3 Steps to Better Understand Spoken French

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Understanding spoken French is the goal of every French Learner. This is why you are working hard every day to learn French. In 3 Steps to Better Understand Spoken French, I will explain 3 Steps one should absolutely follow to understand spoken French. It’s not as complicated as you think. These 3 steps work for any language; French, English, Spanish and more.

Step 1 – To Better Understand Spoken French

Learn French pronunciation sounds – Understand how French words are built!

A step that a lot of people overlook when learning a language, especially French, is not taking time to learn French pronunciation and pronunciation rules. Spoken French and written French are two different languages. In French, we speak by sounds. If you try to read this word for example (maintenant), what do you get? What about this one? Un chien.

If you haven’t learned the French pronunciation sounds, I highly recommend it. I will link a playlist for you below. It’s important to go back to the basics to have a great foundation in French.

Learning French pronunciation sounds will allow you to understand spoken French. Without knowing them, your chances of understanding spoken French and becoming fluent are limited.

Step 2 – To Better Understand Spoken French

Read and Listen at the same time!

After learning French pronunciation, many hope to understand spoken French directly from movies. It doesn’t work like this. Before understanding French naturally, you will have to read and listen at the same time.

What is the point of reading and listening French at the same time? It’s simply to connect sounds and spelling in your brain. If you hear a French word and you don’t know how it’s spelled, you won’t be able to understand what it is. Here, the goal is to get your brain to recognize the word and the sounds associated with it.

Working on this step daily is best. Even if you do 10 minutes a day, you will see incredible results in only a few weeks.

Step 3 – To Better Understand Spoken French

Knowing how French sentences are built!

I know that grammar isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but knowing basic French sentence structure is really a must. Imagine watching a movie where all the parts of the stories are mixed; what you think should be the end is now the beginning, and the dialogue is not in the right order. In your brain, nothing makes sense. It’s the same for French. French probably doesn’t follow the same sentence structure as your first language. Think about the place of pronouns, for example.
I bought it. In French, it isn’t at the end; it’s before the verb. Je l’ai acheté.

If sentence structure doesn’t make sense to you, you will never be able to understand spoken French because your brain won’t make sense of it.

I don’t mean that you need to have perfect grammar, even though you know me, I love grammar. What I mean is that you just need to understand how French works. That’s all. You can still struggle with the sentence structure of French when speaking but understand spoken French.

If you have other tips to understand spoken French, please leave them in the comments and let me know if you are going to implement one or all these tips in your own French learning journey.

If you prefer to watch a video lesson, you can watch the video 3 Steps to Better Understand Spoken French.