Writing eloquently in any language can be a struggle to improve for many people. In another language, that challenge increases even more.
If you’re looking to be able to write in advanced French, you will need to learn more than just extensive vocabulary.
C1 and C2 fluency requires you to have a strong mastery of the language, where you can command what you write to create the exact final product you intend.
Whether you’re studying advanced writing to ace your Frech classes, submit a research paper, write to a correspondent, publish an article, or write a novel, the key is to practice and have patience!
1. What Concepts to Improve as an Advanced Learner of French
How can you improve your French writing? Specifically, how can you tell if your writing is advanced?
While you may easily be able to write paragraphs upon paragraphs, what is contained within can indicate your level of fluency. There is a simple language and complex language. Mastery of French means you can manipulate your words, sentences, and overall work to share information in the way you intend.
To improve your French writing, study the following concepts.
Le Participe Présent et l’Adjectif Verbal
While these concepts may appear somewhat similar, there is a subtle distinction between them. The participe présent focuses on the ongoing action, and the adjectif verbal emphasizes the effect of the action on the noun. Mastering these forms is essential to enhance the precision and variety of expression in French.
Le Participe Présent et l’Adjectif Verbal are fundamental elements of French grammar. Understanding their nuances and knowing how to use them correctly will significantly enrich your language skills and your ability to communicate accurately and with nuance.
Ready to learn more? Discover French online classes taught by qualified tutors on Superprof!
La Concordance des Temps
Ensuring that your verbs agree on the tense they are referring to is an important and intricate part of any language.
Just like in English, there is a specific way to pose the verbs to convey our ideas in the proper tense, and in a way that agrees with the other verbs in the sentence and/or story we are telling.
Having a thorough understanding of all of the verb tenses in French as well as how to successfully combine them is mandatory for fluency.
"I don't know what it is about the French language, it seems to be scared of coming out of the mouth so it comes out the nose instead." - P.D.Q. Bach
Organizing Thoughts and Ideas
You’ll know your fluency is satisfactory and improving when you find that you are better able to organize what it is you want to say or write with ease.
With limited fluency, you need to make adjustments to what you want to say and how you want to say it to match your current ability. It requires you to modify the way you want to speak or write, taking away a little of your authenticity.
When you have an extensive enough vocabulary, plus a firm grasp on things like le participe présent, l’adjectif verbal, and la concordance des temps, you can form more complicated sentences, paragraphs, and even entire papers or books.
Fluency allows you to think on your feet in a conversation. It also allows you to plan what you’d like to say or write in a way that makes sense and flows. Your words don’t sound disjointed, repetitive, over- or under-explanatory, or choppy.
Connecting Ideas and Transitioning to New Ones
Part of organizing your ideas means that you can successfully flow from one topic to another with little to no effort.
You possess the vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, and mastery of the language to bring your ideas to life.
In writing, you can make logical connections between paragraphs, chapters, points, and so on. The order in which they are presented is logical, and you are able to convey the information you want to the reader.
In conversation, you can analyze what your conversation partner is saying immediately and respond in an appropriate way. You can guide the flow of the conversation into topics you want to bring up in a natural way if you want.
Nominalisation
Being able to manipulate the language in ways to better express yourself and make what you want to say or write more interesting is a crucial part of fluency.
Learn more about nominalization, which is the process of changing a word from a verb or adjective into a noun.
Overall, fluency means you can express yourself fully as well as understand other peoples’ expressions. You can think laterally, horizontally, vertically, theoretically, abstractly, literally, figuratively, and all the other mindsets one can have when dealing with language.
All the things we take for granted in our native language need to be learned on purpose in our chosen language(s). It takes a lot of time and practice, but the end result is well worth the effort!
2. Read Practice Exams
To improve your technical and academic writing, you can practice responding to prompts from tests like DILF/DELF/DALF, TFI, TEF, TCF, and TELC.
Even if you don’t plan on taking any of these proficiency tests, they can supply you with great writing prompts meant to test the fluency of French learners, so you can be sure that the prompts are valuable as study material.
Read examples of past questions and answers to see what kinds of answers received good scores and why, and make a mental note to incorporate the high-scoring techniques into your own writing.
3. Complete Workbooks
Similarly, you can find many workbooks, textbooks, and exercise books meant to help learners prepare for fluency exams. You can certainly use them to improve without taking the exam in the end if you don’t want to.
With exercise books, you’ll have more prompts to practice with than a practice test. You’ll also find many tips about how to score well (meaning, how to make your writing more effective in this medium) so you can understand what kinds of answers are expected to certain questions.
It can help you learn to think more like a French person!
4. Listen to Spoken French
While writing and speaking are often very different from one another, they do of course share a lot of overlap.
When you listen to French more often and develop your ear for the flow of the language, you can become a more effective writer.
You’ll understand how to make your writing sound more natural to a French reader, especially if you’re writing dialogue.
5. Read Books, Papers, and Articles in Your Preferred Genre
Beyond academic writing, make sure to consume all other sorts of written media as well.
Just like in English, there is a huge swath of media available in French: comic books, graphic novels, novels of any genre, zines, newspaper and internet articles, research papers and essays, and more!
Read what interests you so you can better write about topics you enjoy with a French-relateable perspective and vocabulary.
6. Play French Video Games
An underutilized tool for language learning is video games!
Read the in-game media like books and notes your character can find, as well as the dialogue, signs, and item descriptions.
In this format, you’ll learn how to write creatively and with the intention of worldbuilding, which is especially helpful for novel writing and creating dialogue.
7. Recreational Writing
Spend time practicing your writing frequently.
You can choose what you’d like to write about: a journal entry, explaining a situation or plot of a movie, something you did recently, describing a scene… Anything can be good practice for writing!
The more you write anything, the better your vocabulary recall will become and future writing will be easier and faster.
8. Brush Up on Grammatical Rules
Of course, you’ll also want to ensure that you are familiar with the rules of writing in French!
It would be difficult to improve your writing if you are consistently making fundamental errors. You can really only bend the rules of something like writing after you already understand the rules.
Understanding the foundations means you can confidently and effectively shape your words to tell the story or information in a way that both makes sense and conveys the ideas and feelings you want to express.
9. Learn More About French Culture
One critical aspect of improving your writing in French is to understand the background of French-speaking people.
Societal and generational traditions largely dictate for people think and feel, in general. Knowing this background information can ensure that you understand how to write with the tone you want to convey.
10. Take French Classes with a Tutor
To ensure you get individualized feedback and assistance with proofreading and writing style, consider getting help from a tutor! Take advanced french language lessons with a remote tutor from anywhere in the world.
You can get guidance on how to write certain genres and mediums as well as improve your fundamental knowledge of the language.
Writing in another language is satisfying and impressive. Being fluent in another language and being to communicate with a larger part of the population is an amazing feeling.
Practice your writing to learn how to express yourself in a high capacity in French!
Enjoyed this article? Leave a rating!
Loading...
