I lived my early childhood in a mixed, mostly Puerto Rican neighborhood in south Florida. I had Puerto Rican playmates, and, constantly exposed to the Spanish language while living there, I was quickly becoming bilingual. We eventually moved to a part of the country whre only English was spoken, and I quickly forgot my spanish. I did pick up a lot of it again while traveling in South America. It was actually fun -- the natives appreciated the effort I had made to speak spanish and were never condescending.
Now I'm about to move to France for work, and I want to be able to function in the French language so I don't come across as some obnoxious american who thinks the whole world ought to speak english. I can read french quite well and write it OK, but speaking and understanding spoken french is very difficult. Memorizing 5000 french words and learning grammar hasn't helped me at all. Out of desperation, I got an audio french course, the "Michel thomas" method. This seems to be helping... It's very basic, but has a lot of tricks of pronunciation which are impossible to pick up from reading it. It has listening and speaking lessons as well. I'm finally able to follow basic conversations and understand radio broadcasts in french.
Now I'm about to move to France for work, and I want to be able to function in the French language so I don't come across as some obnoxious american who thinks the whole world ought to speak english. I can read french quite well and write it OK, but speaking and understanding spoken french is very difficult. Memorizing 5000 french words and learning grammar hasn't helped me at all. Out of desperation, I got an audio french course, the "Michel thomas" method. This seems to be helping... It's very basic, but has a lot of tricks of pronunciation which are impossible to pick up from reading it. It has listening and speaking lessons as well. I'm finally able to follow basic conversations and understand radio broadcasts in french.