This information is intended to give you the real keys, the real secrets, to learning a foreign language.  The failure of some students to 'get' foreign languages resides in the simple fact that languages are not learned in the same way that most other subjects are. They may be going about it the wrong way. Let's look at this for a moment.

Look at how you learned your native language, for most of you English.  You did it by listening and repeating what you heard.  But what you heard made absolutely no sense at the beginning.  It was simply delightful music, sung by the loving and happy faces of your parents, bending over you and smiling.  You sang this music happily back and gradually, over months and years, it came to have a meaning.  Your brain synthesized a grammar out of the repetitions of familiar structures, in various contexts, that it identified.  It is very likely that you were already completely fluent in this language before ever asking what a given word meant and before ever having any grammar explained to you.  You made perfect sentences without knowing what grammar was.

This fact is, in a way, a sort of proof that all of you can learn foreign languages.  Admittedly, we can't learn the second language in exactly the same way we learned the first:  we simply don't have the same time at our disposal.  We don't have 10 hours a day, seven days a week, for years, in the presence of French speakers.  We get three hours a week in class and a few more at home. That's why we take language classes.  Why don't language classes work very well sometimes?  Because many people, both professors and students,  have assumed that the tactics which work for learning other subjects are also the best ones for learning a foreign language.

In fact, foreign languages are not learned the way history, biology, business, math, computer science,  psychology, and engineering are learned.   In these subjects, because of the long history you have of reading and memorizing in English, it's sufficient to read over the material a few times, or listen to someone else talk about it, and you've got it.  This is why most foreign language students come to class and sit there.  They actually believe that simply listening to the professor talk about French will somehow impart it to their brains by a mysterious kind of transmission.  In fact, the tactics by which languages are learned are probably more similar to the tactics by which basketball or gymnastics is learned.  Motor skills are involved: nerve pathways have to be established between the brain and certain muscles.  The muscles have to be taught how to function with very minute nuances of contraction and coordination to produce the new sounds.  Then the pathways have to be consolidated with many, many repetitions.  A gymnast does not read about a new move and do it.  Motor skills take practice.  Imagine an NBA coach who believed that all his team needed in the way of preparation was sitting in class listening to him talk about basketball. Language is learned more like a sport or musical instrument.

This is not to say that it is all easy or all play.  Much of the work is real work: rigorous, intense, focused, and toiling.  But all true intellectual work is, and the student without the courage to face it--and the discipline to face it every day--will not succeed.

Ten Rules:

1.  Return to the music as often as possible.   Be willing to sing the music, even if it's nonsensical.  You don't always have to understand, or be able to translate, everything you hear and repeat.  Try to learn by blocks and chunks, rather than by stringing individual words together.  To do this, you have to accept the whole chunk without questioning and without trying to translate it.  Just realize that that chunk is what you say when you're in a given situation.

2.  Use intellectual, grammatical shortcuts as aids, but don't rely on them to the exclusion of lots of practice.

3.  Practise, practise, practise.    There's no substitute for this.  From the neurophysical point of view, it's a question of laying down an electro-chemical pathway along a nerve fiber.  Once is not enough; it will fade.  You have to lay it down over and over, and then it will stick.  Imagine the gymnast or basketball player. Little/often:  Any of you who play musical instruments can answer this question: "Is it better to practise for a couple of hours once a week, or for 20 minutes a day?"   The motor skills used for speaking a foreign language are like those used for typing or playing an instrument.  The pathway gets established better by a little repetition often, preferably every day.  The best time to practise is in class.   Keep mouthing the phrases all the time, saying them under your breath, whispering them, or trying them outloud on a neighbor.   As soon as the vocal muscles are working, you're learning the new phrase.

4.  Imitate, exaggerate.  Use the Inspecteur Cluseau accent to remind you that what you're trying to do is get out of the English system.  Any way you get out is good.  You cannot get to a real French sound from your English system.   Exaggeration is the key!   Lay it on thick!   It will sound a little ridiculous, but so what?  Have you ever noticed that when a classmate or the professor makes a peculiarly weird sound, everyone giggles?  This is because it's taboo; it's not English.   Whenever I insist on a good pronunciation of the French vowel "u"  [y], as in the word "tu", (made by rounding the lips to form a very tense "oooooo" sound, as in "too" and then bringing the tip of the tongue all the way up and holding it against the tip of the lower teeth),  and then when I have them try it, it invariably provokes peals of laughter.  Because it's not English.  It's taboo alien sounds.  You can be sure that you're getting close when it provokes laughter.  You simply cannot learn to ice skate or learn French without appearing ridiculous, so go ahead and get into it, rather than trying to avoid it.

5.  Realize that you have an English perceptual/conceptual system firmly installed in your brain.  Installing a new system which is at odds with the 'home system' is not easy.  Whenever you present your brain with new, contradictory information, it will look at the billions of times you've gone over the English pathways, then look the three or four instances of the new French pathways, and reject the new ones.  You're telling your brain that Je chante sous la pluie is how one says "I'm singing in the rain," but your brain knows that sous means "under" and dans means "in", so your brain will prefer the incorrect *Je chante dans la pluie.  The Frenchman perceives himself as under the rain, under the shower, not in it, and to him being in the rain would be being inside a raindrop.  Altering your patterns takes practice and understanding.

6.  Try to put the new blocks, or chunks, of French language which you acquire to practice in real situations.  If you can't be in a real situation, at least imagine one.  The more you run through the newly-acquired blocks in real situations, or situations which you are pretending are real, the faster they will be accepted and learned.  This is surprisingly easy to do:  walking to class, you can have an imaginary conversation with a girl you want to ask out, with a teacher you're apologizing to for being late, with a friend about what her favorite rock group is.  There are millions of examples.  And you will, at some point, get stuck.  But this is good:  first try to talk your way around it, then remember where you got stuck and ask a French teacher how to get past the obstacle.  Pushing gradually at the envelope of this expanding bubble is how you acquire more fluency.

7.  Another key to making French real to you is what I call 'show and tell'.   Everyone knows show and tell from elementary school.  The key here is to pick up a piece of life, an incident, an anecdote, a perception, from outside class, and bring it to class and share it with the others in French.  It should be something real--something with emotional connections, emotional roots for you.  Maybe your dog died.  You got a phone call from a friend you hadn't seen in many years.  You found a twenty-dollar bill on the ground.   It doesn't have to be something big.  And it doesn't have to be more than a few phrases.  The main thing is that it be real and that you be willing to share something seemingly insignificant with the others. Language is un-covering yourself and dis-covering others.

8.  Finally, and this is a little difficult to explain, you have to play the game.  This is how one gets out of the conceptual system installed by his past..  It involves being someone else for awhile, playing a role.   We act the way we think we're expected to act, and it's difficult to act as a French person in a class with a bunch of American students who know you're an American student, but this is what is necessary.  I've seen people do miraculous things as athletes or as performers when they were with people who didn't know them, i.e., when temporarily liberated from the 'expectations of others'.   One guy, who was a failure as a bike racer in America, was in South America on business and entered a race in a town there.  Everybody was buzzing about the powerful-looking American.  The guy started to believe the buzz.  He broke away in the race and won it.  Some kind of myth had worked on the Colombians, and they believed in him.  Their belief in him, and their expectations caused him to believe in himself.  Do you think you're shy?  Somebody has taught you to be shy by expecting you to be shy?  Now you think everybody expects you to be shy and so you are shy?  For a little while, as a test, try being someone else.  Feign interest in others; ask them questions; try to find out what they like; get to what their secret passion is.  People are interesting.  This is stuff you can't do in biology class!  What an opportunity!   Thinking in new patterns will cause you to discover that you are more than your old habits.  That's the exciting thing about language.  We carry a lot of repressed stuff around inside us, or rather drag it along behind us in a sack, the stuff that our parents and teachers and peers told us was inappropriate.  The shamed stuff.  Language is a great way to get some of that stuff out of the bag, along with all the old energy we used to have as kids but shut down on the command of some adult.  And here's where the medieval concept of a classroom is inappropriate for learning foreign languages.  The medieval model is one guy at the front (the Authority), talking in a one-way stream to a bunch of other people facing him (the pupils), who mostly listen and respond when he tells them to.  This is not real communication.  Try to make the classtime a real and flexible exchange among all present equally.  It's much more fun.  If you prepare at home and come to class willing to share, it will be wonderful.

9.  Since this is my job, and since I love it, I'm always more than willing to spend time helping to solve problems or facilitate the learning.  Don't  suffer in silence!   Write, call, or come to see me.  It always amazes me that all this free, willing, help is available and nobody takes advantage of it.  Must be that old shame thing.

10.  Relax and enjoy it.  This class, this subject, this language, is not the most important thing in the world.  But it will teach you some really important other things if you do it with bonne volonté.