Crash course a textbook on reading it, start reading easy materials like Wikipedia and news articles and straightforward nonfiction books on topics that actually interest you, keep doing this for 3-6 months depending how good your brain is, and auto-magically you'll find you've built a core vocabulary of 5-10k words and can basically read whatever you want from there with varying degrees of effort.
Everything else is cope, with the one exception being that if you have an oral consciousness (in Walter Ong's sense) you can learn by "immersion" and doing painfully tedious crap like Michel Thomas, because you're the kind of dunderhead who actually LIKES those little stories about Grug and Claire going ins Kino and ordering une biere s'il vous plait
Get Sandberg's French for Reading or any similar book and finish it by this weekend, then start it over again
At the same time, get French Pimsleur and do 2+ sessions a day
Within a few weeks start reading easy French texts with help from google translate, deepl, or lingq (costs $10)
Recycle this entire process until you ramp up to harder texts, after about a month or two of it you will have a large working vocabulary (this is especially important in French because relative to other languages it has a LOT of "mid-level" idioms with meanings that can't really be deduced from the actual words in them, and which you just have to learn - this is why something like lingq or google translate is vital, to reduce dictionary time and parse whole phrases as vocab)
The more you grind out this initial process without thinking too hard about it and worrying too much about progress, the more progress you will make
Once you hit the "hey I can basically read French now, neat" level, do whatever review and filling in of gaps you want and keep going, but since your goal is to "know" French and thus presumably to speak it, you need to do the additional work of saturating yourself with listening, writing, and speaking practice ASAP. Watch Steve Kaufmann's videos on this, he uses a variety of techniques, lingq has resources but he also just listens to shitloads of podcasts and watches movies and such and then reviews them, basically teaching the brain to parse and pick apart what it hears and click into "This is a language I know, I should not parse it as a single stream of silly noises anymore but actually listen to it" mode, which can take time.
This is why doing the Pimsleur from early on would be a good idea, because even if it's kind of tedious and gay, it will be the baby steps that launch you into the more complex stuff once you are ready from all your reading practice. Conversely though the reading practice was necessary for giving you the relatively large stock of vocabulary and confidence in the language, so that you're not parsing sound AND meaning at the same time, just parsing sound FOR meaning you already know.
Writing also helps thicken the memory because somehow when you have to learn something in order to write it, because you actually want or need to say it, the brain remembers it like twice as hard as when it's just reading something and looking it up in the dictionary.
If you do all of this a lot, and you are reasonably intelligent, you could be reading and speaking French within a month or two. Really smart people can do this with much more difficult languages with relatively intensive study, Friedrich Engels and Max Weber both taught themselves Russian for fun just from grammar and a dictionary and throwing themselves headlong into Russian literature, and that is way more difficult than French because it has 5% cognates whereas French is like 50% English cognates. But either way, by Winter is a perfectly doable goal
Translating does nothing at all, shit advice, you're just reading in english at that point,
in the beginning you NEED someone who knows the language well to help you with pronunciation, or else you will be turbo fricked and have to spend a lot of time and effort fixing this later. community colleges will general have language courses, so look around your area for one with the language you want and take a few semesters of it.
Useless, just listen to a native french speaker.
Some of the worst language learning advice yet.
It's just input, watch french shows or movies that interest you, or french youtube videos you find interesting, never use subtitles.
2 years ago
Anonymous
bait
2 years ago
Anonymous
Exposed yourself as a moron who didn't know what he was talking about. gg.
2 years ago
Anonymous
op is likely going to speak worse than some nafri immigrant if he takes your advice
Am I just moronic or does French for Reading take way longer than just a weekend?
Especially when you have to re-read the passages in order to memorise the vocab
Great primer.
This is hoe I studied Latin for my uni exams. Unfortunately although Latin has a massive pool of resources the people compiling those are huge gays, classical philologists who would‘ve guessed!, and so none of the resources I used were all too accessible or compatible with exams and or the texts you want to read—most open source online translations are rather bad in style, so a lot of relative sentences and compiled awkwardly, with no dictionary integration you‘d expect from something like French.
Deepl doesn’t have Latin, and most other translators/guides struggle with the same contextless and ignorant of idioms you would be learning the language.
Philologists just don’t get that languages are learned for a purpose, may it be personal or practical, and very few people other than themselves would find value in learning a language for the sake of it, yet not at all delving as deep as a linguist would.
study it for one hour every day, with an emphasis on listening. Start with the alphabet, then move onto vocabulary, then grammar and vocabulary together. Use a variety of resources: games, text books, story books, audio tapes, audio books, writing exercises, etc. Language immersion and having a native partner will speed up the process incredibly.
in the beginning you NEED someone who knows the language well to help you with pronunciation, or else you will be turbo fricked and have to spend a lot of time and effort fixing this later. community colleges will general have language courses, so look around your area for one with the language you want and take a few semesters of it.
This is moronic because most formal classes don't focus on phonology/phonetics and rather expect that you're able to pick up pronunciation through listen and repeat
If it's an ancient language, find a textbook, study the grammar. If it's a modern one, just read the Wikipedia articles on its grammar. Get Anki, start making flashcards. Keep adding flashcards. Eventually start composing. Tinker with it. Write new things. How would this sentence change if you altered the tense, etc. Then, start adding sentence based Anki cards (use the word in the sentence on the front, the definition of the word on the back). Consooooooom media in your language. Babble to yourself. Go find an IQfy thread and call other people racial slurs.
I've got a book with exercises and I watch Cyprien and read the little prince. Hope to be able to read Houellebecq soon enough. Frick publishers for not translating the fricking novel.
As much exposure as possible
Crash course a textbook on reading it, start reading easy materials like Wikipedia and news articles and straightforward nonfiction books on topics that actually interest you, keep doing this for 3-6 months depending how good your brain is, and auto-magically you'll find you've built a core vocabulary of 5-10k words and can basically read whatever you want from there with varying degrees of effort.
Everything else is cope, with the one exception being that if you have an oral consciousness (in Walter Ong's sense) you can learn by "immersion" and doing painfully tedious crap like Michel Thomas, because you're the kind of dunderhead who actually LIKES those little stories about Grug and Claire going ins Kino and ordering une biere s'il vous plait
Just expanded on this for some anon's thread where he's trying to learn French, but it 404'ed so I'll post it here in case he's lurking
Get Sandberg's French for Reading or any similar book and finish it by this weekend, then start it over again
At the same time, get French Pimsleur and do 2+ sessions a day
Within a few weeks start reading easy French texts with help from google translate, deepl, or lingq (costs $10)
Recycle this entire process until you ramp up to harder texts, after about a month or two of it you will have a large working vocabulary (this is especially important in French because relative to other languages it has a LOT of "mid-level" idioms with meanings that can't really be deduced from the actual words in them, and which you just have to learn - this is why something like lingq or google translate is vital, to reduce dictionary time and parse whole phrases as vocab)
The more you grind out this initial process without thinking too hard about it and worrying too much about progress, the more progress you will make
Once you hit the "hey I can basically read French now, neat" level, do whatever review and filling in of gaps you want and keep going, but since your goal is to "know" French and thus presumably to speak it, you need to do the additional work of saturating yourself with listening, writing, and speaking practice ASAP. Watch Steve Kaufmann's videos on this, he uses a variety of techniques, lingq has resources but he also just listens to shitloads of podcasts and watches movies and such and then reviews them, basically teaching the brain to parse and pick apart what it hears and click into "This is a language I know, I should not parse it as a single stream of silly noises anymore but actually listen to it" mode, which can take time.
This is why doing the Pimsleur from early on would be a good idea, because even if it's kind of tedious and gay, it will be the baby steps that launch you into the more complex stuff once you are ready from all your reading practice. Conversely though the reading practice was necessary for giving you the relatively large stock of vocabulary and confidence in the language, so that you're not parsing sound AND meaning at the same time, just parsing sound FOR meaning you already know.
Writing also helps thicken the memory because somehow when you have to learn something in order to write it, because you actually want or need to say it, the brain remembers it like twice as hard as when it's just reading something and looking it up in the dictionary.
If you do all of this a lot, and you are reasonably intelligent, you could be reading and speaking French within a month or two. Really smart people can do this with much more difficult languages with relatively intensive study, Friedrich Engels and Max Weber both taught themselves Russian for fun just from grammar and a dictionary and throwing themselves headlong into Russian literature, and that is way more difficult than French because it has 5% cognates whereas French is like 50% English cognates. But either way, by Winter is a perfectly doable goal
Translating does nothing at all, shit advice, you're just reading in english at that point,
Useless, just listen to a native french speaker.
Some of the worst language learning advice yet.
It's just input, watch french shows or movies that interest you, or french youtube videos you find interesting, never use subtitles.
bait
Exposed yourself as a moron who didn't know what he was talking about. gg.
op is likely going to speak worse than some nafri immigrant if he takes your advice
Am I just moronic or does French for Reading take way longer than just a weekend?
Especially when you have to re-read the passages in order to memorise the vocab
Great primer.
This is hoe I studied Latin for my uni exams. Unfortunately although Latin has a massive pool of resources the people compiling those are huge gays, classical philologists who would‘ve guessed!, and so none of the resources I used were all too accessible or compatible with exams and or the texts you want to read—most open source online translations are rather bad in style, so a lot of relative sentences and compiled awkwardly, with no dictionary integration you‘d expect from something like French.
Deepl doesn’t have Latin, and most other translators/guides struggle with the same contextless and ignorant of idioms you would be learning the language.
Philologists just don’t get that languages are learned for a purpose, may it be personal or practical, and very few people other than themselves would find value in learning a language for the sake of it, yet not at all delving as deep as a linguist would.
study it for one hour every day, with an emphasis on listening. Start with the alphabet, then move onto vocabulary, then grammar and vocabulary together. Use a variety of resources: games, text books, story books, audio tapes, audio books, writing exercises, etc. Language immersion and having a native partner will speed up the process incredibly.
in the beginning you NEED someone who knows the language well to help you with pronunciation, or else you will be turbo fricked and have to spend a lot of time and effort fixing this later. community colleges will general have language courses, so look around your area for one with the language you want and take a few semesters of it.
This is moronic because most formal classes don't focus on phonology/phonetics and rather expect that you're able to pick up pronunciation through listen and repeat
don’t know want to say other than mine largely focused on that
If it's an ancient language, find a textbook, study the grammar. If it's a modern one, just read the Wikipedia articles on its grammar. Get Anki, start making flashcards. Keep adding flashcards. Eventually start composing. Tinker with it. Write new things. How would this sentence change if you altered the tense, etc. Then, start adding sentence based Anki cards (use the word in the sentence on the front, the definition of the word on the back). Consooooooom media in your language. Babble to yourself. Go find an IQfy thread and call other people racial slurs.
I've got a book with exercises and I watch Cyprien and read the little prince. Hope to be able to read Houellebecq soon enough. Frick publishers for not translating the fricking novel.
They have good resources.
if there's a need you'll find a way. If not and you just want to think you're better than the hoi polloi, don't bother.