Becoming fluent in French
We introduced our series on buying a house in France in the last part of the series. Planning your move is essential, the next most important thing is acquiring fluency in the language.
This aspect will take you the longest period of time so it’s best to start work on it first. You might think that it’s an impossible thing to do or that it will take many years. Fortunately neither is the case and even if you are starting from no knowledge whatsoever of the language you can become fluent in as little as two or three years. For example, when I started off with the French after a long break, I was expecting it to take many years before I became fluent but in reality it was only two and could have been done in one. So how did I do it?
I was starting off from a very rusty O-Level (GCSE) so thought that a couple of years of night classes would be best to get my French back up to speed again after such a long break. Those night classes (2 hours a week for 20 weeks per year) took me up to roughly A-level conversational French but that’s not really fluency in the sense that I couldn’t chat in French. The next step was to join a conversation class with the Alliance Francaise in September. I thoroughly recommend them but you need to be aware that the classes can be incredibly intimidating initially and you have to be stubborn enough to just keep going regardless of how dreadful you feel you are doing.
The Alliance Francaise classes operate at a much higher level than A-level French. At A-level you are expected to be able to talk about a range of topics if you know what the topic is in advance (hence you can’t chat at that level), the level above at that is to be able to chat about a range of topics which you don’t know in advance. Alliance Francaise operates at the level about that ie you should be able to talk about anything without being told the topic in advance. Now you might think that there is absolutely no way you could do that. However, even a GCSE gives you all the vocabulary and grammar that you need. What the Alliance Francaise classes do is to force you to use that knowledge in real time and that’s why the classes are so intimidating at the start.
Anyway, the following September I started the Open University course L120 and did the related residential LXR122 that July. Whilst the Alliance Francaise classes are brilliant for getting your current level of French working much better they aren’t very good for improving your level of French so that’s where the Open University courses come in. Right in the middle of the residential it was like someone had flicked a switch and all of a sudden I heard the French as though it were English. I’d to meet some French relatives after the course that Summer and was able to chat to them with no effort ie fluently.
So to get to fluency, one route is GCSE, Alliance Francaise and then Open University first year with the residential. I’m sure that’s less time than you expected!
The one thing that is key with learning French is to be stubborn enough to keep going to the classes regardless of how dreadful you feel you are doing. Yes, you will be really bad at the start but the trick with learning languages is to keep going regardless. That’s one reason why I feel it’s essential to be in a class rather than attempting to learn the language on your own. On your own you can easily grind to a halt on some topic which you just can’t understand but in a class environment, the class will force you to simply skip that topic and move on which is OK because you’ll come back to it later.
Our next section is on staying fluent which, if anything, is more difficult as it feels much more like a chore.
Staying fluent in French
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 although you'll probably think that it will be impossible to ever understand it when you start. By far the best way to maintain your spoken French is to practice it and the Alliance Francaise 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 instalment covers what to do about French for your children.
French for your children
As with yourself, there are two aspects of this ie what to do before you come here and what to do after you get here.
Before you get here, you should try to encourage your kids to enrol in French classes where they are available. If you're near a large town or city you may be able to enrol younger children in French language playgroups and the like. One thing that you shouldn't do is to speak French to the children yourself as this way they'll pick up your French accent: we've heard many British children who've been here for some years still saying BON JURE rather than BO ZHUR simply because their parents spoke French to them from the start. Take particular care that playgroup leaders are native French speakers.
When they get here, if you can, you should enrol 2 to 11 year olds in a French school (more on education later) and 12 to 18 year olds in a bilingual school. I recommend bilingual so that your children can keep up their fluency in English as well as French; we've touched on this aspect several times in the past which are worth reading to see the kind of difficulties you can find with French language schools for older children.
Next week is our final section on languages: the local languages in France and what to do about them.
The local languages in France
This is one aspect of French life that is really simple. This is France, so everything is in French.
Well, almost. You didn’t expect it to be so simple as that, did you?
There are various regional languages in France from Breton in Brittany to Catalan in Catalonia. For the most part, these languages are barely paid lip service by the French authorities. For example, the capital of the Pyrénées-Orientales department bills itself as “Perpignan le Catalán” yet in reality the Catalán language is only represented by the bilingual signs outside villages in Catalonia and the odd article in the magazines distributed by the Conseil Regionale. This lack of support for the language is effectively killing the language in France so, for example, our neighbour’s father speaks Catalán as a native tongue, he speaks it as a second language and his children don’t speak it at all.
Things are very different just over the border where more and more of the signs have dropped bilingualism and are only in Catalán. Even the brochures in the shops are almost exclusively Catalán only. In fact, Catalán is pushed so much that in a recent shopping trip to Girona one or two of the shop assistants all but refused to serve us when we asked for some things in Spanish.
I think it’s sad that the children can’t speak to their grandparents in their native language in France but Spain has definitely taken it too far and I feel sure that it will end up as being very divisive.
Do you need to be able to speak French to live in France?
This is a question that many would like to ask but few are brave enough to actually ask it.
There is no single answer to this one as it depends on where in France you choose to live. If you are aiming for a Brit-enclave such as Brittany or the Dordogne, the answer is probably "no" as in those areas it's quite possible to live within the English-speaking community and to rely on those that make their livelihood supporting it. The only potential difficulty is the mayor's office ("mairie") but in the majority of cases they will be able to deal with you in English too. There's no problem with the likes of tax, electricity and the phone company as all three plus similar outfits have at least one office set up to deal with English speakers.
Outside the Brit-enclaves, it's a different story and, for the most part, you will need to speak French quite well although it is still possible to deal with tax, electricity, etc. via their English speaking branches. Where you will encounter difficulties is in dealing with the plumber, electrician, school and mayor's office. Even though we speak degree level French we have found that, for example, some electricians refuse to understand us because they simply don't want to be bothered working for non-French.
If you aren't English, then you'll also find that the French are a good deal more willing to speak English to you. One of the shop assistants claimed not to speak English for almost three years until they found out that we were from Northern Ireland and Australia when they suddenly became quite fluent English speakers.
So, yes, you could move to France and live here without speaking any French. However, in most cases, you'll find live that little bit easier as your level of French improves.