Buying a house in France: part 3: staying fluent in French
January 18th, 2007 | 
Author: In many ways, the hardest part of learning a language is maintaining your fluency.
If you have reached a good level of French before you move, you need to put the effort into maintaining that level of fluency which can often seem like a chore. If possible, you should continue with further courses through, for example, the Open University but if that’s not possible you should at least try to maintain your existing level of spoken and written French. Your current level of fluency will determine how you can go about this. For a basic to intermediate level of French you can subscribe to magazines such as La Vie Outre-Manche and Le Rendez-Vous Français which are available through Concorde French or Champs-Elysées. If your French has progressed further, you could try reading a novel which isn’t nearly such a major undertaking as you might think (see Amazon France) or perhaps buy a French newspaper (Le Figaro is best, Le Monde is a much harder read) which are also available online. For spoken French, Sky has TV5 on the basic subscription; the best programme to watch is the news. By far the best way to maintain your spoken French is to practice it and the Alliance Française classes are wonderful for that.
You might think that you can ignore all the above once you’ve moved to France but that’s usually not the case. In practice, you can find that after the first six months or so (when you use French a lot), you hardly use French at all day to day. To keep your French up you should read the French newspapers and watch French TV whenever possible and don’t reject the idea of further French courses either. The key thing is to keep using your French whenever you can because if you don’t you’ll find that your level of French will drop quite quickly.
Our next installment covers what to do about French for your children.
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You ARE right: Learning French and maintaining a good level IS the smart thing to do to open many commercial/social/political/everyday logistics doors.
There are only 45000 Brits in France (which for some will come back and also not many will go to France from now, as the houses in the UK are so expensive since 2004 that they cannot even sell them like they used to, for expatriating themselves) on a 62 million people population (for a big majority French).
Not to speak French in the long term is foolish. Besides, even now, with the Euro against the British Pound, and not having gone to the Iraqi war, the French feel, more than before, that they can reply in english (if they know some) or not when they wish, or not at all, when spoken to in their country in english, because they have that lever now and because they start to get tired of helping the Brits.