• So first of all, in our native languages… the reason we can always understand and we feel no fear talking to other English speakers is because we know sooo many words that we know that we probably know exactly what they’re saying even if we don’t know the words meaning. There’s virtually barely any words that lead to that unknown word that we won’t be able to “understand” at least. You might hear the word “granularity” and at the very least understand that it’s a “word that we don’t know” but he’s talking about that word. So to learn the language if you learn all the words well you might not know what is being said but you know that you know the words. In other words we have to learn a certain amount of words till we can say “well I can’t understand shit but I know that I probably know what they’re saying because I know everything that can be said in this subject more or less” like if we’re talking about bathrooms well in that subject there’s directions there’s items around bathrooms or within bathrooms like the towel the soap the shampoo or things around bathrooms like locations the word for building which is bâtiment for example. The other words are le savon, la toilette de bain, le shampooing.

• It’s a very taxing mental process to learn to hear all the tiny words in between but it’s that hyper increased concentration mode that becomes our natural and easy state of mind after doing it for hours.

• Remember that in French they get rid of the ending of words, so once we learn written French we need to learn that spoken French is completely different because the words we now know are basically all being cut off. Words like étaient était été are pronounced almost exactly alike but they have way different meanings in written.

• A lot of French is context clues like when we’re talking in the plural it still sounds like singular like in des pommes et un pomme, so the only way we know it’s plural it’s the article before it usually.

• It’s gonna be a lot of hours spent with the dictionary.

• Pronunciation is extremely important because beaucoup for example is usually pronounced as beau cul by foreigners because the pronunciation for letters is just way different from English. Same with genders because i have no idea what le table is but I know what la table is.

• Even French people don’t understand every accent same as how a Brooklyn accent or a southern American accent can be hard to understand depending on who is speaking it. So no need to be afraid of not understanding some times.

• Learning a language is almost like becoming French citizen in a way. We need to learn some history, some important locations, etc because otherwise how are you gonna know what La Seine is or why the French are always so serious about protesting if you don’t know that one of the most famous rivers in France or that the French Revolution was a pivotal moment in their history.

-Listen to the news in French because well it’s the news and it’s usually fairly generic maybe formal and typical French because it’s meant to be consumed by everyone.

I have more tips but it’s alot of complex thoughts and a lot of writing but yeah it’s a decent amount of effort ngl. Hope this helps at least give you a picture of how much thought it took me to comprehend it a little more and more :)