How I'm Learning French at age 40 (and succeeding).

Hello and welcome to the video. My name is Jade Jollow. I'm an English teacher and I'm also somebody who's learning French so I thought in today's video I'd talk about how I'm learning French at the age of 40 and more importantly I'm succeeding in the sense that I've got so much further with French than I ever thought possible and I'm succeeding in the sense that I'm able to speak French, have conversations. Yes I make a lot of errors but I can make myself understood and perhaps that even at a higher level I'm able to understand a lot and follow along conversations. I'm able to watch French YouTube channels and understand most of what it said on the topics that I'm interested in, not everything else. So I think that I've done quite well and this video could be inspiring or motivating to people who are learning French around the same age as me or are perhaps considering whether they should or not, considering whether they should put in the effort of doing it and also another group of people, people who moved to live in France, English people, without knowing the language that well and thinking they'll just pick it up while they're there. So all of those people I hope will be interested in watching this video. I'm just going to share my personal experience which is that all of this started two years ago now when I very tentatively began learning French. I committed to learning by myself a certain number of hours every day but at that time I wasn't yet dedicated to learning the language because to be honest I didn't think it would be possible. I considered myself to be someone who was bad at learning languages as somebody who had a rubbish memory. That part probably is true, not a lot has changed there and also I considered myself as having a personal flaw or a really big problem when it came to speaking in foreign languages. So I thought I'll never get to a point of being able to speak French. So here I am two years later and like I said I've got so much further than I thought possible and I still want to keep going but having overcome those challenges I just wanted to say to people it is possible but a certain way to approach learning language that I think you will need and that is possible to people once they're around the age 40 which it isn't before. So the first most important thing which I've had this time with learning French or learning a language in general is that I've had dedication towards it and it didn't come from day one because I wasn't I wasn't sure if I was wasting my time but as I got more familiar with the words and I began to be able to follow what I was reading or understand now and then what I was listening to a stronger sense of dedication came which wasn't just I'm going to put the hours in like a machine it was more that I started to think I've chosen to study this language I've chosen to study French I have shaped my life in order to be able to study French and have the time to do it that this is important to me and I find the time to do my studies as a result and that kind of dedication at working towards something with with rewards if any far off in the future and not monetary rewards not like I'm going to make make this my career or anything um yeah setting setting my life up in a way with this dedication that enabled me to study and I see that as being a um a real benefit to learning French at the age of 40 is something that I definitely wouldn't have been able to do when I was younger because when I was younger there were so many different things I was interested in and I would have a flavor of the month that I would quickly forget and move on to something else but um yeah there were too too many things to do when I was younger that it wouldn't be possible for me to dedicate myself to a language and um yeah to be honest I think that's the main ingredient that's needed to be able to get progress in French at least okay so uh the second reason that I'd say I'm succeeding is because I've really made learning French part of my life I set aside time in the mornings when I do my studies and I take French classes a couple of times per week and I don't let other life things interfere with this my morning routine of learning French comes first so I want to digress a little bit here and say why people who are around the same age might fail to learn French um because they just don't they just don't have the time so I've noticed that when there are lots of programs about expats moving abroad to a different country they're also trying to start a business they're trying to do something else at the same time they have to earn money to live and the thing that they're trying to do takes up all of their energy leaving really not much for learning French at the end so I would say your French is never going to be able to grow that much if there's something enormous in your life that you're trying to trying to push and trying to grow and I would say that's the biggest biggest reason and biggest area that you might not be making any progress so you if that describes you try to have a think about whether you could for me rebalancing doesn't that looks a bit like boobs rebalancing doesn't really work with things it's um it's the the dedication and the work that we put into learning a language is so enormous that at least in the beginning stages we have to give our attention to that and the other thing will have to wait that's in my personal experience I can't push two things at once and learning a language for me takes a lot of effort and the third one uh for me is why I think I'm succeeding now is related to the last point I made is because I don't have any ambition anymore for let's say I don't know how else to put it let's say worldly things I don't have ambition anymore for my youtube channel for my job other than oh hopefully it will keep going but I don't I don't um have big goals that I'm pushing there's nothing that I'm trying to achieve with it other than the fact of let's keep doing this and therefore my ambition if I do in fact have any left just goes into my studying now because at least we're studying over time you can see progress and result from from it and um if I compare that to when I was younger as well I say that um I was a lot more ambitious I wanted to achieve um achieve things in general and I don't think at that time I would have really counted learning a language as part of those achievements at least not ones that I I needed in the very short term okay so let's change the focus of the talk now and um mention what are the limitations when you're learning a language at age 40 because um there are obviously going to be some difficulties associated with it so I think for me personally the biggest limitation is time and the responsibilities that you have in in your life as an adult so um in terms of the first one time something I really notice about the age that I am is that time is already going much faster than it did feels like it's going much faster than it did when I was younger so a single day doesn't give you a lot of time to do that much or achieve that much so for example I'm only really able to do between one and a half hours and two hours French study or French practice per day more than that can be difficult to fit in with my life and responsibilities so because of that the amount of the amount of time that it will take to learn French will stretch on far into the future so how this could be different if you think about it when you're a teenager and you're at school you have lots of different subjects um but you don't have life responsibilities your pair usually your parents take care of that even things like cooking the dinner doing the shopping so in a sense even though your day might be filled up with lessons you have extra extra time to put into the things um that you need to do so your studies for example and also when we're talking about responsibilities most people are going to need to work to earn money to pay all the bills and that kind of thing so that is a really big limitation but again hopefully you'll be able to balance your life in a way where you've still got time and energy left over for learning French I would say to feel like you're making any progress to be honest if you're like me an hour and a half per day is needed otherwise it's going to take you far too long so I would say if it's important to you learning French try to arrange your life so that you've got time and you've got energy to do the studies all the time the second limitation that I'd say that I've personally experienced is that other people seem to learn so much faster and this is if they can be believed least judging by people who make videos about their progress on YouTube so I think this comes down to understanding that people learn at different rates and for people who have an aptitude for learning languages when they learn like a language at a young age they can they can get going with it much more quickly and also just to mention sometimes it might seem like a person I'm going to talk about English a person has learned English in only like three months wow how did they do that it's so fast surely you must be able to learn French in three months because they can learn English it doesn't work like that and also just bear in mind someone who appears to learn English in three months also probably had five years of English lessons at school which seemed like at the time they didn't learn any anything from and couldn't speak English but still it was dormant knowledge in there somewhere which in a sense they reactivated later on with three months of intense effort and practice so I'm just making the point that sometimes if it seems like it was achieved really quickly there might be a lot of learning somewhere else in the past that they're just pulling up again so anyway when it seems like other people are progressing much faster and maybe if they are just have to that's something that you just have to accept you can't make yourself be a faster person than you are all you can do is keep going and importantly I think set the pace that's right for you which is another really great thing about learning at age 40 is that you're more in control of the pace it's not just set by your teacher it's set by how much you want to study and by the teachers that you personally employ to help you not just your school okay so I want to talk about the benefits now for learning a language at age 40 so for me personally the number one benefit is I'm just more patient I'm able to work towards really long goals that are really long way ahead many years away into the future now in ways that I wasn't when I was younger so I think you have to be patient when it comes to learning languages and also for example when I was younger I wasn't able to repeat things I found them so boring that everything I read or studied it was a one-time thing and when I was revising for example it was painful to look through notes that I'd made before like it was the most boring thing in the world but I reflect now and think if only I had repeated that stuff a few times read it again a few times that would have been the secret to learning quickly and perhaps keeping that knowledge or information forever but with the benefit of age and experience now I know that it takes many many repetitions of the same content the same thing to finally learn it and I'm no longer at war with repeating things or seeing the same information more than once and the second one is I'm not so distracted in my life by other things shiny things places places to go people to meet people to socialize with the latest thing that's happening no all of that stuff is fine but I'm dedicated to learning French at the moment and I don't mind missing out on this this and this and this so that I can accomplish learning French to a high enough level sometime far off in the future who knows if I'll feel finished with it not in a rush and yeah I already covered this point but another benefit of learning at age 40 is being able to set your own pace and learning in a way that's comfortable for you and not feeling stressed by things like exams and all of that kind of pressurizing stuff that happens at school and I think a lot of the stuff that if you're anything like me creates a lot of the terrifying feelings of going to a language class so bringing all of this together I just want to say yes it is possible to learn French at age 40 you can do it but you might need to reprioritize your life and create more dedication in order to do it and obviously in a practical sense you might need a teacher to support you and you will need things like a a course book or materials to follow when you're learning by yourself but it can be done and I wish you bon voyage thank you for watching this video and come back to my channel again soon see you later bye