Online French tutors

Nearly everybody who takes up French has already learned English, and that changes the starting position more than people expect. You arrive knowing how to be a language learner, which helps, and also carrying the assumption that letters roughly indicate sounds, which does not. French writes six letters and says two, drops most final consonants, then links words together so that the gaps you were listening for are not there. That is why a beginner can read a paragraph comfortably and understand almost nothing of the same paragraph read aloud. The second thing is the gap that opens between what you can follow and what you can produce. Reading races ahead because cognates carry you, so you end up understanding a news article and being unable to order a coffee. A useful lesson works on the two specifically: dictation in small doses so the sound and the spelling get connected, and then most of the hour spent talking, badly at first, with the tutor supplying the word you are missing rather than the grammar rule behind it. Ask for the free first lesson to be half listening, half speaking.