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What turned the tide for me was watching TV in French with french subtitles. Suddenly the French I'd been hearing and not fully understanding clicked because I could read what they were saying as they said it. It cleared up a LOT in real life conversations. That's the number one tip I give to people that are learning French, watch French tv with french subtitles... as long as you are at the point where you can comfortably read (and write) French. Cheers!

So rare to hear an honest assessment of the time it REALLY takes to learn a language. Thank you.

I feel really happy because I'm a native Spanish Speaker (Latin American) so hearing you both for me is not only learning how to learn French, as you said I'm not conscious about when I'm hearing you I'm already thinking in a different language.

I'm not even trying to learn French (I am learning others) I just dig you two 🙂 plus the general info regarding language learning is really applicable to any language ✌️

Great video and reassuring for me who has been studying French for 2 years and I still cannot speak very well! Merci beaucoup

I really like French, it is a lovely language that I do not speak too well, but can understand quite a lot. The advantage of English is that one can usually do well after a year or two of practical training (due to far simpler grammar). This is not the case, for example, with French and German, which require much longer practice before a normal conversation with a resident who speaks the language can be conducted. I speak from a Norwegian point of view (ie a Germanic language like English and German). French is a bigger challenge, but definitely worth the effort if you try to learn the language. On the other hand, Spanish is easier to learn than French so you really have to decide what you want to learn and need for example, in connection with work.

Thanks you two please keep the lessons coming. Much love

Thank you so much I really feel motivated when I watch you guys there are moments I feel discouraged so I tend to watch some videos that help with motivation like you guys thanks

I agree it’s important to just enjoy the learning process, have fun with it and don’t put too much pressure on yourself. I’ve been learning for around 3 years, I’ve never really had lessons apart from when I was at school, I live in England, I listen to coffee break french podcasts, use memrise and duolingo and watch FranceInfo, I message penpals in French using WhatsApp quite a lot, I started to find my French writing was getting way ahead of my listening/oral comprehension so I’m speaking once a week with a French colleague now for an hour using Skype. Speaking and understanding is really difficult especially with the “liaisons” and French spelling and I can fully appreciate why it takes 6 / 7 years whilst also being fully immersed in it day after day. It’s a slow process and you have to have patience and focus on the key words in a conversation as Charlie says. Thanks for the videos both, I find them really interesting and useful. Now if only I could learn to pronounce “myrtille” correctly and understand reflexive verbs.... ;)

it was such a relief to hear it is not just hard for me. thank you for your honesty. I feel encouraged to keep going

So glad to hear your comment about accents in France. So many people I hear think that everyone in France talks like Christine Ockrent or Emmanuel Macron! The French I spoke growing up around Lille is nothing like Parisian French and drove my mother, who was from the Pays Basque but spoke like a Molière play (!), up the wall. People still accuse me of being Belgian ... I also despair of people who think they can learn from pop songs - they realise that English singers can mangle pronunciation to make the words fit the tune but do not think the same applies in French for some odd reason - imagine of they had learnt to pronounce -r listening to Edith Piaf ... !

Excellent recommendations!

These are great tips and they could be applied to any language.

Very true that one should listen to familiar content. I understand sermons and TV news best because I'm familiar with the terms and concepts in both English and French. Sermons are usually spoken in a slow, clear, distinct and formal prose. TV news is often in passé composé and have a ticker-tape at the bottom which helps.

I agree about conversations. It’s difficult to let go of the desire to understand every word but I found it’s better to just focus on the words you do get and hopefully the understanding of what is said is correct. The. You can reply whilst the French person looks at you strangely because you speak at the pace of a snail and as you may have got the context wrong but it doesn’t really matter. I speak to our neighbour when I’m on holiday a little bit. I know he goes out on his little boat so I look up words relating to that and see how much I can understand. He didn’t like it when I said I was allergic to shellfish as that stuff is I important in that area but at least I tried.

Great video it really helps with my French learning thank you 🙂

This is daunting advice.

I studied french for 2 years , and then left it for 3 years but now I am starting again. I still comprehend , I mean it's difficult to understand the fast pace french. But otherwise I understand the meaning of the sentence/sense . What I struggle with is speaking . Thanks for linking other channels.

Oh that makes me feel bit relieved as i started learning french last july in my university and would get little anxious as to why i can't really understand spoken french😂

I've been studying french for almost 2 years and at this moment I think I can understand more the natives speaking but I will follow your advices! Sometimes I struggle with the grammar :|

Intermediate level is listening to Radio France Culture, Affaires Étrangères with Christine Ockrent. She speaks a form of high-French and it is incredibly well-pronounced. I can duplicate her expositions 100%. What's more, her interlocutors tend to be people from other countries who happen to speak French as a foreign language and therefore can be understood easily as well. It is only when French people who are not politicians try to be interesting by using pub language (verlan, argot, school French, street French), when things get difficult. I remember that my Parisian girlfriend, who was 'une sudiste', could not follow her own kids when they came home from school for lunch. I discovered iw as just a matter of vocabulary and different expressions and getting used to the tone and swallowing of letters and whole syllables that , apparently, shows you are 'cool'. After studying Charlie Hebdo and stuff I started to understand what the kids said. The more awkward young people speak, the more cool they think they are. But it is nonsense, they are just asserting identity and do not realise that within 5 (or 10 years max), they won't be 'cool' 'anymore because other young people speak yet differently from them, again in their turn, and then all this 'cool' talk disappears and these 'cool' young ones start to talk normal French once 'au bureau'. I never had any problems in business or in an office but only with Parisians under 30 in pubs. Recently, I met the boy, now a grown-up, and he had quit talking like a schoolkid and told me he now had trouble following the 'newspeak' of the new generation. Contrary to most other languages, French changes about every 10 years in idiom and vocabulary. It is a strange phenomenon and I gave up on street French because of it. I come to France since I was a kid, 1966, and to Paris since 1978. I can follow the difficult language of Georges Brassens but not the language of 'les ados d'aujourd'hui'.

Years ago I used to listen to Europe 1 it was my only way of hearing French in the UK back then, to me it just sounded like a noise I understood very few words, I enjoyed trying to speak French at that time but was never good at listening however over time my listening skills seem to be actually better than my speaking skills in French, so learners should not give up hope if they don't understand fast spoken French at the moment. Je n'ai jamais vécu dans un pays francophone.

There's another American UKpostsr living in Paris that you guys should give a look. His channel is Damon Dominique, he is AWESOME. A video on him would be hilarious, because he's funny. You guys are really great also, keep it up, I'll be watching! 💕

I don't know if I can make it to the Sorbonne, but I'll try.

I have a sort of good intermediate level of French and I don't find it that difficult to speak the language but when it comes to understanding native speakers that often speak very fast and leave out all the syllables turning je suis into "chui" and things like that I sometimes don't understand a single word. It could be Chinese. Then I think: How is this possible? I´ve improved quite a bit by watching videos but I'm not really into watching films. I imagine I'd have to move to the country. I've learnt understanding Spanish this way which is also hard to grasp for foreigners.

Charlie you should Teach StreetEnglish. 😁 Your accent in English is Smooth.

Can I get someone from France willing to teach me French please..I would really appreciate..am studying education at the university and am gonna be a French teacher!! I really need help

Your example of not trying to understand every single word someone is saying, but rather just pick up some of the main words to get the gist of what they are saying, reminds me of how people learn to speed read. They pick up the major words in a sentence, and not every single word. They can still comprehend the content and read much faster.

Salut! Je me sens plus confiant. Merci a vous.

I watch Netflix shows that are originally in French. I watch a few scenes with French subtitles and then I go back and watch them with English subtitles, but still with the French audio. Then I go back and watch them again completely in French. Because I can go back after every scene or two, I don't get too far behind in the story and it makes the next scenes easier to grasp in French before I go back and watch them again in English. My favorite is Dix Pour Cent, But Netflix has several good shows. I can also watch Netflix on my phone so I can listen to shows I have already seen while I'm doing something else. Because they are series and not movies, the dialogue is more conversational than the flowery dialogue of a movie.

merci. j'aime votre chaîne

hello! ive been living in france for 2 years now and i am able to speak french pretty well at this point. at least for me débrouiller. i feel like even though im fine with french i dont feel like i relate with french people that well. i still prefer the company of expats and anglophones bc we can talk about integrating in france and somehow it feels like theyre more open because they are going through an experience that french people in paris dont relate with. do you feel that your closest friends in france are still expats? i guess you have eachother but for friendships..

For me, it took a month in an immersion course at l’Institut Français in Villefranche sur Mer with a two-week follow-up about a year later. You have to hear as much as possible and let it flow by you to start to “get” what native French speakers are saying. And if they’re speaking grammatically, you’ll improve your grammar as well. Learning French in the US in classrooms just doesn’t do it. Schools like l’Institut teach you by immersing you in it - including fines for speaking anything but French! Talk about motivation …

Bonjour du Canada. 3 months ago I started listening to French AM news radio but could only understand 1% of it. I borrowed children's French books from the library, watched comprehensible input videos on UKposts, watched Caillou season 1, speak with a French tutor 30 mins a week. Now I can understand 25% of the same radio show _BUT_ there is a long delay in assembling the meaning in my head that by the time I have made sense of what was said, the radio host has moved on to a new topic. Je suis frustré :(

Thank you for the video! Can u please clarify something? 3:25 mb you would get WHAT? Shooked up?

During my foreign exchange semester in Paris, when I had already taken 9 years of academic french classes, I still struggled a lot to understand a lot of what my classmates said. I could understand the professors fine, but it was hard with my classmates. Although, the guy in my AirBnb from Bretagne was definitely the hardest to understand. He spoke sooo fast and there were times when I couldn’t get a single word he said.

I was just trying to get what a French youtuber was saying in a video. I guess the only thing that works is practice. Studying too much is a terrible idea, of course, not studying anything at all won't help but studying years of a language is counterproductive many times if you don't meet anyone.

He's got valid points but I think this will depend on what your first language is. If your first language is English for instance, and have had no exposure whatsoever to any other language (as it's almost always the case with English speakers) you will struggle a lot. However, if your first language is a romance language, I believe it will be easier, and if you have had exposure to any other romance language, aside from yours, it will be even easier. I'm not saying it will be a walk in the park, but it will not be as hard as they make you think. I'm studying French, my first language is a romance language and previously studied another romance language. French is complex, but not impossible.

Is that “mm-hmm” a common filler between thoughts? I learned to use ‘eu....’ in school but I don’t hear it as much now.

Such a convoluted answer. Still don’t know how long it took Charlie to understand French.

How can you find people to practice conversation? I live in Mexico and I am trying to improve my French and learn German, but I'd like to know if there could be something like a Facebook group where I can find that help. I am currently not in a situation where I could pay for lessons in italki or apps like that. Could you recommend me something?

LOL! I just made it to one year and a half :D

At what point in this journey could you understand tv and film without any issues?

At what point in the learning process should i expect my brain to stop trying to translate everything into english..eg i hear french and the voice inside me translates..even basics like bonjour etc.

@StreetFrench.org Bonjour. J'ai regardé La bajon. Elle est comedienne. Malheuresement elle a parlé très très vite. Parfois c'est plus difficile de comprendre. I saw La bajon on UKposts. Unfortunately she speaks so fast often it's so difficult for me to understand it properly. P.S: Je suis suisse allemand.

Could you possibly do a side-by-side video of why it is so important for English speakers of French to NOT keep the same mouth movements that they use in English, when they speak in French?

just like learning Jazz music

Maya = material energy. Very attractive and main force in the material world.

26??? I thought y’all was 22😂😂

Spanish is easier.

Please stop saying "hi guys" We are NOT all men. That phrase is a bad habit.

For me, I actually like watching teachers give tips on how to learn and speak French in French (I'm only b1 level) as it helps to hone the basics that I already know whilst getting comfortable with the way it is spoken by a native speaker, get the grammar stuck in my mind and learn the odd New word. Oh and they don't speak crazy fast for those just starting out. ;-)

Charlie you should Teach StreetEnglish. 😁 Your accent in English is Smooth.