How to teach your mother tongue to your spouse
Other Tools to Facilitate Understanding and Memorizing
Speaking as often as possible, having the right attitude and modifying your sentences to make them easy to understand and remember is the most important. However here are a couple of additional ideas to improve even more the learning process:
Use Your Body!
Remember to move, to use body language: mime, show, move around if needed. It’s quite tiring but will make your conversations livelier. And besides, your spouse definitely won’t forget a mime session!
Stick to One Topic
Talk about the same topic for a while: repeating the same words again and again will help your partner remember them.
Speak With Other People
Encourage the student to talk with other people than you once s/he knows the basics. S/he will get used to other accents, speech rhythm and expressions (and the end goal is of course to be able to talk with everyone, not just you!).
Don’t expect miracles though, as you’ll very often need to stay close by in order to lead the student’s thinking process or rephrase a person’s sentence to make it easier to understand. Indeed, not everyone is used to speaking with foreigners and they sometimes speak too fast, don’t repeat, or their vocabulary is simply too different from yours.
Experience has taught me that the day you are able to have real discussions with your spouse in your mother tongue, it is no guarantee that s/he will be able to speak with other people. In my case, I reached a point where I could speak French with my ex-partner almost all the time, but she still struggled to understand my grand-parents.
Use the Right Amount of Grammar, at the Right Time
Don’t leave grammar rules, conjugations and the like totally aside; instead use them as a tool to perfect existing knowledge. The learning process is not based on them, true, but the day your spouse no longer needs to think to be able to formulate certain sentences and yet still makes a few mistakes, don’t hesitate to explain the underlying rule to correct them. The student, who no longer needs so much focus and energy to build his/her sentence, will have the necessary attention to understand, remember and apply this rule.
In my case, my ex-partner kept repeating “je aller” (“I to go”) instead of “je vais” (“I go”). In the beginning, the most important thing was that she knew the verb “aller” (“to go”), so we could understand what she meant. However after a while, when she managed to express herself quite fluently, I detailed the conjugation of the verb. Since she no longer had 15 things to remember simultaneously, she remembered this rule.
4 Comments
Elise
Super article !
Exactement ce que je cherchais.
Mon copain est Japonais, et on communique 100% en japonais. Il a des bases d’anglais (puisqu’il l’a étudié à l’école) mais c’est très limité.
J’aimerais lui apprendre un minimum de français pour qu’il puisse communiquer avec ma famille. En partant de zero, cela semble insurmontable cependant.
Au bout de combien de temps pouviez-vous avoir des conversations simples en français avec votre partenaire ?
Votre article m’a motivé !
David Gay-Perret
Bonjour Élise et merci pour ce commentaire ! (qui était perdu au milieu des 110 spam… T_T Heureusement que, pris d’une inspiration, je suis allé regarder de plus près !)
Honnêtement je ne me souviens plus très bien du moment où on a pu plus ou moins discuter, toutefois je me rappelle avoir débuté en janvier de manière très (trop ?) intensive, et quand mes parents sont venus en juin ma compagne pouvait discuter avec eux. Sur des sujets simples bien sûr, et ma mère a un don pour parler lentement et s’adapter aux étrangers tandis que mon père parle anglais et pouvait donc traduire les mots difficiles. Mais c’était tout de même une belle victoire !
Le plus important est de commencer et de persévérer. Il est très facile de remettre à plus tard ou d’utiliser la langue commune “juste pour cette fois parce que sinon il faut 3 fois plus de temps pour se comprendre”. Mais résultat dans 5 ans rien n’a changé. Autant s’y mettre le plus vite possible et passer le cap galère tôt pour ensuite se faire plaisir (car ce cap ne va certainement pas disparaitre avec le temps !).
Quoi qu’il en soit bon courage et n’hésite pas à revenir faire part de ton expérience si tu appliques les quelques conseils de cet article !
Christine Crews
This was so helpful! I have struggled to teach my husband (Italian) my native language (English) for so long. I’m definitely going to try some of the tips you mentioned! It is also hard for people outside the relationship to understand why it is so hard to teach him.
David Gay-Perret
Thanks Christine for taking the time to leave a comment and glad you found these articles of some use!
Agreed, people outside the relationship and especially people who don’t have the experience of a multicultural, multilingual relationship can have a hard time understanding what it implies.
Good luck in any case! Learning English shouldn’t be so hard if your husband is motivated!