French [H] in one year with no prior work?

Sean33

Hey,

doing french this year and need to get a min C1 [H] for the course I want next year. I have literally zero french as its the only subject that I have never worked in. I can barely say my own name. It's something I'm very much interested in learning. Is it possible to get the entire course done in the space of 9 months or am I kidding myself?


Thanks.

spurious

If you've never done French before you're kidding yourself.
A far better chance (and meant to be two year courses, so arguably possible in one) would be Japanese or Russian.

Sean33

spurious wrote: »

If you've never done French before you're kidding yourself.
A far better chance (and meant to be two year courses, so arguably possible in one) would be Japanese or Russian.

I have done French before, it's just that I never worked in it and have forgotten most of it.

Canard

Well if you're interested I'm sure you could give it a shot. I assume you have classes of it in school? I was in a slightly different situation where I loved French and got an awful teacher for 6th year, so I pretty much ended up teaching myself a lot of the grammar and finding stuff myself - it's not that bad really, considering you can always ask questions and not all that many tenses would be required for a C1. It does depend on how much you already know though; for example if you knew the imperfect tense and the future tense, you'd pretty much know the conditional tense with no extra learning required, but if you didn't it'd be considerably more to do.

Sean33

Patchy~ wrote: »

Well if you're interested I'm sure you could give it a shot. I assume you have classes of it in school? I was in a slightly different situation where I loved French and got an awful teacher for 6th year, so I pretty much ended up teaching myself a lot of the grammar and finding stuff myself - it's not that bad really, considering you can always ask questions and not all that many tenses would be required for a C1. It does depend on how much you already know though; for example if you knew the imperfect tense and the future tense, you'd pretty much know the conditional tense with no extra learning required, but if you didn't it'd be considerably more to do.

Well I'm in a private school with great teachers and I will be speaking with my french friend for an hour or two every weekend. Hopefully I can get the c1.

mathstalk

Sean33 wrote: »

Well I'm in a private school with great teachers and I will be speaking with my french friend for an hour or two every weekend. Hopefully I can get the c1.

It's possible. Emil Krebs (Died aged 63) mastered 68 languages in his lifetime. That's more than one a year. Okay... he was a genius. But you only have to learn one language. At Leaving Cert level you don't even have to master the language. You just have to know it well enough to form structured sentences.
That's not to say that it's going to be easy. You'll have to spend hours on it every night. You won't be studying for the Leaving Cert like every other student in the country, let's put it that way. Still possible though.

tyty

I started teaching myself French this January and got a B1 in the Leaving Cert. So it's definitely possible within a year, especially if you already have some knowledge. Just do something every single day, however little it may be.

spurious

OP what did you get in the JC in French and at what level?

Sean33

spurious wrote: »

OP what did you get in the JC in French and at what level?

Can't remember but as far as I know I passed in [P]

spurious

Well if you passed Ordinary, you have 'some' grounding in the language.

Speaking to your French friend daily should help a lot, especially if you get him/her to correct you when you make big mistakes.
Small mistakes can be forgiven, but major grammatical or expression errors he/she should point out to you and help you fix.

It will be a lot of work, but good luck with it!

Sean33

spurious wrote: »

Well if you passed Ordinary, you have 'some' grounding in the language.

Speaking to your French friend daily should help a lot, especially if you get him/her to correct you when you make big mistakes.
Small mistakes can be forgiven, but major grammatical or expression errors he/she should point out to you and help you fix.

It will be a lot of work, but good luck with it!

will be once a week not daily! I'm in school 8.30 - 8.30 ha! Anyway thanks for the help.

eyssy12

I got a C2 in HL French after studying it only for two years with no knowledge of it before, not the best grade but certainly good enough for me personally. I don't know why I decided to do it but I always was good at languages although everyone said it's nonsense and impossible to learn a language, especially French, in such a short time and get a solid result. However, if you really have the interest and you are willing to work hard, then go for it . It will be really tough but the satisfaction at the end is terrific.