For those of you who are focusing on oral comprehension whilst you are learning French in France mastering conjunctions is a vital skill. As you progress on your French immersion course recognising phrases and propositions will become clearer and clearer as their elongated form they take will make them easier to identify within a length of dialogue. You will quickly get used to hearing the subject-verb form and begin to readily pick it out but this is only half the battle. Understanding the components individually is a far cry from understanding how they relate to each and conjunctions do just that. I have listened to many exercises where I understood the main substance of what was being said but I still had no idea about how they should be put together to form a coherent body of speech. A challenge here is that conjunctions mostly take the form of just a word or two and can be easy to miss or wrongly attribute as an indistinct part of the preceding or following proposition. If you also consider the fact that conjunctions can have a huge impact on that which surrounds it you can begin to grasp the importance for oral comprehension.
The main thing I have found with connectors since learning French in France is that they give you a grasp of the nuance involved in whatever it is you are listening too. You will start learning conjunctions from your first week on your intensive French immersion course; starting with the most frequently used. They can fall out of the spotlight though as you progress in favour of lofty grammatical concepts and for me I would sometimes go days with being aware of a conjunction before actually looking up the proper meaning. With each one that I have learnt though I have noticed huge, deepening shifts in my understanding.
They allow you to understand the differences between cause and effect and also how things relate to each other in time. For example, if you have two propositions for example, you can find out by concentrating on the conjunctions if there was a causal relationship and if the effect was immediate or long term etc.
Deepen Your French Learning Quickly
Obviously the more you learn the more you are going to understand but I have found really this comes a lot faster if you dedicate a bit of extra time to studying conjunctions whilst learning French in France. The reason being that many of the simple conjunctions you will hear early on in your French immersion experience have more advanced compound versions that have a completely different meaning. Lots of them are combinations of very familiar words and the direct translation will leave you scratching your head so learning the meaning of the compound conjunctions will really open doors to you in a profound way.
It took me ages to realise this, I spent a lot of time getting hung up on these little two word phrases in the middle of a sentence and tried to translate them literally and often it is hard to get from the direct translation to their actual sense so I wouldn’t get anywhere. In my attempts to translate literally I would always miss the next part of the dialogue and I could really lose a lot of important information.
Another challenge to the general comprehension of dialogue especially when it comes to conjunctions is the subjunctive. The subjunctive conjugations are very distinct from the regular forms and a little conjunction can transform what would be a quite simple sentence into something unfamiliar and confusing. Many of the more advanced conjunctions are followed by the subjunctive form so getting a head start on them is a good idea.
I have really felt a huge improvement in my oral comprehension since I have started paying a bit more attention to conjunctions, there aren’t that many and the ones you are most likely to hear are an even smaller group. With a little bit of extra work, you will see a huge pay off in your understanding, it really is one of the best effort-to-results ratios I’ve found since I started learning French at the EasyFrench Immersion school here in Montpellier.