French GCSE

Can someone help me how to get better at my reading and listening, because i do so well with writting and speaking but suck at the rest

Reply 1

University of Strathclyde

Official Rep

Original post by ekiraiai

Can someone help me how to get better at my reading and listening, because i do so well with writting and speaking but suck at the rest

Hey @ekiraiai :smile:

I studied French at uni so I've a few tips!
For both of these the thing that helped me most was reading and listening to things that I had an interest alongside my class revision. I thought about what I liked reading and listening to in English and found the French equivalent. For me that was pop music and radio stations, and magazines. I found this helped to keep my attention a bit more and I became familiar with different types of language.

Some of my classmates would change their phone language to French/Spanish, put on foreign language subtitles or watch dubbed versions of their favourite TV shows they were already familiar with. Doing things like this alongside my normal revision and classwork definitely helped me, and also really helped how interested I was in learning the language!

- Caitlin :h:

Official University of Strathclyde Rep

Reply 2

tealpencil

Ahhh I was the same as well. Writing and speaking was what I was really good at but I found listening particularly challenging. I do french a level now and what really helps me is Duolingo ( I promote this app a lot :biggrin:

) . Do 10 mins a day, start listening to their podcasts and your listening will improve . Good luck and hope this helps !

Reply 3

tiredgiraff

I also studied french at uni, and I'm also a French and German tutor for GCSE and A level languages students.
With listening, my main tip is to do a lot. Switch between native-level and A2/beginner level listening extracts. Rather than aiming to understand everything, aim to pick out words that you know from the extracts. Over time, you'll get better and better at this and you'll be able to understand linger extracts. Listening to some native-level extracts will also help as it will make the GCSE-levwl extracts feel less fast and overwhelming. Also, if you're listening to things you're interested in, you're more likely to practice more often.

With reading, again, practice lots. But if it's hard then you can try annotating the texts. For example, underline the verbs, which tenses they're in and which nouns they apply to. This might also helping with your writing skills!

Something that will help with your language in general is just learning vocab. On some sites you can listen to how the words sound while you learn them, which can really help when it comes to listening as you've already heard them.

(edited 8 months ago)

Reply 4

Mamaklaudja

Hey,
I have done 5 yrs of French at Uni, then moved in France for 7 yrs so I would advise to go in the country for a while, even only for holidays. It's the better way to get better.
Another way could be to get a French partner lol (I can tell you that it does help at lot).
Otherwise I would suggest French movies, in original version and with french subtitles.