WILL I LEARN TO READ AND WRITE FRENCH?
“...we believe that focusing too much on the exactitude of your spelling and on the complexities of the French grammar won’t help you to speak French.”
Developing good reading and writing skills is essential to master any language and French is no exception. However even if these skills are important to master a language, the development of oral skills involves complex processes that are both intellectual and physical.
At Speak French Now, by focusing first on the development of oral skills, you’ll develop a strong confidence of how French sounds and that you can communicate in French. When given reading and writing exercises, to strengthen your study at home, you’ll be then able to compare your knowledge of how French sounds to the way it’s written. By listening to dialogues on CDs you’ll also be able to reinforce this knowledge on your own.
By discovering, during the lessons, the rules of French pronunciation and having personal feedback you’ll be able to pronounce more and more confidently and accurately what you read. Little by little you’ll develop a strong sense of how the written word is pronounced in French. From that point on reading in French becomes an important asset in learning French because you already know how to pronounce the written word in French.
Focusing too much on written French and on French spelling is often counterproductive. Students end up learning things they do not need to at the proficiency level they’re at and more importantly their oral skills do not grow hand in hand with their literacy ones. It can also mislead you in pronouncing French, discouraging you, and makes you feel as if you have a terrible pronunciation when you just didn’t have enough practice speaking French. It is not a really fun way to learn as well.
At Speak French Now you’ll learn to read and write in French, even at a beginner’s level. In the same way you learnt your own language, once you develop the confidence to speak the language and have a sense of fluency, then reading and writing French more accurately are incredible assets in the full development of your expression and in mastering French.
However until reaching that stage of confidence and fluency we believe that focusing too much on the exactitude of your spelling and on the complexities of the French grammar won’t help you to speak French.