Hello, it's Jan here and today I am here with Sebastien and he is actually my French teacher.
Yes, that's right.
So, last year we started...
I started learning French. I was in Morocco and I decided to learn the language online with Sebastien.
We did an exchange, no it's wasn't an exchange... I took classes with him.
Yes, exactly.
It was a good experience. So what do you think?
Maybe that in this video we can talk a bit about how we did it.
How we did it (correction).
Exactly. You like to correct me, that's a good thing.
Maybe little bit, it's not a big deal.
So what did we do? What do you think about me as a student?
Maybe we can talk a little bit about the how we did it.
What was interesting about Jan and Lucas as well, you were traveling with him in Marocco.
You guys were students that had already learned many languages knew very well how you could do it.
And what you guys did actually, how should I say it.
You manged to speak without any difficulties. We always found a topic were we could talk about.
And it was very easy actually to have a conversation.
I could ask a question and then we were able to talk about something for a very long time.
Sometimes for one hour without any breaks.
I did not have to do so much, I corrected the mistakes but in general...
Because we think that it's very important that if you take language classes that you speak and not the teacher.
It's good that you have a teacher in order to correct your mistakes.
It's also more fun to learn with a teacher than with software for example (and books).
So during language classes...
It's important that you speak s a student and not the teacher. That is what we did right?
Yes, exactly. It's important that for example when the teacher asks a question, normally I give online classes.
And if I ask a question it's important that the student knows that he should TRY to speak as much as possible actually.
So that he doesn't just answer the question with yes or no, but says everything that comes up in his mind.
Like the example I just gave you, the question was ''where do you live?''.
It's an easy question and I could just reply this question with ''I live in Belgium''.
And that's the end of the conversation.
The conversation could end here. But no, of someone that wants to learn the language you have to say more.
You could for example say; I live in Germany, in Berlin. It's a very international city.
You should try to say many things.
Even a beginner is be able to do that or at least able to try to say this kind of things.
It's important to actually TRY.
Yes and sometimes you might not know how to say a word, then you just say in in English.
Yes, it's called 'code-switching' right?
Yes, you can do code-switching, you should try to speak as much as possible.
It's important to speak, to take control over the conversation.
I remember that when I took classes with you, I think that we did about 3 classes per week.
Sometimes even more.
And after a while we didn't have a lot to talk about because we spoke to each other every day.
So we used other tricks.
Yes, other tricks, websites, resources on the internet with topics where we could talk about.
There is one site that is really good, because they come with a lot of topics (and questions).
It's a website that was created for English teachers, but you can also use it for French.
So it's a list with many questions...
That you can use as a conversation starter.
And that helped a lot for the classes.
There was as well another technique that we used.
That we used later.
Watching the news.
Yes, watching the news, videos on YouTube.
It could be a video in French or in English.
And then during the class we discuss the videos.
That's maybe for the people that already speak the language at a higher level, a B1 or maybe B2.
That's also a technique that could be very useful.
I was very happy with Sebastien because after one or two months we already managed to hold a conversation for an hour.
Yes, exactly, in the end we could hold a conversation as we have having now.
You started almost all the way from zero.
So it worked out pretty well I think.
I hope that this video was useful for you and maybe you can use the techniques that we used last year.
I hope that like this you can also learn a language or reach a comfortable level in a few months.