Want to learn French from native person

Well I'm French and I'm moving to Bucharest on Thursday.

People just starting out usually get a beginner book such as "Teach Yourself" or the "Assimil" method, some go with Roseta Stone, "Pimsleur", "Colloquial" or "Michel Thomas" courses and I think Hippocrene is very popular too. I've never seen their beginner books but I have an excellent dictionary from them. Those are the most famous and the first two, the most popular. AVOID editors which are not specialised in language learning such as French for dummies or companies that have books on languages as well plumbing and a hundred other things. You want to learn from a book specifically written by editors of foreign languages.

Then you'll probably need a dictionary. I like the ones that indicate the context in which the words are used as opposed to a simple collection of translated words in alphabetical order.

Phrasebooks are also very popular and effective. They are just books with a whole bunch of common phrases in both languages

Finally there's a whole bunch of resources online, it's unreal how much stuff there is. No need to pay for anything, there are so many free resources out there. I'm on livemocha, a great language learning community. It takes literally 20 sec to register and it's 100% free. You can take free courses, help other language learners with their courses and they have a chat feature to connect with native speakers.

Also there a language learning community on YouTube with polyglots sharing their secrets. Steve Kaufman (lingosteve on YT) is my hero when it comes to languages. He's a Canadian who speaks more than 10 languages including 5 or 6 fluently. He makes regular video blogs about language learning, from beginner to advanced, discuss methods, problems, tricks, motivational videos, the whole thing.

There are more than a dozen impressive YouTube channels on the subject and I follow mostly Steve Kaufman, Moses McCormick, Richard Simcott and Luca Lampariello, all of whom speak fluent French.

Et voila!


Vincent