I had thought that in 2022, I would brush up my Modern Greek, but then life happened.

Not to abandon my carefully crafted plan to study three languages a year, I needed an easier option. I needed to choose a language that I can refresh or update without much effort. Thus an idea to read some French books came up. 

There was a hiccup, however. My relationship with French is a passionate romance that turned sour. Long gone are the days when I was begging to be accepted to a French phonetics class, learning French songs by heart, and bracing the cold to get to the médiathèque française to borrow French  books.

Mais où sont les neiges d’antan (“where is the snow of yesteryear?”)

This year, I willy-nilly read a couple of French novels, more out of duty than for fun, and said to myself that this approach was going nowhere. 

I, who would usually eagerly wait for the night to fall, to intimately engage with my Spanish, Italian, and even German novels, was looking for pretexts to do something else, anything really, rather than to read French romans. 

Is there anything at all I can do to improve my French and enjoy the process?

Deliberate learning is a well-known technique of identifying, isolating, and working on a single issue that you need to improve, and which will move the needle. 

I wanted to work on something that would give me the most bang for my bucks. 

My French pronunciation is passable. In any case, working on your phonetics is not much fun.

My grammar is reasonable. Besides, I adhere to the line of thought that the importance of grammar in achieving language fluency is exaggerated. 

But what about vocabulary? Hold on,  I really like phraseology: hearing a new idiom is music to my ears. 

I have been working steadily on my English idioms for three years now. Although I sometimes want to throw in the towel, my English has gradually become more idiomatic. I have been slowly acquiring flexibility, elegance, and effectiveness in expressing myself. 

Thus, I decided to make my French more idiomatic. More so, I decided to do comparative idioms in French versus English, which is right up my street.

I would start with English expressions that I actively use, and for which I do not know a French equivalent off the cuff. 

(How do they say “off the cuff” in French, by the way? “Sur le champs” is one option, I just checked. Others include “au pied levé”,  “spontanément”, and  “à l’improviste”).

For example, I comfortably and frequently use English idioms “lay the groundwork”, “mince your words”, or “not set in stone”, but needed to look up their French equivalents: “poser les jalons”, “mâcher ses mots”, and “pas gravé dans le marbre”.

The process would be that of deliberate learning: identify the gaps and work on filling them. Look up new French idiomatic expressions, learn them, and use them.

Let’s hope that this comparative phraseology approach rekindles some French passion.