How to learn French

French looks easy on the page and turns out to be hard in the ear. A third of English comes from it, so reading starts well - then someone speaks and none of the words you recognised are where you expected them. Planning around that gap is most of the job.

Learn the silent letters first

Start with what is not pronounced. Most final consonants are silent, -ent on a verb says nothing at all, and words run together through liaison and elision, so vous avez sounds like one word. Learn the silences early and spoken French stops being a wall.

Never learn a noun without its article

Learn every noun with its article attached - le pain, la table, never pain and table on their own. Gender governs the adjectives and pronouns around it, so a noun learned without it has to be relearned, and there is no rule reliable enough to save you later.

Listen faster than is comfortable

Listen to French faster than you are comfortable with, early. Textbook audio is slowed down and teaches you to expect pauses between words that real speech does not have. Ten minutes of a podcast you half-follow beats an hour of dialogue recorded for learners.

Let politeness carry the sentence

Then use the politeness formulas as scaffolding. Bonjour, excusez-moi de vous déranger, je voudrais and merci beaucoup carry an enormous amount of weight in France, and having them automatic means the sentence in between can be clumsy without the exchange going wrong.