I had a textbook that explained many things very clearly with lists of vocabulary words to learn, and I also made sure to speak with a French tutor on a regular basis. Not to mention that having a professor who explained the grammatical rules and asked me to speak in a live, conversational context was very helpful.
When I decided to major in French, however, I needed to take my skills to the next level, and the only way to do that was to spend some time living in a French-speaking part of the world. There’s only so much about a language one can learn in a classroom. After all, in order to approach fluency, one has to experience how that language works in real-world contexts (think about all the English words you’ve learned from your family, jobs, hobbies, etc… it’s much easier to remember words when they have an immediately relevant, real-life applications). At the beginning of my semester in Paris, I would say my French was at an intermediate level. My sentences were stumbling and there was a lot of important vocabulary that I still didn’t know, but I spoke well enough at least that French people could understand me, and therefore help me learn new words when I found myself at a loss. For instance, during my taxi ride to my homestay from the airport on my first day in Paris, the taxi driver taught me the phrase famille d’accueil (“host family”), as I was trying to describe to him my living arrangements in Paris.
Since the beginning of the fall semester, I’ve lived mostly in French. All six of my classes in Paris are in French. Every time I want to buy something or order food at a restaurant, I do so in French. Perhaps most importantly, I live with a host family.
