Tired of boring and ineffective language learning methods?

Let me ask you a question: What do you think is the most important when you are going to learn French:
   to learn facts about the language?
      or to begin using the language actively?

One of the most revolutionary and surprising discoveries made by language researchers in the last couple of decades is that there is almost no relationship between these two forms of language learning.

To learn facts about a language - like memorizing grammar rules - does not help you much in your practical use of the language. When you hear someone speak French and you want to understand what the person says, it helps you surprisingly little how much vocab or verb declension lists you have tried to cram in - you simply don't have the time to 'look up' all that information in your mental 'dictionary'. 

At a speed of perhaps 100 words per minute, you don't have a chance consciously to think about the rules and information that you've read about.

When you are using a language actively, like listening, reading or talking French, you are using your language intuition - a superfast language processor built into your brain. This part of your mind is made for interpreting a language superfast, so you in real-time can understand what is being said, and produce sentences yourself in that language.

Just think about a language you already know - like English or your mothertongue. When you're using that language, do you then have to think about what each word means - word for word, or consult grammar rules that you've memorized? No, of course not.

It does happen that we get unsure and our language intuition leaves us in doubt about something, for instance when we write. "Is that how I write it? Should there be a plural ending here?" Then it is useful to know some grammar rules and 'look them up' in your grammar-memory. But this is the exception. 99% of our language usage is run intuitively and in real-time by our built in language-processor and not by consulting grammar rules we have studied and memorized.
 

If it doesn't work training my language processor or intuition by reading about and memorizing grammar rules, how do I train it then? 

Then answer according to the research: by listening to and reading large amounts of understandable French.

That's how you learnt your mother tongue as a kid, and (if that wasn't English) that's how you learnt English as well as you have (since you are reading this article pretty fast!) And that's how you must teach yourself French too if you want to be able to use it actively. Reading large amounts of French texts, listening to it spoken, watching movies, and so on.

Going to France is of course the best way of being exposed to lots of French. With the right home-study courses built on recent research you can also get quite far towards fluency. Many language courses however focus on the wrong elements - giving you lots of material to analyze and memorize but not feeding and training your language processor sufficiently.

So Linguaguide went ahead and tested and scrutinized lots of language courses for you.

We took a look at one of the most popular courses on the market, the much praised FrenchNow! package from Transparent Language. Was it any good?

You bet. So good that we even made our own complete Tutorial CD-Rom for it, to teach you how to get squeeze the most language learning effect out of the software.

FrenchNow costs $69, or $97 including our Linguaguide Tutorial package (CD-Rom plus immediately downloadable). Click here to read more.