Find a French tutor near me in Plymouth

When it comes to learning a foreign language, French is one of the most commonly taught in the UK. While the popularity of other foreign languages like Portuguese, Polish, Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Turkish, Spanish, and Italian has resulted in fewer students taking French at GCSE, it remains one of the most popular languages for students.

With that in mind, let's see why learning French is important, the challenges French students will face as they study the language, what they'll learn about French in school, and how private tutoring can help.

Why It's Important to Study French

In terms of languages, French is one of the most important in the world. In addition to being the official language of France, our closest non-English-speaking neighbour, it's also an official language in Canada and many African nations.

The French language is also widely used in an official capacity for large international organisations such as the UN and the EU, NATO, the WTO, as well as the IOC.

Speaking French can offer a way into many different careers and since the level of English spoken in France is among the worst in Europe according to EF's English Proficiency Index, there are many opportunities for those who speak both English and French.

Challenges in French

Of course, if speaking French was that easy, everybody would be doing it. Much like any foreign language, learning to speak French takes time and dedication.

Students will quickly learn that they can't just translate what they want to say from English to French, but instead have to follow the grammatical rules, structures, and protocols of the language.

One of the first challenges students will face is grammatical gender, a concept that doesn't exist in any way, shape, or form in English and can take years of practice just to occasionally get right.

Then there's pronunciation. Much like the English language, French loves silent letters and mastering the pronunciation is something that comes with experience.

Of course, the most challenging part of learning any language, be it French, Spanish, German, or Chinese, is remembering large amounts of vocabulary, the grammatical rules, and the pronunciation.

Ultimately, when you learn a language, you need to be prepared to put in a lot of work and have days where it feels like you're making very little progress. In these instances, private tutors can help an awful lot, but more on that later...

Areas of French Studied at School

The French GCSE is many students' first opportunity to gain a foreign language qualification so let's see what kinds of things they'll learn about. We've taken the AQA French GCSE as an example so if you're studying a GCSE from a different exam board, the topics may be slightly different.

Students learning French at GCSE will learn to talk about a broad range of subjects including themselves, their family, and friends, technology, hobbies, food, French customs and festivals, shopping, travel and tourism, and their studies, jobs, and career choices.

They'll also cover a lot of French grammar including nouns and articles, prepositions, adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns as well as grammatical tenses including the present, perfect, pluperfect, imperfect, future, and conditional tenses.

The GCSE is a good start for those wanting to learn any foreign language, but the level you'll have by the end of it will still be relatively low. It's recommended that any student interested in using a foreign language in their career continue their language studies onto A Level and also study the subject at university as part of a dedicated language course or alongside other subjects.

Private Tuition in French

The main problem with teaching a language in a school is that the teacher doesn't have the time or the resources to adapt their lessons to each of the students. With a private tutor, the lessons can be tailored to the student, what they want to learn, and how they want to learn.

GCSE students can focus on the topics they're struggling with to ensure they get the best grade possible, for example. Of course, you don't need to be a primary school, secondary school, or even university student to enjoy the benefits of a private French language tutor, professionals and adults can also learn a new language with courses that are tailored to them.

Your private tutoring sessions will be appropriate to your age, level, and experience with the language and if there are certain skills you need to work on or hone, you can discuss this with your tutor. For those who work in a specific field and will need to learn technical vocabulary, private tuition can make them both fluent in French and their area of expertise.

As we mentioned, learning any foreign language can be challenging and it can be useful to have a private tutor there to support you when you're not feeling motivated or are struggling with some tricky grammar points.

Finding a French Tutor in Plymouth

If you're looking for private tutors in or around Plymouth, consider searching for them on Superprof. You can view each tutors profile to see their experience, level, rates, and reviews left by their other students.

A lot of the tutors on Superprof also offer the first lesson or hour of tutoring for free so you can try several potential tutors out before deciding on which one is right for you or your child. Remember that with language tutoring, you'll be spending a lot of time speaking to your tutor so make sure that they're somebody you get on well with.

If you can't find any available tutors in Plymouth, remember that you can also broaden your search to include tutors that offer their tutoring online. With an online tutor, you can also save money as they can charge less as they don't need to travel to each of their student's homes.

While there are some drawbacks to online tutoring for hands-on subjects, for academic subjects like French, Spanish, German, or even hard sciences like maths, chemistry and physics, online tutorials can be just as effective as home tutoring.