How do I get out of America and go to France?
My name is Chris and I teach at OuiCommunicate, a school that I started in 2018. We specialize in teaching French to adults.
Regardless of personal views on politics, I’ve met several students who’ve formulated the wish to “get out” of America to go to France. For this purpose, they started to learn French so as to be able to fit in overseas.
On this page, I will share with you a lot of my experience to guide you towards what you will have to do in order to learn French. May this advice serve you well!
Click on a French course:
Step 1: You want to learn French but you are not quite sure what that entails.
As a first step, I would advise more caution than is usually provided by apps and language schools.
Firstly, you the learner must understand that you are likely stepping into a field in which you have very few references. This puts you in a weakened position and vulnerable to any type of learning method that promises you French in the shortest amount of time. The implicit (or explicit) promise of most apps is “do this and French will happen”. But it is very rarely the case. If ever.
If you don’t properly understand what it means to “learn” an academic subject, it will likely not work. If you can’t properly define a “language” you will likely not understand what you are expected to do.
When we purchase the services of a source of learning, we delegate this responsibility to them and believe that our part of the bargain is to “show up”. We think that the language specialists have it all sorted out and that our involvement can be minimal. But it isn’t so.
Step 2: You find the biggest name.
Many learners skip Step 1 altogether and even though they might realize that they are not able to define a language or the act of learning, they’ll assume that if they find a big name the rest will take care of itself.
This is very often the biggest mistake. In truth, it falls entirely within your responsibility to examine yourself and your ambitions. “What do I want to achieve? What am I ready to give in order to get there? Am I ready to face the truth that learning French takes focus, sacrifice and repetition”?
A critical examination of your source of learning should be at the top of your priorities before signing up. Questions include: what are the odds that they are able to control quality if they offer upwards of 20 languages? What is the true intention of the owners of the school if they seem to grow to international proportions? Are the tutors involved at all in the creative process or are they just a cog in a huge machine?
It must be known that some businesses can grow in size without sacrificing quality. For example supermarkets or taxi companies. “More” is in direct corelation to “quality” but this principle does not apply to all industries.
A sports team with 10 coaches instead of one will not perform better. An ice cream van that sells 200 flavours instead of 20 is not better for the customer. A barber with room for 300 customers at once will not cut your hair better than if they had 3 seats. In all these cases, quality control will absolutely suffer.
Placing too much trust in the reputation and size of your source of learning while at the same time overlooking your side of the bargain effectively gets you a comfortable seat in the wagon but doesn’t tell you at what time the train will arrive. The day you get impatient and stand up to complain, you’ll likely realize that you were supposed to be shoveling in the coal and determining at what time the train should arrive.
Step 3: You trust the process
Once a learner is comfortably seated in the “big name” language school or comfortably playing with the app, they trust the process and wait for French to happen. If all goes well, they will soon be at that level where they can order their own bread in France.
The fact is that at this late stage, the student still hasn’t examined the very notion of “learning” or the notion of “language”. The learning part seems to be well organized by the other party, while the language part seems to have little importance precisely because it is taken care of by the learning structure.
If indeed your plan is to prepare seriously to move to France, it is a good idea to measure the mountain you are about to climb. Am I making it harder for myself by not being properly equipped?
Knowing a new language is both complex and easy at once. It is complex so long as we skip the necessary reflection on the nature of learning and of language. In short: what is going to happen factually between me not knowing French and knowing French? When will I know that I know French? What is even French?
Going with a source of learning that promises to simplify this to the extreme is like choosing a sherpa that says “Don’t worry about what it means to climb a mountain. We’ll get you up there, it will be easy”. Very unlikely.
The secret formula to learn French sooner than later is not usually mentioned. It takes repetition, discipline, curiosity, structure and a sense of marvel. These 5 elements function as a sort of Kinetic Chain where each part drives the next.
The repetition side of things is often downplayed because it is perceived to be contrary to a pleasurable customer experience. We can check for ourselves that any human who ever became “good” at something did so by repeated exposure.
Forcing ourselves to engage in repetition takes discipline. But the two can be made easier by a sense of marvel and by a sense of curiosity for French. So two hard parts give birth to pleasure which can then be re-used to fuel the cycle.
A practical example would be to force ourselves to learn about a certain French tense, repeat this until known which then gives birth to a sense of marvel because we have now learned it. This in turn fuels our curiosity to discover more and the whole experience is made easier still because we are operating within a structure which helps us know precisely what we are learning.
As counter-intuitive as it seems, this likely works better that methods that emphasize “fun” or minimal involvement from the student. Remember: you are driving the train, not just sitting it !
See the lady in this video? She started from zero, did the exercises on the website and learned French.
She’s still doing French with us today in 2025 and we read classic French literature together in class.
With us, she found the necessary structure and a home to learn French.
Book a free class !
You can book a French class now.
We will meet on this website. Top of the page you will see CLASS. When you have the password, you will be able to log into our virtual class.
And even before that, we are happy to phone you to learn about your current level of French.
