My American boyfriend has expressed an interest in learning French. While I’m happy to oblige, and want to teach him all I can myself, I’ve never done this before and don’t really know how to teach someone a whole language from scratch. I think it might speed things up a bit if he can find some learn-by-yourself CDs to listen to when he’s got the time.
Has anyone here had any experience learning a new language with one of these sets of CDs? Are they worth it at all? Is there a certain company that does a better job? I’m willing to pay a little more, as long as I know they’ll help him to pick up the basics of the language fairly quickly.
I bought some Pimsleur language CDs to start learning Spanish because a now-ex of mine is from Argentina. We broke up before I was done with the course and I lost all interest in learning Spanish, but while I was listening to them I was picking up the phrases. They were heavy-repitition and the Spanish ones seemed to be oriented toward tourist-level Spanish. Lots of “where is the hotel,” “where is the restaurant” sort of stuff. No idea what the French might be like.
I honestly don’t think it is possible to learn a language by CD unless your boyfriend is some kind of savant. I had to learn to become conversant in Spanish to the point of giving half hour academic lectures. It was very difficult and I had much greater advantages than listening to tapes.
The only way to learn a language is to speak it hours a week. My wife is fluent in French. She has taken in it since she was 12 and majored in it as immersion in college. Even she gets rusty and she uses it several times a week on her job.
Those courses are for those who want to brag that they have “studied” another language when all they know is a few key phrases.
Well, he is a smarty-pants, but I’m not expecting him to be able to lecture in French after a few CDs! I guess what I’m hoping for is a chance for him to get a little bit more familiar with the language, pick up some vocabulary, and give me something to build on with him afterwards.
No, but your local Alliance Francaise will have courses in conversational French for fairly reasonable prices.
Personally, I don’t think you can’t learn a language by listening any more than you can learn to ride a bike by reading about it. If there was a written part with listening and reading exercises he might learn to understand the language without being able to communicate in it (he wouldn’t be able to write because there’d be nobody around to check his work). But if it’s just listening and repeating I’m not sure he’d even learn to understand it. I listen to opera all the time and I have yet to learn Italian.
In '99 I went to Paris for 15 days, alone, and didn’t know French. So I picked up a couple tapes form the library, and tried to learn phrases and such. I did learn a little, enough to not embarass Americans too much. But I don’t think you can really learn enough that way to know the language. I did learn to speak, but when it come to writing the words I learned, I can’t because the only thing that sticks right now is the words, and not the spelling. But I gues it all depnds on how in depth they are, but I don’t think they would be in depth enough.
I think your relationship with him will have a far more profound effect on his learning than the CDs.
Anyway, I think it’s totally doable since that’s what I did. These days my Portuguese is good enough to fool a Brazilian into thinking I’m from another region of Brazil (at least until we start talking about camshafts or Bridgeport mills). When I met my Brazilian wife, I purchased a Living Language course. The material wasn’t bad, and I think I found the books themselves more useful than the cassettes. That’s probably because I didn’t need to hear how to pronounce things: I could simply ask my wife.
I had lots of time on my hands as well: I was a projectionist at night, and so I studied the language while my films were running.
I guess the most important thing for me would be to buy a course that didn’t just do the tourist talk. It needs to actually have sections on verb conjugation and the like.