“Why do you say that in French? It just doesn’t make sense”, I would repeatedly ask my wife. This has an incredibly de-motivating effect on the brain’s desire to assimilate new information. Subconsciously, I am saying to myself, “this is really dumb, I don’t want to do this.” I noticed this when trying to conduct conversation classes. A student will invariably ask, “how long you live here?” When I correct the mistake, “how long have you lived here?” they say, “why?” It’s not like that in their language, so they don’t want to believe that it’s like that in English. They even continue to come up with variations that they think sound better and ask me if they can use them. “No”, I say. “Why not?”, they respond. The whole lesson is wasted because they refuse to believe what I, the English teacher, am telling them!

My advice: even if you don’t understand why something is said a particular way, just accept it and move on. A foreign language is not English, and has no obligation to be like English. For hundreds of years, busy-body academics thought that English should be like Latin, because Latin is more intellectual. They tried to burden us with useless rules about split infinitives and never putting prepositions at the end of sentences. Don’t be like them, and don’t make life hard for yourself. Why do you want to learn a foreign language? The only valid reason is because you want to communicate. And communication starts with conversation, not by asking “why do you say it like that?”

living in the country and practising everyday. He has a site about that helps students to improve their learning abilities, apprendre anglais, and a blog about learning English. The advice he offers is invaluable for anyone wishing to learn a language, not just French.

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