The ‘Let yourself forget’ strategy
It’s 2024, and I am driving along the highway while listening to an ‘easy’ French learning audio book called ‘French Conversations with Paul Noble’. Right at the beginning of the book he pushes a rule which at first didn’t make the slightest bit of sense, even though I was nodding along to myself and thinking “right, of course”. We go through some basic vocabulary which then becomes everyday sentences and it’s ridiculously easy to learn and repeat. I was quite impressed at how easy the vocabulary was to remember. After about 15 minutes, we started building on the vocabulary around the phrases we’d been learning, and I was quite comfortable repeating after the native speaker. I was excited to try speaking to my partner and hopefully impressing her with how quickly I could learn French (this gets good).
Our sentence base was “I have prepared ______” and we just kept on adding vocabulary to make longer phrases. The reader then added a sentence structure which was very much like the first one: “I can prepare the coffee; can you prepare dinner?” and all I had to do was respond with “I have prepared dinner” (the very sentence I’d been working on for 20 minutes). I just went completely dead and forgot everything. As soon as the native speaker said it I smacked myself about the head, thinking ‘Of course, how could I have forgotten?’ The reader then went on to add more vocabulary to the structure. When I started doing a mock conversation in French and stopped talking about myself I suddenly forgot even more and felt completely behind.
A bit later I was feeling a bit stupid and thought we weren’t meant to be forgetting yet. I thought the author was just being kind and saying “it’s alright to forget”. I went back a few times and rewound the audio book by 5 minutes to go through some of the exercises again and that did help, though it was still a lot to remember as a complete beginner. Eventually I just decided to trust the reader and carry on without any more rewinds. We went through the basic vocabulary of J’ai (I have), Tu as (you have), Je vais (I’m going), Tu vas (you are going), manger/mangé (to eat/eaten). Those were fairly straightforward words to learn and some of them were very similar in the different tenses. We went through the words that start the sentence and once we’d done enough of them we would then add a verb or a noun to them.
After about 30-40 minutes of repeating I was starting to catch up again and we were beginning to add in some very English vocabulary (preparé / preparer, café, dessert, chocolat, chat (cat), jus d’orange (orange juice)).
I started to understand what the author was trying to do; he had us repeat words such as:
I can
You can
You have
We can
I want
You want
They want
I will
You will
I have
They have
She has
They will
She can
I can
You can
He has
I am going
You are going
And
Today
Yesterday
Tonight
Tomorrow
This is a huge amount of vocabulary to learn and we’re constantly being asked to repeat it at random moments throughout the book to keep it fresh in our minds. Given that it’s such a long audiobook he wants us to be very focussed on this vocabulary. It deals with various tenses and points of view. As we’ve already seen, French nouns and indeed some of the verbs are very similar in sound to their English equivalents so they’re not as difficult to learn as a lot of the other French vocabulary. After a while you’d be asked to say…
“I have prepared the coffee; can you prepare dinner tonight”
“J’ai préparé le café, tu peux préparer le dîner ce soir”
And respond with
“Thank you for the coffee, yes, I will prepare dinner soon”
“Merci pour le café, oui, je vais préparer le dîner bientôt”
You’ll see that the vocabulary isn’t too difficult to follow with the translation, and the words the author has us repeat throughout the book are the unfamiliar ones. Luckily, I listened to the audiobook when my partner and I were doing long-distance. It was a 5-hour drive to see her and another 5 hours back home, so I had plenty of time to sit, listen without distractions, and work through the audiobook to gain a deep understanding of what the author was teaching. I still forget a few words or rules from time to time, which I quickly pick up again when the author goes over them.
This rule of ‘allowing forgetting’ teaches the learner a few things.
One, it’s absolutely vital to keep doing the exercises even if you think you’ve got them committed to memory. There are a massive number of words to learn and it takes time. Do a little bit of vocab at a time, and make time to go over / re-listen to even the very small things (like telling the time). Trying to learn a whole bunch of rules at once isn’t necessarily the best approach as our brains forget very quickly so repetition is going to be your friend.
Secondly, pay attention to the grammar rules (yes, it is boring and you probably think you already know them). Knowing some of the grammar rules by heart (even just the very basics) will be of help when you get lost. A lot of verbs in French sound the same in different tenses. Manger is ‘to eat’ in French, mangais is ‘I was eating’ and mangé is ‘I ate’ and they all sound the same. That can be useful in real life situations. Once you know they all sound the same you’ve got one less thing to think about. It is very simple really, but if you do remember the -er verbs (you can of course forget this if you’re a very beginner at French) and that they all sound the same in different tenses (not all of them mind you) then it’s one less thing to think about. So yes, learn the rules so that you don’t have to think about them when you’re speaking.
Overall the hard part of learning a language is just accepting that learning at a steady pace is better than anything else and it will feel absolutely glacial for a lot of the time. Our brains aren’t actually designed to learn as quickly as possible. Even if some guy on TikTok says he’s learned 5 languages in 3 months using this app (he’s paid to say that), our brains are designed to forget. What you get to do is choose what you feed them via repetition and consistency. Allow yourself to forget and trust that repetition will take you where you want to go. Who knows, after ordering a coffee in your car 100 times, it might not be so horrifying to order one in Paris.
