Is there a better option to reach beginner-intermediate level? I am going to have to learn French from scratch in about a month and I'm finding the prospect daunting.
Buy (or pirate, but really, you should buy them if you can afford it, they’re great) the entire set of Pimsleur French tapes. There are 90, each 30 mins long. Do one tape every day. Note that this will take you longer than 90 days as you are supposed to repeat tapes when you don’t remember ~80% of the content.
Concurrently, get Anki (flashcard program) and find a French vocabulary deck ordered by frequency. Learn as many new words per day as you have time for. Do all your required reviews every day.
Concurrently, spend as much time as you can every day reading or listening to appropriate material and trying to understand it. Search for “French graded reader” for some good books to buy.
(I've also heard Assimil is a good alternative to Pimsleur.)
I think a lot of language learns focus too much on vocabulary and grammar when starting out but they don't take the time to drill/ use the vocabulary they are learning in actual conversation. There is no point in passively knowing 1000 words if you can barely use 100 in an active conversation.
Another resource that I like but wouldn't recommend it unless it was on sale is the mimic method. Learning the phonetics and how to hear/create the unique sounds of your target language is really important but it's too expensive for what you get imo.
I think it's one prong of a multi-pronged approach to language learning.
I used this method to learn some basic phrases and greetings in Russian. It helped me get by as a tourist, along with earning some surprised looks from the locals.
I'm intrigued by the fact that you can see this requirement coming up. What's imposing it on you? What defines "success" in learning French?
If you're interested in the experimental views of a random person on the internet, babies learn language in the following sequence:
1. Listen to the language with no understanding or context. By the time you're born, you will be able to tell the difference between your language(s), and a foreign language.
2. Practice producing sounds that could be part of the target language. If you're learning French, then at this stage you're pronouncing nonsense syllables, but at least they're nonsense French syllables.
3. Be exposed to many example sentences for which you already know the meaning. (This is actually an ongoing process which never terminates -- seeing an unfamiliar word used in a sentence for which you know the meaning is how you learn new words.)
4. Learn some single words. ("Mom". "Moon". "Jump".)
5. Use your words to communicate with the people around you. Look how they smile!
6. With your growing understanding of sentence structure, move on to sentences.
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As an adult learner, you can collapse the phases (as do babies, really) and take advantage of formal instruction to learn things much faster than a baby can. I strongly recommend using formal instruction to go from "nothing" to "beginner" level. But stages 2, 3, and 6 remain crucially important for pronunciation, understanding, and production, and you should probably focus some time on each of them.
You may not need certain abilities. Foreign learners frequently never achieve native-like pronunciation, because strange pronunciation is only a minor barrier to communication. And many people learn a language to the point that they can understand it but can't really produce it themselves.
And a word of warning from personal experience -- I can converse well enough over text messages in Chinese for Chinese speakers to feel basically comfortable. All of my practice is in text -- in person, I still can't speak at all. You'll only develop skills that you use.
This is similar question I had. I think a lot of people on HN think learning means becoming an expert, but many people just want tourist level of fluency. That means vocabulary, phrases, and basic conversation. Whether someone learns perfect pronunciation and sentence structure or not means little as a tourist trying to get by.
I found Duolingo sufficient for tourist level fluency.
My first and last name are not sounds in English apparently and polite people try to pronounce them correctly (I do not really care how it is pronounced; I am not important) them, English and American (and Australian) cannot even hear side by side that they pronounce it really differently. They ask me to record the correct and then their way and they cannot even hear they are pronouncing it differently. How can you learn a language correctly like that? It must be practice right? I came here from another thread because I am sure this is the same as me learning Mandarin; I have been ordering green forks instead of green tea for a long time...
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