Learning To Speak French Quickly
Can I memorise the 2000 most used French verbs? I watched a YouTube video yesterday by a Spanish professor who made assertion the that you both can and should learn languages quickly. He dismissed ideas like immersion and recognisable input. His suggestion was that the most important thing was to learn vocabulary, and learn it quickly and strategically.
This YouTuber does tend to be pretty aggressive in his titles and also in his advice. There’s a lot of stuff along the lines of stop wasting your time watching YouTube videos and get on with doing some actual work even if it is boring. He also makes great claims to being able to speak 12 languages – a claim that sounds too good to be literally true, though I have no way of assessing it.
What he is saying is pretty much the opposite of how I have learnt French. I’ve been picking up odds and sods here and there over many decades. I can’t read a French novel slowly with the aid of dictionary. I can satisfactorily buy tickets and order meals. But I can’t really hold a conversation in French. So I was quite attracted by the idea that I might be able to rapidly upgrade my rubbish French into actually usable French.
His proposal for a strategic approach is to learn the verbs first. And when he says the verbs, he means 2000 of them. He asserted that this was all the verb you’d ever need. That sounds about right.
How should you learn them? By reading them in sentences. And you learn those sentences by spaced repetition. The details are up to you. But he did provide a spreadsheet with the 2000 verbs rendered into 2000 sentences along with some MP3 files with all the sentences read out.
He sounded quite intriguing. So I have said about seeing how quickly I can learn these 2000 verbs. To be honest, I think I already know about a third of them. So it shouldn’t be too difficult. His proposal was that you need to learn 100 a day. I am up for the challenge. The next stage is to come up with a plan. And the first stage of that plan is to work out how I can test how quickly I am learning the verbs.
