It’s beginning. I’m about to kick off my next linguistic adventure: learning French.
I’ve started from scratch before; there was, after all, a point in my life when I spoke no Spanish and no Portuguese. But this time it’s different. When I started Spanish, I started it by taking classes in high school. And even though I did most of my Portuguese learning on my own, I did take one semester in college right at the beginning of the process.
So it’s fair to say that I’ve never really started from scratch quite like this before!
The Immediate (Predictable?) Second-Guessing
As soon as I began pondering a battle plan for learning French, I immediately started feeling overwhelmed. “Do I really want to do this?” and “Where will I start?” were the first two things to surge into my mind.
But the more I chewed on it, the more I realized that most of my objections and fears were simply rooted in the fact that I had no background in French. It’s easy to tackle Spanish – I’m already confident enough to carry conversations with native speakers, for example. The same goes for Portuguese. But French… well, I remember that bonjour means “good day,” and Pain means “Bread” (only because I used to live near a Le Pain Quotidien coffee shop/bakery). But beyond that, I have seriously almost zero French vocabulary.
It’s easy to be passionate about something you’re good at. And the opposite is true as well – it’s hard to care a lot about something that you suck at. As soon as I framed it that way, it helped me to realize that most of my second-thoughts have more to do with discomfort or fear than anything else. And neither of those things are permanent, which is a pretty freeing thought.
The solution? Get moving. The longer I sit and turn it over in my mind, the less likely it is that I’ll overcome the inevitable initial inertia.
The First Definitive Step
The ball has to get rolling somehow, right? So my first step to get moving was to immediately go to italki.com and find a tutor. I’ve got a couple of trial appointments scheduled for this weekend, which will be the first of many tutoring sessions to come. There wasn’t anything too profound about my reasoning or approach to this, but here are some of the reasons why my very first step was to hunt down a tutor:
- I don’t know the peculiarities of French. I need someone who can see a couple of steps further than I can and anticipate the questions I’ll have
- I don’t want to the structure of a classroom setting; I went for a one-on-one tutor because they’ll be able to help me measure my progress without laying out an inflexible learning plan
- I get way more for my money from private tutoring sessions than I would from an expensive piece of language learning software
Here are some of the criteria that I considered “essential” when looking for a tutor:
- Either in my timezone or flexible with their schedule to accommodate my schedule
- Some knowledge of Spanish and/or Portuguese; it’s almost inevitable that I’ll have trouble separating those languages from French, so I need a tutor who can help me specifically with that
- Not too expensive, but not too cheap either. I want good quality, but I really don’t think that paying 2-3 times as much will give me 2-3 times better results. The tutors I found that I liked were in the range of $10-12 USD per hour
- A Native French speaker. There are plenty of non-natives out there who will teach me French, but I want to hear a native accent whenever my tutor talks, and I trust a native to know the language better and more colloquially
Here are some of the things I thought were not important when looking for a tutor:
- A high level of English. I want them to speak to me in French, after all! If we really reach an impasse, they can write to me what they’re saying and I’ll plug it into google translate. No big deal.
- A strong teaching record. The thought here is that, if they have at least a “medium” level of experience as a teacher, that’s actually better than an “expert” because experts are often tied to their own way of doing things
What’s Next?
Next week I’ll share the full French plan and some of the specific resources that I’ll be using to learn French. What about you? What was it like when you were just getting started? Maybe you’re there right now – what’s your next move?