The reactions you get when you have an accent and people know or can assume by context that you are a migrant or immigrant are telling, to say the least.
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I recommend anglophones on travel—who have the luxury of a native language quite commonly spoken by nonnative speakers—stick to what I call “global English.”
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Most people do not know that Switzerland has four national languages: German, French, Italian, and Romansch.
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Even if all the tests tell you that you’ve arrived when it comes to fluency, you can still improve. Here are a few tips for continuing to increase your fluency in your target language.
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You’ll find all types of people in France, as you will in all countries and cultures. As blanket stereotypes, though, these haven’t proven true in my experience.
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I’d just assumed, as I believe do most of us, that a person reaches a given point at which she’s just fluent and—a-ha!—goal reached. You’ve made it.
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What long-term psychological dangers exist for people who feel they cannot communicate and cannot manage to make others understand them?
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When asked about timelines for integration, I never had a definitive answer based on my own experiences. So I did a little research. Here’s what I learned.
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We might most naturally learn our second (and beyond) languages in the same way we learned our first.
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It’s easy to criticize people who don’t learn the local language to fluency—until you gain a bit of perspective.
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Here are the most valuable resources and experiences I’ve had for learning the French language to help you in your journey.
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Here are the best podcasts I used in my journey to learning French, whittling it down to the ones I found the most helpful and engaging in each CEFRL level.
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I’ve discovered that when you live as a foreigner or immigrant, certain things happen regularly that you’d wish would happen differently—for several reasons.
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No one likes nasty surprises! So that others can go into the DELF B2 far less blindly than I did, I wrote up my experiences taking the DELF B2 exam. Hope it helps!
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Reading a book improves language learners’ grammar, spelling, and vocabulary. Here are my recommendations for novels in French that language learners will enjoy, categorized by CEFRL level.
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In the process of learning French, I discovered three unexpected side benefits that I’ve found interesting to contemplate (and that have kept me slogging forward).
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I have only a few days or even weeks before I’ll need to communicate a bit more in a French-speaking world. And I’ll have to do through voice-muffling masks.
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