Teaching French to my friend : a complete beginner Spanish speaker

A story on purpose, friendship, and teaching choices.

This summer, I’m teaching French to my friend Dylan! He’s the first Spanish speaker I’ve ever worked with—and he’s a total beginner. He didn’t ask me to teach him; I offered spontaneously, seeing this as an opportunity to test new methods and get the chance to work with a Spanish speaker (Fluench! will move to Spain soon!).

Reflecting on what this process is all about feels important to me as an educator.

Who and how?

Dylan is a native Spanish speaker. Coming from Barcelona, he has strong knowledge of Catalan. He was born in Peru, before moving to Spain as a child, which gave him a strong sense of belonging to both cultures. His knowledge of English is intermediate—he’s using it more now that he lives in Bulgaria—but he’s still not comfortable expressing himself in this language.

Aside from the language aspect of this experience, applying every core principle I hold as a teacher to our learning time is allowing him to develop trust and confidence when it comes to French, which then allows him to grow without judgment, while still receiving honest feedback. This applies to all students, no matter their background or prior linguistic experience.

A personal challenge

Working with someone like him is forcing me to come out of my multilingual bubble. My personal linguistic background, as well as that of the people I usually work with, is very different.

Even though I teach exclusively in French from the very first minute in the classroom (exposure and immersion work wonders on beginners—I elaborated more on that topic in that article), we do share two languages (English and Spanish), and this is extremely relevant for the success of our experience.

Indeed, teaching is not just about sharing a bunch of key information; my job is also to accompany him in his memorization process. Everyone functions very differently, and I love that! It’s what makes humans so beautifully interesting.

Finding ways to help Dylan remember all kinds of language concepts requires me to share efficient methods, useful tips, and memory tricks in order for him to grasp the logic—and never forget!

Personal picture : Dylan and I working together

Recently we worked on the endings of “-er” verbs in the present tense. He struggled with memorizing them, specifically because they sound very different from their written form. To solve this issue, I started by showing him the parallel I created in my mind between the Spanish and French endings. This is something that always helped me, and I imagined it would make sense for him. Well… it didn’t really.

My second idea was to show him how I remember learning these endings in primary school—by repeating them by heart like a poem, spelling out every letter: e, es, e, ons, ez, ent. And this clicked right away! I love this anecdote because it shows the kind of pre-existing mindset we put ourselves into as teachers, speculating on what should work best based on a bunch of clues—and sometimes, it’s not what we expect!

Making him speak good, so that he feels good.

Dylan being a newbie in terms of language learning—and his background being more technical than academic—I knew our learning process had to be specifically reward-based.

After five lessons, he can already:

• Understand most of my explanations, thanks to the closeness between French and Spanish, key gestures I implemented from the first minute, and key words I taught him to help clarify if necessary.

• Say simple sentences with correct grammatical structure (including conjugating er verbs and using negation: ne… pas).

• Understand a simple biography and answer basic questions about the given information

• ask for precision about a word's meaning and/or its pronunciation

Personal picture : a whiteboard display on introducing characters

But mostly—and this is the key element here!—he understood the point of creating connections and growing from them toward more elaborate thinking.

When it comes to grammar, the world of language education is going in all directions, trying to decide whether grammar should be taught from the start, and if so, in what way—implicitly or explicitly—and in what language (native or target), and so on.

Well, this is again a highly individual experience, because we’re all different and don’t all need the same things.

My job with Dylan is to give him the grammar, because I know he needs it to be able to use the language, while not talking about it too much, because he is not familiar with language studies and doesn’t know too many complicated terms.

This is why I do both implicit and explicit grammar—but only in French. All of my students learn, within their first two lessons, the key words that will let them understand (first) and ask for clarifications (later), no matter the topic: féminin, masculin, singulier, pluriel, consonne, voyelle. Later on comes: verbe, adjectif, nom, défini, indéfini…

The truth is, most learners don’t want to do grammar. When it’s mentioned, they get afraid. However, all learners want to know why something is one way or another. To answer that why, we need grammar (or one of its many exceptions, especially in French). Most of the key words I use are transparent enough between French-English-Spanish, and they help categorize information. Since they’re simple concepts, they can be used by anyone—even by people who didn’t follow academic studies. I’m helping Dylan create bridges away from hard grammar, but still incredibly effective.

Testing out beliefs

Throughout this experience, I’m verifying an idea I’ve always had—but that used to make me feel bad. I remember feeling like I had to be super strict with grammar and pronunciation right from the beginning, even if it meant learning fewer things. I saw myself as cruel and intolerant, even though I was convinced this was essential.

I watched all my colleagues, and all the textbooks, moving so much faster than me in their beginner courses. But still, the years have proved me right. Especially working with younger learners, I’ve noticed that focusing on the right stuff during the first five hours can unlock the doors of French reading and sentence-building with minimal mistakes.

Disclaimer: ALL mistakes are useful—but there’s a right time for all of them. With all of my students, I regularly find myself having to go back to basics, even after two or three years of French, because I (or someone else) wasn’t strict enough at the beginning. I can’t undo what’s already been done—but with Dylan, I’m testing this hypothesis:

"If a beginner doesn’t have the chance to learn wrong information or develop wrong beliefs (we all have some in the foreign languages we speak) at first, then he won’t have to unlearn them later."

This applies especially to the complexity of reading and pronouncing French. I don’t know yet if this is going to work, but I’m embracing it as a trial-and-error situation.

Personal picture : Dylan navigating a reading activity

Nerd alert! //If you’re not into French phonetics, skip to the next part!//

The following paragraph will be a list of the rules I gave Dylan right from our first lesson, in the same order I gave them to him, to show that learning a language really is a matter of connection and build-up.

1. Never pronounce the final consonant (cue word: “silence” + “shhh” gesture)

2. Never pronounce the letter “e” with the sound [e] (like été) or [ɛ] (like lait). It’s a simple [ə]. (Exaggerating the mouth positioning works wonders on someone completely unfamiliar with French phonemes.)

3. If the letter “e” is followed by an “s” (like in the present: tu manges, tu parles, tu danses), don’t pronounce the final “s.” If it’s a short word like les, still don’t say the “s,” but turn the [ə] into a [e].

4. The final “s” of the pronouns nous and vous should be pronounced as a “z” sound if followed by a word starting with a vowel. (Cue sign: draw the connection between the final S and the next vowel, write “z” and exaggerate its pronunciation.)

5. Same thing applies to the article les.

6. If the word is feminine and you need to add an “e” to indicate it, then you’re allowed to pronounce the final consonant. (Ex: petit = silent “t”; petite = pronounce the “t” / grand = silent “d”; grande = pronounce the “d”)

7. A bunch of letters won’t be pronounced but will change the sound of the vowel involved. (Ex: o / on, e / et, a / an, etc.)

This is after just three hours of French—and most of these came naturally during our lessons.

Personal picture : me writing on the whiteboard for Dylan

Finding purpose in the world, and within yourself.

As teachers, I believe we often lack good judgment about what to give—and to whom. Especially in high school teaching, we know the students have an exam to pass at the end and want to give them everything the school curriculum includes, usually sacrificing the most important: a purpose.

People always told me I had “the thing” for languages, because it seemed to come easily to me. Growing older, I understood that “the thing”—apart from some cognitive aptitude—was mostly me realizing that languages could serve a purpose. No, many purposes: talking with people, accessing cultural content unavailable in my language, meeting foreigners, expressing myself differently, traveling, and so on! I could actually do something with them.

Now that’s why I understand Dylan so well. He got into French because he realized there was a whole world out there waiting for him. And this is extremely exciting, no matter how old you are. Why would you learn to cut down a tree if you never, ever intend to cut down a tree?

After two hours of French—the only two hours of his life—Dylan already told me:

“I’d like to continue with French and why not move to France for a while to learn more.”

That speaks for itself.

My pet peeve in the language world is the joy of discovering a new thought system. My friend Dylan never considered himself a language guy and had kind of lived his whole life believing this wasn’t for him. But when he started using English more after moving abroad, he began to understand its purpose. I now get to see him get super excited by the connections between French, Spanish and Catalan!

He came to the conclusion himself that languages are the key to communication and bonding with the world. We often talk about this topic and regularly reflect on the fact that if we didn’t have a common language with our friends, we wouldn’t be able to talk to them—and, actually, we wouldn’t be friends.

Personal picture : happy learning is efficient learning

The fact that he chose French to explore his new interest in languages makes me very happy. I’m proud to contribute to his language journey—as a teacher, but also as his friend. I hope we share many more meaningful moments of friendship—and French learning!