I Learned French in 12 Months

I think it's essential if you're serious about learning. For Spanish at least you can find people $4-$6 an hour which can fit into some seriously lean budgets. I think it's one of the best ways to spend an hour.

I currently chat with my teacher every morning on my bluetooth headphones while exercising in my backyard (of course, confirming first that this wouldn't annoy her). Most productive hour of my day, and I she likes the certainty of me committing to a daily time slot.

Cool way to build friendships too. In April I'm visiting her in Venezuela. Though I recommend using a service like https://www.conversationexchange.com/ for a more overt way to meet different people while practicing language.

I completely agree that there is a huge gap between B2 and that level you describe as automatic. I'm currently trying to bridge that gap, but I can't live in France so I think it will take me years. I know people who have done it without immersion, so I know it's possible. My solution is to "immerse" myself at home. I do 90% of my reading in French. 90% of the podcasts I listen to are in French. I watch French TV shows and YouTube channels. I listen to French whenever I'm driving, exercising, doing errands, cooking, cleaning, etc. I'm also spending 3 weeks a year in France. That's not full immersion but it helps. When I'm in France, I stay with French speaking hosts and do tours in French. I avoid English at all costs. It'll be interesting to see how far I can get.

> I studied French from 7th-12th grade

As a French, I’ve lived a few years in Australia. A lot of people there can only say “Bonjour” and keep a bitter memory of their lessons. It feels like learning German for the French people, also a difficult (albeit more regular) language. It is merely necessary for political cohesion but not at an individual level; As such German lessons are... not designed for the students. If I had to believe the lessons, there are only two topics that Germans talk about: The Wiedervereinigung (reunification) and the war. All their movies are black and white with yellow subtitles. That’s how I imagine the French language in the Australian culture ;) Something you gotta learn at school, like se hazing or something.

It really feels like we haven’t mastered teaching, as a civilization. Our teaching works for pupils who have an interest; but for the others, it’s like signing for a mortgage and hating the house from the day you move in.

In fact, a lot of Ozzies I’ve met told me they went to Paris and felt hated by parisians. This testimonial was so frequent (dozens of times) that I led my little survey. On Twitter and among friends, all French people love Australians, between surfing and Crocodile Dundee, we have good conversation starters ;) Some may dislike some British but I don’t think there are many, let alone many who would act it out on the street. I just think parisians behave like stressed people behave in very stressful cities. So, no, we don’t hate English-speaking people, and I’m sorry that my language is so hard and so required in your curriculum ;)

Good day everyone!

If you just care about understanding most of the written language this can be done a bit faster in a very similar way: A few years ago I started watching Danish TV shows and went through a few months of "Danish obsession".

-I started Duolingo Danish, only 15-20 minutes every day, just unlocking stuff, not completing evey level. I never completed it all, but there's not much left.

-Then I followed a couple major Danish newspapers on Twitter. This is good because it is just incorporated in my couple daily sweeps through my timeline, provides a little "cultural immersion" and the translate button is sitting right there to help with those couple of words you didn't already know.

-The Twitter thing also works well to give a sense of progress: After a while you find you don't have much trouble with the tweets themselves and start clicking on some links to get a harder challenge with the articles themselves.

-When you can make out what most of the press articles say, you can start trying with some fiction: In my case I chose ebook Danish translations of the Millenium novel series, for no particular reason (just more Nordic noir). I had not read them previously.

I read them using my phone and set up the reader to provide Google translation by selecting words or sentences. I found out I could in fact enjoy the novel and had to use the "dictionary" less and less as I went on. I read the two first novels and the average speed was about half of English or my native Spanish.

- Since my Danish reading was by now quite effortless, for an aditional challenge I tried the third novel in the original Swedish. This was viable and still fun, but certainly more belabored.

All this took about 3-4 months.

So now I can read Danish, Norwegian and Swedish newspapers but I can't really understand the spoken language. (In fact spoken Danish is notoriously difficult to understand). I can catch the drift of conversation, recognise words and phrases but not really understand or speak myself. I can surprise Danes by greeting them and exchanging some smalltalk, but not really keep up a conversation. But hey... it was all pretty much effortless, so RoI is great.

Nowadays I'm doing the same with Russian. It goes slower because I'm not as obsessed and stop from time to time, but I can understand tweets from Komsomolskaya Pravda pretty well by now.

We certainly haven't mastered language teaching, at least at public schools. What I remember most is being tested on verb conjugations of irregular verbs. Worst possible way to learn a language.