Learning French at 60
Our French school specializes in teaching French to 40+ aged learners who want clear answers and a structured program.
Our oldest student is 72. In the following article, we share some advice on how to learn French at 60.
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.
Understand what you don't !
My first piece of advice for a learner of 60 is to understand what they don’t know. Let a good teacher explain to you the road ahead. You might already be in a situation of worry and unsure if you “still have it”. By jumping into it head first, it is likely that you will encounter disappointments and frustration.
There are usually two parts to the puzzle: what it means to learn and what we mean by “a language”. The right combination of the two should bring you to be able to communicate in French.
Think of it as a sport. To one who doesn’t know basketball, it is likely they will summarize it to “the skill by which we throw a ball into a hoop”. But a pro player will know the many important skills that it requires. They will also be able to rank them by order of importance. A good language teacher can do the same thing.
If you approach French as an undefined ocean of “words”, you will do the equivalent of running up and down a court trying your best at throwing the ball in the hoop. You won’t get good at it and you might blame it on exterior factors such as age.
Whether you are 60 or much younger, the difficulty remains the same. Speaking French has more to do with understanding the trick behind the magic. To make your learning easier, a teacher should point out the priorities. Not knowing these causes a learner to see French as an unstructured “whole”.
Languages are systems. We can compare them to a tree in which the very thin branches are the rare words and the trunk represents the absolute necessities. As simple as it sounds, the average learner of French can quickly fall victim to “clutter”.
Some teachers will encourage you to talk about your hobbies or do simulations such as asking someone for a direction. It often happens that several months down the line your French doesn’t sound any closer to the genuine article. And if you think that big name schools are exempt from this, it is not true. They are often as disorganized as the isolated part-time tutors.
60 years old is not the true obstacle to learning French. It is rather a lack of clarity and a lack of understanding of what you are doing in the present moment and what it is all leading to.
The mental barrier
Younger or older, we must understand that learning French is a mental game. Before even learning the first word, there are battles to be won to regain sense of inner balance. Making that decision to learn French cause disbalance because it is new. It is in opposition to the peace of mind we all desire.
The battles include overcoming a limiting self-image, correcting a distorted view of French, raising the bar on our abilities, understanding the nature of language learning and most importantly battling the natural ability to postpone or choosing the easy route.
Let’s be clear: your person doesn’t want to learn French. At least subconsciously it doesn’t. There are habits and behaviours that echo through our person. A new one is never welcomed, especially if it requires effort. It is a stress on the system.
We are very alert to easy solutions and promises of shortcuts. Our brain is also a type of “expert trader” that always weighs within a split second the benefit of a certain proposition. When you do the shopping you quickly picture the benefit of buying a certain item: comfort, happiness or health. There is always a trade-off in everything we do and that motivates our actions. We always calculate “if this then that”.
The issue with this trade-off is that you might come to the wrong conclusion, especially since it is a field you don’t know. You might say “If I learn at Alliance Francaise, I’m sure to get the best” which might provide you with a sense of inner comfort.
If you are extremely energetic you might even compare 5 or 6 language learning solutions. We could symbolize them as little houses in front of the beautiful waterfall, each decorated in its own unique way. Before you know it, you are making subjective decisions based on variables that have nothing to do with your original intention: getting to the waterfall. This is called marketing. Your desire for French has now taken second place.
Because there is now a sense of trust and your mind is at rest, whether French materializes or not is less of a concern. Your mind is happily engaging in the “activity of learning French” and you can go on without the worry of having to re-think whether you have made the right choice or not. This is the reason learners are happy to engage in months of Duolingo: a trade-off for peace of mind and a deep-rooted desire to not have to go back to the dreaded drawing board and research the decision. (in a proper manner this time)
Why age doesn't matter
The probable reason you figure that age is a concern is the association you make between language and memory. You might believe that there are quantities of words to memorize. By viewing languages as systems that require discernment and curiosity, we can now change this narrative.
Our brain has been known to prioritize information according to need and emotional engagement. We don’t remember the padlock combination of 30 years ago simply because we don’t need it. And we don’t spend time memorizing random information because it’s not very fun.
At any age, the learner of French will have to create an emotional attachment with French, a sense of curiosity and a rational celebration of their victories: “Isn’t it amazing, yesterday I couldn’t do this and now I can”! You must see yourself move forward, rejoice at this and be curious about what’s next.
Some famous language apps propose this to the letter by celebrating at each moment your little victories. (the only issue being that it’s their learning program that is badly designed!)Â
I’ve met learners of 17 who were incapable of formulating a rational thought. I’ve met brilliant learners of 70 who were pushing the boundaries. Naturally it is easier to point towards more examples of 70-somethings in their armchair with a remote control in their hand, barely conscious.
The reason we don’t see older people act like this in traditional societies (i.e. the jungle) is that they are never told to rest after a certain age and go from busy to nothing. They might not perform the harder physical tasks anymore but they still stay engaged and contribute to the village life.
If it’s been a while since you learned a language, the higher risk is in a misinterpretation of your results at the first obstacle. You might conclude you no longer have the ability to learn when in actual fact you are discovering what it means to learn. You are still at the stage of battling your pre-conceptions while believing you are already at the stage of learning. If it doesn’t work quick enough you might conclude “Well I tried learning French and it’s not working”. To use an easy image, you think you’re driving but still figuring out how the pedals work.
To conclude
For reasons of culture and we have been brought to under-estimate our abilities. There is a mirroring effect with our peers and we think “what makes me believe that I can do this when other can’t?”
The level of expectation seems to have shrunk in recent years to the point where social media celebrates acts of kindness that require no more than picking up someone’s wallet and saying “Here you dropped this”. The same goes with physical and mental abilities. The bar is very low.
The effects of “everything on demand” are also felt. The time span we consider to be “acceptable” between the decision and the result has shrunk like never before in history. Worse still, the very notion of decision has almost eroded. We don’t compare and weigh the alternatives: we see a film and click on it. We see a product and buy it. It’s closer to animalistic triggers than true decisions. Impulses, we might say.
As a result, an activity such as language learning sticks out more and more due to its uncommon character. (which leaves a wide open door to clever marketers to bring language learning to the same standards as anything else we buy: quick and easy)
It may be too early yet to measure the result of this, but for the first time in History (perhaps) humans are engaging in one-sided communication by means of social media. Hitherto, whether the activity was writing a book, conversing, making a film or writing a song there was a certain exchange of ideas, the process of which took time. Nowadays, we can throw out “that sucks” beneath any video on Youtube without thinking of the purpose of the message or even listening to the contents of the video. It’s more like releases of emotions than releases of ideas.
As we can see, age starts to look like a minor factor when we put it up against all the other forces surrounding language learning: a certain pre-conception of what it means, a self-image, the act of learning itself, the definition of a language, the understanding of where we are located within the learning process, decisions based on marketing tactics, the subconscious desire to avoid effort and recent internet-based behaviours which make the process more complicated still.
60 or not, if you still have a brain it means you can use it. Languages are systems that require to be understood. French is a system also. Yes you can do it!
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