Does anyone have any good resources specifically for passing the TCF citizenship exam? I read that @Earthdave passed above last year- well done!
I have B1 DELF, and looking to prep specifically to pass the TCF test and the sort of tasks they set which seem to be relatively short exercises.
Cheers all!
On the general advice on resource preferences, I found Michel Thomas to have been really helpful on building adaptable root phrases for everyday conversation, and on ingraining syntax/ word order. He’s an acquired taste for sure and his vocal accent/ delivery takes some getting used to, but I think he was brilliant. I also enjoy him getting annoyed at the people he’s talking to, haha. Paul Noble is like a similar version of his technique, with enthusiasm and a standard English accent. Getting familiar up to their intermediate levels will get you functioning well in a lot of French situations/ conversations. They good on long car trips, and emphasise it’s ok to forget words if you keep repeating. I think I once read that you need to be exposed to a word nine times before it sticks on average depending on the age of your brain…
Duolingo I found only useful for vocab as many have said. I’m not being guilt-tripped in my emails by an owl avatar.
Reading the free café newspaper with a coffee and croissant and checking words you don’t know now and then on your phone is great.
Watching french films, news TV with subtitles on is a great regular habit.
I agree with you here in principle, but ultimately I’d love to have an eloquent and expressive vocabulary in french to be able to speak with nuance and intelligence. One of the things that is frustrating about my current level is that my speech tends to be formulaic and simple. I was a literature and creative writing lecturer in the UK so I’m particularly sensitive to this …
It gets better, but slowly. I often feel I must resemble French friends when they swear, which is almost always a little “off”.
The more one used language in work, the more nuanced and elegant one’s phrasing, the more poetic one’s analogies, the more one feels like a backward four-year-old with a speech impediment when one speaks French.
I’ve just signed up to a French language course at our local university inter age on .Connaissance et pratique de la langue française. It is (obvs) for french people so I think it could be stretching! The course after this one is creative writing.
Excellent, that sounds cool! Especially the Creative Writing element. From what I understand there’s not many universities that offer formal courses in CW in France. It tends to be in modules and standalone courses like the one you mentioned. I’d be interested to hear how it goes
Go for romans policiers, as they are grounded in the real world and give lots of context they tend to be a lot easier for foreigners to understand. Poss not Fred Vargas to start with, brilliant though she is. I devoured lots of Manuel Vazquez Montalbán and Alicia Gimenez Bartlett while I was getting my Spanish back up to scratch, and now I can happily read anything.
Look in the adolescent section in your local library, and/or talk to the librarian. Some are really well written and interesting, just with more straightforward sentence structure than adult novels. Those were the first books I managed to read cover to cover in a normal way.
@marko Well you could go for classics, Maigret - obv Simenon is old fashioned but that’s not a problem I’d have thought, and he wrote over 70 books so plenty to be getting on with. A lot of my pupils loved reading Agatha Christie (for their English, they actually requested her) and I wonder if she’s good in translation, certainly the French should be a good example. You can also look for éditions bilingues of books, there are lots and I bet the library has a selection. Actually, reading a book in French which you’ve already read in English is pretty good too. People like Frank Thilliez are good but they do tend to write doorstops and that might not be encouraging.
You really need a short successful read to get that dopamine going
Maigret is, however, a great repository of archaic French words and some of them have very obvious links with English and so provide endless opportunities for disappearing down etymological rabbit holes.
Le petit Nicolas is likely to be a bit complicated, think of the adventures of Molesworth ma for a foreign reader. I think a foreigner would miss most of the jokes.
Le Petit Nicolas adore faire des blagues et il en fait voir de toutes les couleurs à ses parents, qui ne sont jamais fâchés pour longtemps. Sa mère est drôlement chouette et son père est un sacré champion. À la récré, il retrouve ses copains : Alceste, Geoffroy, Eudes, Joachim, Maixent, Rufus, Clotaire, et aussi Agnan, le chouchou de la maîtresse. Et il y a Marie-Edwige, la fille des voisins, qui a de si jolis yeux bleus… En vacances, en famille, à l’école, avec le Petit Nicolas, on s’amuse comme des fous !
