Interview with a French Language Student

Name: Channah
Studying: French, German and Russian with a little Japanese
Mother Tongue: English
Strongest Language: German
Future Plans: Linguistics and Teaching probably

1. Why do you want to learn languages? It’s really interesting and exciting - unless you learn and study it you don't realize all the complex things that go on inside your head when trying to construct sentences and speak everyday. Grammar is fun. You can learn rules which you then have to apply all the time when using the language. I also like how when first learning a language, how you can see yourself improving as you learn more vocabulary and grammatical structures, and it is really satisfying as you see yourself progressing and becoming more confident

2. Why these particular languages? I have always studied French and don’t want to stop learning. German is really grammatically interesting and I feel a lot more confident in speaking this language. Russian is exciting. Its alphabet is like a code and once you know which sound each character represents you feel you have achieved a lot and it opens up possibilities of understanding so much more. Just started doing lunchtime taster Japanese course – again, another (or in fact 3 different) alphabets is challenging but really satisfying to learn.

3. How long have you been learning them? I have been learning French since I was 11. At GCSE the language seemed to ‘click’ for me. Currently, I understand the majority of French that I hear and I really enjoy reading and writing but I lack a lot of confidence with speaking. It’s almost as if a barrier comes up when I’m in certain situations with French – I have no confidence and consequently I’m unable to say anything.I started German 3 years ago at the beginning of A-Levels. I am now at a similar level in German as in French. This year I have become more confident with speaking German, I think because I live with another student studying German and we often speak German together. I like feeling equal when speaking a foreign language and that rarely happens with native speakers so that may be why I often get quite nervous and say very little in the presence of native speakers.I have been learning Russian for about a year. I found learning Russian quite frustrating at first as I wasn’t able to express all the things I could in my other languages.

4. What kinds of resources helped you in your Language learning? At GCSE and A Level, we spent an hour a week with the language assistants and I got a lot out of this. My language assistants from my school are probably the only native speakers I am reasonably comfortable speaking to and still like to keep in contact with them. I enjoy reading looking at Grammar Books as they provide the key to how the language works. When I first started learning German, I got myself quite a concise grammar book which I read and learnt the main, important grammatical differences which I’d have to get to grips with in order to pick up the language. I am still surprised how easily I managed to do this in such a short space of time. I really enjoyed finding out about the grammatical differences and similarities between German, French and English.

5. What resource do you hope to make use of in the future? Maybe speaking more to native speakers… although sometimes, I prefer learning languages without the help of native speakers. I think it’s really cool how non-native speakers of different languages communicate together – it’s a shame that English is often the lingua franca. I often think it doesn’t matter whether one sounds native or makes mistakes as long as the speaker is competent enough to get a message across, however, I don’t like the thought that I will sound foreign and make mistakes, even if they might be able to understand me perfectly well.

6. How do you improve your Reading? Writing? Speaking? Listening? I like to keep mini flashcards of new vocabulary I learn and I listen to podcasts in the target language, just to get used to listening to that language. I also put the language of my phone, email homepage and other computer accounts like facebook and Blackboard into French so I get used to seeing the it on a regular day-to-day basis.

7. What is the hardest part of learning French? Probably the fact that I’ve been learning the language since I was 11, but I still make so many mistakes and even if I keep learning the language for the rest of my life, there are always going to be things I get wrong and I will always have an English accent when speaking French. This might sound like quite a negative attitude, but I think, once you realize this, but love learning languages nonetheless, it means you don’t have to set yourself the near-impossible task of native-like competency, but can relax and enjoy learning it with the aim of being the best second-language learner of French that you can be.