Why Speaking Like a Native Is Not the End Goal 🚫✨

Transcript:

Hello everyone, bonjour tout le monde, welcome back to the French Made Easy podcast!

In today's episode, I want to talk to you about something that is holding back a lot of French beginners from speaking French clearly and confidently.

And that is the goal of speaking French like a native.

Since I started to teach French, I've heard that sentence countless times: "I want to speak like a native."

I don't actually hear it from my students at all, because I think the students who are part of my French Pronunciation Made Easy course know very well that I don't teach them to speak like a native.

But I do see it a lot online. I see a lot of articles, YouTube videos that promise French learners to:

"Learn to speak French like a native in 3 months," or "Learn French pronunciation to speak like a native in 20 minutes," "You just need 3 hours to speak like a native," and I'm not even exaggerating — those are real headlines.

And although those might just be cheeky headlines... it's something that I don't quite agree with. I thought I'd chat with you about it today!

So what is the problem with saying, "Learn to speak French like a native in 3 months?

I don't think that speaking like a native is a very helpful goal for French learners to have. It's not very specific or attainable enough in such a short amount of time.

When you're reading those titles — those promises — as a French beginner, you expect that it will take 3 months to speak like a native. And the truth is, you're setting the bar super high.

And when you set the bar that high, and you don't meet the expectation that you've set for yourself, you feel like you're not good enough. And it leads you to what? To disappointment — which then leads to giving up.

But learning French — whether studying pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary — takes time. It's a journey. I like to say that learning French is a marathon, not a sprint.

And that's one reason why many students give up learning and speaking French after a short few months — because they get disappointed. They think learning French is just "too hard."

But you're comparing your pronunciation — you're comparing your French that you've learned for three months — with people who speak French as a first language. It's not fair on you at all.

Speaking like a native, with a native accent, is, I believe, a very hard goal to reach in such a short amount of time.

And also... in my opinion, I don't think speaking like a native should actually be the end goal.

What about your accent? You don't want to lose your accent. Your accent is part of your identity.

Personally, I've been living in Australia — where they speak English, right? — for about 9 or 10 years now. And I have no wish to remove my French accent. That's my identity. I'm French, and that's the way it is.

But I do want people to understand what I'm saying in English.

That’s why I work on improving my English pronunciation because I want to speak clearly enough so people don't ask me to repeat myself 324 times. Still a work in progress, right? But you know what I mean.

And to be fair, there are many, many French speakers that aren't natives but who speak perfect, beautiful French.

You do not need to be a native French speaker — or to sound like a native French speaker from any French-speaking country — to speak beautiful French and converse in French clearly and effortlessly.

The ultimate goal — and I believe that is why you are learning French — is to converse with French speakers.

And to converse with French speakers, what you want is to speak French clearly — with words that you don't struggle to pronounce, and that French speakers can understand.

In my French Pronunciation Made Easy course, I critique my students — I give them feedback on their French pronunciation.

The first thing I check when I receive their audio recordings is to see — or to hear, in that case — if I can understand clearly what they say. If I can't, then we work on it.

But their accent is not what actually matters.

I don't teach my students to speak like me — like a native French speaker.

I teach them French pronunciation so they're able to say what they want to say in French — clearly and confidently, without stuttering, blushing, and getting stuck!

I hope that mini episode helps you reframe a little bit the goal of "speaking like a native" into a more achievable goal: to speak French clearly.