"My name is Aida Dakran, I’m 23 and I just finished an undergraduate degree in French Studies at York University.  In September, I will start a BEd at the University of Western Ontario.  I hope to become a primary school teacher in French Immersion.  Children have so much potential, as does the French language and I hope to be someone who can provide support and enrich the lives of young people.”


The challenges of le grammaire… la grammaire? Zut! Is it masculine or feminine?

When learning a second language, we quickly discover that the process is both fun and painful.  Not only do we find challenges and difficulties in pronunciation and intonation when trying to express ourselves in a language other than our mother tongue, but there also exists hurdles where comprehension and written expression are concerned.

In my opinion, the major obstacle is to start thinking in the second language.  It is imperative to immerse ourselves in the philosophies, culture, and history attached to the language.  We get used to functioning in the mentality of the language that we are learning.  After having established this base, what I call the “mentality,” what causes a problem is grammar.  One of the biggest problems is knowing when to use the different verb tenses.  It is already difficult enough to learn grammatical rules by heart, but it is even more painful to get used to applying them at the right moment.

In fact, do we have to learn these infamous grammatical rules that exist in each language by heart?  I would say no; a better approach would be to understand them.  It is extremely important to understand a rule, an expression, a usage in order to know how and in what context to have recourse to them.  We are put to task the moment we have to explain what we have learned.  If we cannot do that, we have not learned anything but merely copied what a book has told us to do.  However, being able to reformulate a rule and make up our own examples, we can say, with confidence, that we have mastered that rule and have added such and such element to our baggage.

Another grammatical challenge is to understand when gender and number agreement applies.  For example, as we already know, each adjective agrees with the noun to which it belongs.  But there are sometimes exceptions.  These kinds of exceptions can make French grammar misleading, but what is worse is the exceptions to the exceptions!  The only way to learn these exceptions is to find them by writing essays and reading a lot because we can analyse them and appreciate their rationale.  

The rules that guide us when we write seem easy enough, but they can be more misleading than we might think: for example, we have to constantly make the difference between “a” and “à”; between “et” and “est”; between “de les” and “des.”  When we do not instinctively understand those differences, the most useful thing to ask is: “what do I want to say here?” and by analysing the text, we can come to find the answer.  It’s a matter of knowing the traps we usually fall into.

As French is not most students’ mother tongue, is not easy always easy to make the desired progress.  After all, if the goal is to speak fluently, with ease and eloquence, we have to take risks and test ourselves to see if we have internalised the grammatical rules.  That said, our goal as students is to speak French and the only way of achieving it is to practise constantly and to always have a positive attitude.