There are several things that are important when learning a language. First, of course, you need knowledge and understanding for grammatical structures - syntax, verb conjugations, etc. You need to learn pleasantries and salutations - hello, please, thank you, good-bye. And then there is vocabulary… SO much vocabulary. You always start with basic things - said pleasantries, food, weather, asking for directions, clothing. Then you move on to more advanced things. In my case, since my diploma in French was largely literary-based, we moved through the milieu of literature. Starting with short stories, we stumbled through a few short pages of something simple like La Petit Prince, carefully underlining and looking up every word we didn’t know before moving on to actually reading it. There are tedious steps when you start out reading in another language
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