How would you study for language?

I would find a study partner and role play over the phone, asking for directions or information>
Excuse me, I am new in town and am looking for a place to live. Can you tell me about your neighborhood?
That sounds like a nice place. Is there shopping nearby? School? Library? Businesses?
I would like to visit your neighborhood. How do I get there?
How do you get to the library/shops/grocery etc. from your house?

@BarnacleBill thanks! I think I’ll ask one of my friends.

Remembering gender of the words is a matter of memorization. You can make flash cards and then test yourself with them, or you can just read them over and over, mentally composing sentences as you do.

Language is really hard if you are a terrible memorizer like me. I could probably only learn in context, if then. But memorizing is what you have to do. That just takes time.

You learn the gender as part of the vocabulary. Always include the modifier.

La table…
Le crayon.

La maison
Le bureau
La gar
Le trottoir

I agree with what’s been said so far. It’s a matter of repetition and memorization, so flash cards should work beautifully. For verb conjugation, I would periodically go through any new verbs in my head and test myself on them until I got it down.

When I took high school French we’d make flash cards. We’d write feminine nouns in pink and masculine nouns in blue. It seemed to hep.

I learned how to speak english this way: I didn’t study it, I tried to live it, feel it, and I even started thinking in english, might sound corny but it worked, but for that test do study and you can try this later

@gailcalled – which modifier? Do you mean determiner?

For the rote memorisation aspects of language – in this case gender – I recommend Anki – it’s available as an iphone or Android app, or over other internet-capable phones through anki web. It’s very useful. You can make your own flashcards too.

It souds like the last aspect of the test – how to ask for directions – is actually the most challenging part. It’s asking for some kind of demonstration of communicative competence. That’s where role play comes into its own. If you can find a partner – someone else studying for the test is perfect – you can sit down and discuss the different expressions you can use to ask for directions and check understanding, then role-play the conversations. You might want to consider deliberately throwing each other curve-balls once in a while during the role-plays to practise dealing with the unexpected. Of course, this all depends on the test actually asking for spoken competence.

Merde. It’s “la gare.”

@the100thmonkey: “Determiner” is a new term for the “the.” Historically, it has had several confusing labels. So, I used “modifier” to keep things simple. Perhaps, “a kind of modifier” is better; I doubt it.

The

@the100thmonkey:In French, the “the” is called “l’article défini.”

@gailcalled – I wasn’t correcting you, I was seeking clarification!

“The” is referred to as the definite article. However, in French, the system of articulation of nouns is grammatically inflected for gender and number. The general system of noun modification in French (adjectives, quantifiers, classifiers and articles, among others) is also inflected for gender and number, so it makes sense (to me at least) to, as your blogger so delightfully put it, undermine tradition and “cast off the sureties of the past in favor of fashionable jargon”.

That’s a pretty unfair position, in my opinion, as “determiner” is, to me, a meta-group that includes modifiers of intensity, articles, quantifiers, noun and other compounds. It’s not fashionable jargon to me – it’s the tools of my profession, and if I can find one that’s better suited to the job I need to do, I’ll use it.

@the100thmonkey: So, you’re saying that you do use “determiner” professionally? I had not heard of it before you mentioned the term. What’s your profession? I love discussing the vagaries of language. The deeper one bores, the murkier it gets.

I’m an ESL teacher (EFL/ESOL in the UK).

My experience with the terminology is that it can vary somewhat between the American and British communities of practice. It was quite confusing when I started teaching, because my school used a mixture of American and British textbooks!

[mod says] While fascinating, this conversation is getting off track. Let’s stick to answering the original question, folks. Thanks!