WHAT IS FOCUSED CONVERSATION?
“In the same way that a tumultuous river is not the best environment to learn to swim, a normal conversation is not the best environment to learn to speak French.”
With a normal conversation it is quite hard to improve your language skills. A native French speaker might speak French very well but might have no idea on how to teach you French effectively, let alone to teach you French through conversation.
In a normal conversation, we tend to jump from one thing to another. During the train of a conversation, something that is said might make us think of something else and in a split of a second we might change topics completely and start talking of something completely unrelated or that seems to be at first.
In the same breath, we may also use verbs at different tenses (To be for example: I am… I was … I will be) or with different subjects (I, you, he, she, we or they).
So that we don’t repeat indefinitely words we mentioned before we often replace them with little words, that give little clue to what we’re talking about, if we missed these words the first time. For example:
How much did it cost you? Do you think they’ll like it? Will you bring it there? Will you bring the other one with it? Are you going to bring them both there?
A normal conversation is quite disconcerting when learning a language because to get a sense of improvement and to build confidence in speaking a language you need to use vocabulary and grammar structures quite repeatedly before you can use them freely. Using them only once and moving on to something else doesn’t bring you the confidence that you can use them time and time again without any problem. It also makes it very hard to memorize anything as memory and repetition are somehow linked.
WE LEARN THROUGH FOCUSED CONVERSATIONS
At Speak French Now you’ll learn through conversation but with conversations that have some focus. You’ll start speaking French using repeatedly some particular vocabulary and specific grammar structures in different contexts. This way you can build confidence and get a sense of mastery and fluency, with the new vocabulary and grammar that has been introduced, before your language skills are extended and that you move on to other levels.