Deep French

The short answer is that you will benefit from the full immersion experiences I offer no matter what your level is. Yes, that means whether you are brand new at French, whether you have already followed a few classes with a tutor, a language center or mastered duo lingo, and also if you already have an advanced level! How come? That is due to the nature of the immersion experiences: I will not be teaching the group lessons and there are no assigned language targets for each day or activity. Instead, I put you in situations that help you reproduce the acquisition process that any human followed with their first language. I talk a lot about acquisition, which is different from learning. Learning involves intentional studying of the language whereas acquiring happens through organic infusion in the language by using it: you just live in French and acquire French: that's the magic of immersion with hands-on life. Just like we don't segregate babies away from older children and from adults because they are not at their native language levels yet, I don't segregate beginners away from intermediate and advanced speakers. It just wouldn't make sense, because the truth is that we learn best individually within environments that are diverse. In practice, that means I will speak to beginners much slowers and simpler, and with many more gestures. I will also readily draw a picture for beginners, whereas my speech might become faster and more complex with more advanced speakers. Beginners still benefit from hearing me and others talk more naturally to more advancers speakers, just like babies and children benefit from hearing adults talk to each other. More advanced speakers benefit from hearing more articulate and slower speech delivered to beginners too (it might just be their aha moment about how a word is really pronounced!).

No, the world and life around us will be your lesson. For more on this, read the "How it works" and subsequent paragraphs on the main page of this website. Instead of teaching you about the language, I build experiences for you to live the language. Instead of learning, you are acquiring. It is like the difference between teaching you a theoretical lesson about hammers, and asking you to help me build a fence and hand you a hammer and nails, and I show you how to use them so that we are successful at building the fence. In the immersion experiences I offer, I don't teach you about the hammer, we use the hammer.

The same way you've done with everything else when you were successful. To learn how to bike, you needed to bike. To learn how to swim, you needed to go to water. To learn how to talk, you need to talk. Just like for that series of examples, it is difficult at the beginning, and it is awkward. You got on the bike and you did not even know what to do. But you could see others around you who pushed on the pedals, so you imitated. In addition, there was probably also a reassuring adult or older child who was guiding you, encouraging you, and comforting you when you fell. Hands-on language immersion works the same way. I am the reassuring adult, encouraging you, guiding you, and comforting you when you feel you can't do it!

Yep, that is very normal. It's also an excellent indicator that it is what you should be doing. Language lessons can be a crutch because they put you in the comfort of a chair and reassure you by blabbering about the language. Instead, if you are put in a survival situation, you get brave, overcome the obstacle, and thrive. By survival, I don't mean actual survival: you know I speak English and so do many other French people. If there is an actual physical survival situation, we will of course focus on efficiency. By survival, however, I mean that you need the language to live the situation you are in. No matter your level, that is when you will try to observe, imitate, and produce language. During the whole experience, I am there to comfort you and reassure you. My primary mission is for you to feel good, so that you can grow your courage and confidence, so that you grow your French.

So, the rule of the game is no, let's not speak any English so that we are deeply in the French immersion bath. You can compare it to signing up for an experience where you're going to eat vegan for a week, and asking if you can still drink milk and eat meat sometimes. However, once the reason for the rule of the game is understood and accepted, you can know that I will not be policing people around. There is no language surveillance squad, and I will assume that if you revert to English, there must be a solid reason. However, that reason cannot simply be "I don't know how to say this in French and I really want to share this story about my dog" (simply skip the story about the dog). Also, if you revert to English frequently, it deteriorates the immersion for everyone else too, so I will ask you to stop. Finally, it is obvious that in the case of an emergency (medical, a danger, etc.), everyone will use whatever language is the most efficient, which is most likely English.