The French Journey

Learning to speak another language as an adult with a method that teaches you like parents teach toddlers (such as the Rosetta Stone/phrase book/Michel Thomas/Pimsleur methods) is quite possibly the slowest and least motivating method available.

Using this method you can, at best, learn to speak another language like a toddler speaks his mother tongue; repeating single words to convey a whole sentence and using verbs incorrectly with no understanding of cultural context (manners, customs and norms) or how to be eloquent in that language.

People choose this method because it gives immediate results (feedback on how well you can say one particular word) and gives the feeling that you’re on the road to full bilingual communication. But this is false, and the end result is likely to be as stated above.

They also choose this method over grammar books and emmigrating to the language’s country. This is understandable – grammar books are dry, they cannot be read from cover to cover and emmigrating can cost jobs, family ties, social ties and financial ruin if unsuccessful. So the current barriers to the two most efficient ways of learning another language are boredom and risk. Boredom is the easiest of these two barriers to break down.

Grammar books are dry because they show systems and rules, things people generally hate.  But the information they contain is everything required to start learning words to place in those systems and rules and quickly become a proficient speaker of the target language. If that stage can be reached, accessing the culture and sounds of the foreign language becomes a lot easier and progress can really be made in double the time a child takes to learn a language.

In order to make grammar books less boring, they need bringing to life. Easy to remember diagrams of rules, comparisons with rules in the native language, music even; anything that can be used as a memory aid that require as little text as possible.

The French Journey will try to focus on providing the following in as entertaining a manner as possible:
First grammar (the bones), then the vocab (the muscles and skin), expressions (movements and gestures), phonetics (perfecting the sound of communications) and finally the culture so that any communication made is correct for the speakers receiving the communication.