone). For homework, I would play back the conversation and work out where I was weakest.
My final note on speaking is the timing. If you are finding that you aren’t hitting that 5-minute mark, try expand on your simplest responses. These responses are probably the ones you made first. Try add in “I think that…” or “I like it because…” or “in my opinion…” and expand like that. Most people get stuck at the 4 minute mark, so adding an extra 15 seconds to even just 4 of your responses makes the time up to 5 minutes! Also, don’t forget to count in the fact that you speak faster under pressure!
Listening:Most students find that if speaking isn’t their most loathed part of French, it is the listening. For me, listening was so, so difficult. From as early as possible it is really important to be exposed to a lot of French speakers, and you do the translating. Getting your hands on past HSC audio, trials audio, workbook audio or half yearly audio is really helpful. These will help you to respond exam-style. If you have the comprehension questions specifically connected to the audio, you are simulating the exam experience.
However, these resources are limited. What is unlimited? French radio. French news. French music. French movies. For me, my incorporation of organic French listening was listening to French musical artists on the way to school and back each day. “Black M” was my favourite because he rapped, not sung, so I could pick up words in their “spoken” form rather than their sung form. French movies are great and whacky, and very, very French. Don’t hold back from watching one even with the subtitles. When you make the French-english-scenario connection, you gain a really great insight into the words. It is all exposure!
My last tip for listening is: because exposed to many different voices. Towards the end of the course I found a trend in my listening results: I was scoring lower on the questions where I listened to a male speaker. I found that it was because my ears weren’t always as tuned in to listen to voices with a lower tone. It was difficult for me to isolate words in a sentence because to me, the deep voice connected them too well. My classmate found that it was difficult for him to listen to female speakers because females tend to play around with tone in their sentences, almost as if they are singing the sentence. Little things like this can be off-putting, so you need to find the trends of your lowest scoring listening results and work on tuning your ears into responding to them better.
Reading:Reading French is one of the easier techniques to master. The reason being, you are remembering words by sight, and you have a dictionary at your disposal if you ever get stuck. The less reliant you are on a dictionary, the better. The less time you spend flicking
through a dictionary, the more time you have to answer the question.
In the exam, I always looked at what the comprehension questions were and then I returned to the reading material and began reading. I approached sentences by reading them in full and then identifying which words I needed to know in order to understand the jist. Usually, this was a noun or a verb. You can fill in the little words in your head, but you need the staple parts of the sentence in order to translate the whole thing. In a typical reading section of an exam, you will not need every sentence in order to answer the questions. This is why it is so important to build up the skill of identifying the subject matter in each sentence before wasting time with a dictionary when you won’t need that sentence! You may find that underlining the parts of the sentence that you think are keys to answering the question to be helpful. This way, when it comes to writing your response, you just flick back to the underlined parts of the text to formulate a response.
You need to be familiar with what the question is asking of you. “Compare,” “evaluate” and “why” all direct your response in different ways. If the question asks you to specifically reference the text to justify your response, you more or less need to explicitly reference the exact point in the text that informed your response. This doesn’t mean quoting the text in French itself. If you do that, you will need to offer an English translation. It is actually just enough for you to give a direct English translation of the section of the text that informed your response! However, they may ask you for more than just textual referencing. In fact, they may ask you for your opinion! Your opinion is obviously based off something, and no doubt that something is part of the text. So you can have whatever opinion you like, as long as it came from somewhere in the text.
To better prepare yourself for the reading part of the exam, it is crucial that you expose yourself to various types of reading texts. This includes textbooks, online articles, magazines (try: Okapi) and even something as small and simple as following a French band on Facebook and reading their posts.
Writing:The part of writing that I struggled the most with was: conjugating verbs correctly and quickly. In hindsight, I could have worked far more on verb conjugation than I did. I suggest that every Monday, you write a short weekend recount and submit this to your teacher. This helps you to use your knowledge of the past tense! Or, if you struggle with the future tense, spend 15 minutes on a Friday writing about what you will do on the weekend. This is a simple exercise that helps you to put conjugation into practice. When you get into the exam, there is nothing stopping you (after reading time) from writing a quick conjugation code up the top of your writing pages so that you can refer to that later on!
Be sure to address the text type. If you are asked to write a letter, start and finish with the typical letter conventions, (Dear… Write soon!). If you are writing an e-mail, you should forge an email address and work from there. The best way to prepare for the text types is to have a bank of vocabulary up your sleeve and be prepared to throw them into a response and continue with the writing!
You need to incorporate as many tenses into your response as possible. The syllabus requires that you know various types, so you need to show the markers that you know your stuff! The easiest tense to write in is the present tense, until you get a text type that funnels your response into the past or future tense. If you are writing a letter describing your time overseas, you are obliged to write the most of this in past tense. Don’t forget to add in some future tense by saying that you hope to return in the future! You have to make a conscious effort to involve as many of the tenses as possible, but when you do that, everything falls into place!
Using a dictionary:Throughout the year, you should familiarise yourself with the dictionary that you intend to take into the exam at the end. You want to be able to know that the front of the dictionary is French to English translation, and the back is the opposite. You want to know which irregular verbs are conjugated in the middle section, and you want to be able to know it all at speed. In an exam you can waste a lot of time with dictionaries. You need to be able to improve your skills at locating words in the dictionary quickly, and understanding how YOUR dictionary works in terms of the examples in provides, the format and the parts of speech codes (noun, verb, adjective).
You can study on Instagram…kind of…I firmly believe that one of the best ways to remember things is to have them frequently pop up. You subliminally start to take in different words. It is for this exact reason, that if you grew up in a bilingual home, you would probably learn both languages organically. This isn’t going to guarantee you a Band 6, however it does help with expressions and vocabulary. There are two Instagram accounts that I recommend you follow if you don’t already: frenchwords and for more advanced vocabulary, frenchwordsjournal. Frenchwords posts a simple textbox with a French word and English translation.
I love this because it exposes you to vocabulary that you won’t always find in your textbook, yet could prove very handy to know. The same page posts famous French quotes with their translation, and also holiday expressions. Frenchwordsjournal is run by the owner of frenchwords. The content here is more advanced, but the photos are pretty enough that you won’t mind it on your instafeed anyway.
Online DictionariesThere are teachers who will warn against any kind of electronic dictionary because they are not welcomed in the exam. There is a lot of logic behind this and if you feel that you are forever fumbling through a paper dictionary at slow pace, you probably need to work up those skills. However, I want to talk about a certain online dictionary and app: WordReference. This here is your meilleure ami in French. WR is wonderful for many reasons, but a big part of the appeal is the conversational examples. For example, if I type in “how” in the English to French conversion, it offers translations with a supporting sentence so that you can choose the most appropriation translation of “how.”
Furthermore, it offers small expressions such as the translations for more conversational uses of language such as “how about that,” “how dare you,” “how many?” and “how often?” to select a few. If the app isn’t great enough already, WR also has a topic of discussion area. You can submit to this discussion; requesting a fluent French speaker to give you the most appropriate translation if it were not already listed above. Else, you can scroll through and probably find an expression that you’re looking for. This is typically the place where people discuss anglicisms or words with no direct translation from English to French.
Although I don’t encourage relying on this, you can enter verbs in their infinitive and select the option to have the conjugation chart pop up for the different tenses. As extremely helpful and tempting as this is, it does present a threat to you learning verb conjugation par coeur (off by heart). Essentially, word reference is wonderful for honing in on expressions, colloquialisms, selecting the most appropriate translation and for discussion with fluent French speakers! The cerise sur le gateau is: the app is 100% free! There is no premium account. Word Reference also carries more languages than English and French, so if you learn another language, definitely check to see if Word Reference can help you out there too!
Bonne chance!French is not easy but it is very rewarding. Together we can work through whatever you may face throughout the course. Comment whatever is on your mind below!
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