Learning French with Life Questions

Leah Meirinhos
3 min readJul 5, 2021

So you want to learn French. But you want to do it efficiently. You’ve tried different ways in the past, and you’ve learned some basic words like “Bonjour” or “Au revoir” but not enough to really get a conversation going with someone or to understand one.

Now imagine a day like that:

7h30am: You are comfortably laying in your bed, slowly opening your eyes. You can perceive the sun’s rays passing through the window. Outside your home and outside your mind, life moves at breakneck speed. You can hear the traffic, the work on the building in front starting and the pigeons that coo at your window.

You get out of your bed, make your bed, brush your teeth, and prepare your favorite breakfast.

You cook your eggs, press the orange and dress the table.

While the water for your tea is warming up, you take your smartphone, open Youtube and write “Learning French with Life Question” in the search bar.

8h20: You click play to the first video named “What does ‘relationship’ mean to you?” and put on your headphones.

Your tea is almost done, but not yet. Still 2–3 minutes left.

In the video, the tutor Leah Meirinhos teaches French to Anna, a 25 years old student from the UK. She started to learn French 1 month ago.

The first question asked is “What does ‘relationship’ mean to you?”. Such an interesting question, isn’t it? But you think: is this not too deep of a question for a beginner in French?

While Anna is thinking and your tea is still warming, you also start asking this question to yourself.

“What does ‘relationship’ mean to me?”

You put the hot water in your cup and Anna answers. With some help and guidance from Leah, she manages to give her own opinion on the question and it fascinates you. It doesn’t look so hard when you have the right guidance.

During the next 10 minutes, you quietly savor your breakfast, and with each mouthful you hear a new French word. This is a delight.

While you take the first delicious bite of your scrambled eggs, the word “family” appears: “la famille”.

A few seconds later, while taking a deliciously crunchy bite out of your toasted bread, the student asks Leah how to say “my friends”: “mes amis”. Another word you know.

Then you take a sip of your wonderfully sweet orange juice which gives you a boost of energy while the conversation switches to romantic relationships and love: ”l’amour”.

8h30am: You’re done with your breakfast. While you take care of your dishes, you enjoy the last minutes of the video.

One more minute left.

You can hear in Anna’s voice that she is so happy and so excited to be able to speak French in such a short period of time. And that makes you feel happy too, because you can learn like Anna did.

8h33: Video done! You feel so proud of yourself right now. In less than 15 minutes today you learned a little bit of French while enjoying a good meal.

Your brain and your stomach are happy, and it was so easy to listen and learn from!

Now, if this sounds like a beautiful life and moment, you can do it yourself with my Learning French with Life Questions series on YouTube! Just open the link and enjoy a beautiful morning you’ll feel proud of 💪😄https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd0fuan1e1Tj7zY1ttIbk-Q

--

--

Leah Meirinhos
0 Followers

French tutor, dancer and traveller who loves to meet people, learn from them and teach them French language with life questions.