The trick is to find what best suits your personal learning preferences, your daily routine, your needs and your budget. For my wife and I, this has been a lengthy, complex process, but perhaps my lengthy, complex reply may make your journey a little simpler…
Nine years ago, when we bought our French house, we were both still working in the UK and decided to have personal french lessons with a french teacher who lived in the next village (in Cumbria). These proved to be expensive and we learnt very little, despite my wife having assiduously takenAlliance Française classes in Jo’burg for a couple of years, and also had the advantage of being wholly bi-lingual - Afrikaans speaker with an MA from an anglophone university). Anyhow, after a couple of not very useful and not very cheap lessons, we knew this wasn’t working.
Second attempt was with weekly LA evening classes - these gave a bit of confidence in trying to speak french, but again the returns didn’t seem worth the financial outlay.
We started using the free version of Duolingo six years ago and found this really useful for vocabulary, translation and grammar. One can easily fit a few lessons into one’s daily routine and since it was revamped last year, the resource is much larger and more coherently structured. There’s also a large online question and support community - all for free. I’ve found it very useful in expanding my ability to write in quite serious ‘intellectual’ french (I’ve had two essays published on contemporary art) and it’s also enabled me to construct quite complex sentences in spoken french.
Unfortunately it’s not designed to equip me to deal with our local patois! I think this can only be achieved by speaking to neighbours, and for simpler exchanges, food shopping on the markets, where I count the change with gusto - trenté, quaranté and, best of all, cha-in-quanté.
After we moved to France full-time, we began taking official lessons in a nearby town, these were more interesting, but mainly because they mixed French people learning Engish with anglophones learning French; unfortunately the cost to us as a couple @ 10€ an hour, was 160€ a month, which seemed quite a lot. However, at the end of the summer term, the French members of the group suggested that instead we could all meet in a restaurant, or in one anothers’ homes and spend the tuition fees on food and wine for the occasion. Gallic practical pragmatism at its best!
We’ve been doing this for three years now and it works very well, our conversations are more complex, classes now last for four or five hours rather than two, our social circle has been enormously enriched, we’ve had many excellent meals and are much better informed about the less well-known wines of SW France!
Finally; in addition to the above, we also attend weekly F2F conversation classes for foreigners in our département which cost 30€ a year (not a typo!), but these are primarily intended to equip people to work in France (our class is a 50:50 mix of young non-Europeans, from Japan to Mexico) and recently retirees from other european countries. These classes are three hours long, entirely in French and have extra dimensions such as grammar if you need it. And we’ve found them enormously helpful, not least because being retired we’re not spending our days in a francophone working environment.
So, many different routes, but my experience is that through trial, error some free online stuff and talking to ones neighbours, you should be able to operate without too much financial outlay.
Hope this helps a bit, you certainly don’t need to spend a lot of money…
