6 reasons why you suck at French - and how to fix it

Did you take French for years in school, and still can’t speak much? I’ve met so many people in this situation.

Sometimes these people even had very good grades in French, but they have never been able to have a conversation.

In this article, we explore six reasons why this happens, and how you can avoid repeating the same mistakes when you study French as an adult.

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As you will see, none of these mistakes are your fault, and it’s not even your teacher’s fault. No matter how serious you were as a student or how great the teacher, the context of a school just isn’t a great place to learn French.

The bad news is that these typical shortcomings are also present in many classes for adults or self-study methods.

Here’s the good news: as an adult, you can choose every aspect of your French study. So in this article, we’ll explore what goes so wrong with standard language teaching at school - and which elements you need to change to get real results. I’m talking get fluent in a few months kind of results.

1) Lack of a good reason to learn French

As I explain very often (for example here), the one thing that makes a difference between French learners who succeed and those who fail is how good your reason to learn is.

"I learn French because it's on the program, or because my parents chose it for me." is about as bad as it gets, for a "reason" to learn.

If you really want to learn French, you certainly have better reasons than that. Make sure these reasons are crystal clear to you and keep them top of mind.

2) Not enough time to speak

Too many students, not enough lesson time.

When I was eleven, we used to have four hours a week of English study, and there were about 30 of us in the classroom. This amounts to a whooping eight minutes (!) per week per student. This assumes that the teacher would never speak and that no time would be dedicated to other activities. As we know, most of the time wasn't dedicated to speaking anyway. That would leave us with maybe two minutes per week speaking the language. With two minutes of weekly practice, you should be happy that you learned anything at all.

The obvious fix is to make sure you have plenty of time to practice speaking. How you get better at speaking is by speaking

I recommend one-on-one coaching, or any other learning modality that gives you lots of time to practice such as 1-1 tutoring, learning in a small group or a language exchange.

3) Over-focusing on grammar

In school, grammar has a very important place. This stems from an outdated mindset which used to view a language as a set of rules and exception - rather than as the way humans communicate.

The truth is: grammar isn't everything. Grammar is much less important than we tend to think. If you speak without respecting any grammar rule, you won't be able to pass an exam, but you will still be understood by natives most of the time, assuming that your pronunciation and vocabulary are decent.

Now the question is, what do you want? Do you want to ace your school exams or to be understood when you speak the language? If you aim for the latter, focusing so much on learning the grammar is basically a waste of time and effort.

If you are concerned about learning grammar, I recommend this article that’ll show you a way to learn good grammar and also be able to speak and understand at the same time.

My approach is always to put the emphasis on speaking and understanding real-life French and only learn grammar when it supports this goal.

4) Punishing mistakes instead of encouraging them.

Another way that school destroys your language learning capacities - and your self confidence - is by making you believe that mistakes are bad.

If you believe that mistakes are bad and you fear being punished for making mistakes, you will do everything you can to avoid making mistakes. Concretely, this means that you will use only language patterns which you know very well and not "risk" using new patterns which you aren't sure of. This is the best way to avoid making any progress.

Whenever one of my students makes a mistake, I take this as an opportunity to explain a new rule or reexplain a pattern that we have studied before. A mistake is a sign that you haven't internalised a pattern yet. You will internalise it soon, if you embrace the mistake as an opportunity to improve. There is one kind of mistakes that I particularly love: those that I have never seen before. They shed the light on a particular way the brain of a student works (due to their background or existing language knowledge) which was unknown to me. It's a great way for *me* as a coach to learn and grow.

Mistakes should be seen as an opportunity to learn and be encouraged. Not punished.

5) Group. Worse: group of teenagers.

So, you have very little time to speak and if you make mistakes, you will be punished. Can it get any worse? Yes it can: you have to do it in front of a group of your peers, who happen to be teenagers like you.

How secure and confident were you as a teenager? Were you willing to speak up and possibly say something stupid in front of everyone? How did you feel about them maybe judging you, or even making fun of you?

You will agree that this is about as bad a setting as it gets, if the goal is to make progress.

You can only learn a language if your environment is safe and forgiving. Anything else will trigger your brain's protection reflex, which sacrifices your potential for progress to increase your chances of survival.

So, either learning in a 1-1 context with a supportive coach or teacher, or being in a supportive group is critical. Peers that cheer you on, encourage you and go through the same thing as you can really make a huge difference for your results.

If you’d like to find such a group, I strongly recommend you join the French Fluency Accelerator. Not only you’ll have daily support from me, but you’ll also be supported daily by the most awesome French students I know, in our global community of English-speaking French learners.

6) No connection with real life French

For a long time, students have been studying languages in school without any connection to the language as it is actually spoken. This is getting better. If you are lucky, you can get a one-week trip to a French speaking country, or a language assistant - a young native sent directly to your school.

I was a French assistant in Gmunden, Austria, when I was 25. In my first week, I was made to meet all the classes I would work with and introduce myself. That was a full week of being stared at by hundreds of the biggest eyes I've ever seen. Those eyes were saying "Really? From France? A real French guy? Like, he really speak this weird language that we are trying to learn? How is this possible?"

If after years of "studying" a language, you find yourself looking at a native like they are some alien coming from a world you barely knew existed, your school is doing something wrong.

Taking a language out of its environment and studying a purified version of it in a classroom is the weirdest thing ever. No wonder it doesn't work. If you want to learn a *living* language, don't do this to yourself.

I strongly recommend interacting with French content every day.

So, what are you going to change in your study, now that you know all these mistakes to avoid? Are you ready to start studying efficiently and become fluent this year? If so, I would love to work 1-1 with you, or welcome you in my group program, The French Fluency Accelerator.

Your next steps

If you like this way of learning French, you will love to learn with me as a student or client. Please check out:

My 1-1 coaching program, The French Transformation, if you need to improve your French fast.
My group program, The French Fluency Accelerator, if you’d like to join a community of students from all over the world. We have weekly practice calls together and the best online video library to learn French.

Pro tip: you don’t need to choose!

All my 1-1 clients are invited to join the French Accelerator free of charge.

Feel free to book a call with me now to discuss options.