Words words words! Every language in the world is made up of words, and French is no exception. Many students attending english to french courses face the problem of mastering French vocabulary. We offer some useful tips to help you better cope with the problem of learning French words.
Tips for Learning French Words
Mastering the gender of French nouns is one of the main tasks in learning French. Despite the fact that there are some endings that allow you to guess what gender a certain noun is, but in most cases you just need to memorize. Therefore, the best way to remember whether a word is gendered, masculine or feminine, is to keep your vocabulary list of words with an article in front of the noun, so that you can learn the gender along with the word itself. So, you should write une chaise or la chaise (chair), not just “chaise”.
This is of particular importance for nouns used with both genders, both masculine and feminine. A dozen pairs of French word pairs have different meanings depending on the gender in which they are used.
Random vocabulary when learning French
When attending our French language courses, you will periodically come across new words while reading texts. If you look up every word you don’t know in the dictionary, you may lose the thread of the story. However, without some key words, you may not catch the main point at all. Therefore, in this case, several strategies can be applied.
1) Underline unfamiliar words to look up their meaning in the dictionary later. This way you will also have context at hand, in case of multiple meanings.
2) If this is not an option for you, then you can try writing out a whole sentence in your list of new words english to french, and not just a word, in order to memorize it in context.
3) Once all the meanings of unfamiliar words have been written out, read the whole story again, referring to the list of words or restoring the meanings of unfamiliar words from memory. You will see how much better you understand what you read the second time.
Well, the most important advice in learning the vocabulary of the French language: once you have learned new words, do not forget to repeat them periodically, often return to the list of words already passed and control how well you have learned them.