tyleralecia
New member
I’ve been trying to learn French all of my life. Literally! In elementary school we took French from kindergarten through sixth grade. In high school I took French up until honors my senior year. As a rising junior in college, I’ve taken French every semester and am now considered “advanced”. I can hold a conversation, but with a lot of struggle and grammatical errors included. I can read French, but probably at a ninth grade level. Hear and understand French being spoken? I usually miss the majority of the discussion or have to ask the speaker to talk much slower. Essentially, while I can get A’s in all of my advanced French classes in college, speaking and understanding French outside of the classroom is an ongoing battle. Next semester I’ll be in France for study abroad to face my biggest battle with the language yet. And I’m so nervous that even after spending 4 months in the country for which I’ve been studying since I was a child, I’ll still come back to the states not fully fluent in French. This isn’t to say I haven’t improved drastically over the years but I want to be fluent and speak conversationally on command. I’m a firm believer that immersing myself in the culture will get me to that point but not without a lot of hardships along the way. Can anyone relate? Does anyone have any similar stories of success stories related to becoming fluent in another language?