#cherry7885

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teal moat
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Salut Cherry!
To reach A1~A2, You will need to master between 500~1000 French words (not a insurmountable task if you apply yourself consistently - as in all enterprise)

But sacrifices might be required, I'm afraid. You say you want to speak fluently. A1/A2 will barely get you there honestly. To master things like adverbs / conjunctions (simple and complex ones), verb conjugations (3rd group!!!), etc, and other French phrases and idioms that will make you sound French (grammatically/lexically speaking, that is) you're looking at B1 at a bare minimum. Of course, with A1/A2 you can easily introduce yourself, describe your immediate environment and everyday items, etc, colors, face/body, weather, etc, and you put together simple sentences, but fluency will be found above that level, if that's what you really need.
It is possible to reach fluency all by yourself / self-study, but you do realize it will require a great deal of effort and sacrifices (especially without the benefits afforded by a private tutor or structured course).

It will take pages to go over what you should or shouldn't do in your case to reach fluency -- Besides each individual has their own abilities and learning strengths and weaknesses and what I'd recommend might not suit you at all, so just take it with a grain of salt and apply what you think might be useful to your own situation.

  1. Analyze - Where do you see your French fluency being the most useful? What topics interests you on a daily basis? What do you enjoy talking about the most with friends/family? Make a list of that and narrow it down to a handful of options - You can't do it all at first and you can always go back to the other (less relevant topics) later when you get more confident.
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  1. Once you've listed your favorite topic(s), make a list of lexical categories that pertain to that topic and focus on a handful of French words in each categories. Go for the low-hanging fruits at first and gobble the easy words in the high-frequency pool (See, you can't play a Mozart the first time you're learning Do, re, mi, right? -- unless you're Mozart himself, then go for it!! 🙂 Do the same for French verbs. For example, if you like chatting with your BFF about your day and how it went and all, then make sure to learn words related to your daily activities for example, se brosser, se laver le visage, se réveiller, aller à la gym,, etc. and get yourself in the habit of telling your friend (or even maybe an imaginary friend -> that's what I did when I was studying English as my second language and had no one to practice with - this was before the www), so I was saying, get used to employing these words every chance you have. It'll become easier. Then rinse and repeat.

  2. Set (tiny) milestones. "tiny" is relative -- the most important here is to avoid feeling burned out (because there is a great chance of that happening on your trajectory to fluency).

A few milestones I had when studying English as a young collégien - btw, j'ai 46 ans -
Week 1: Study all ingredients Mother uses in her cooking (and tell her the food tastes good) - So I started studying les légumes, les condiments, les viandes, les fruits, etc. Everything I could see right their in the kitchen and that my mother was using daily to cook. She spoke not a single word of English, but I had so much fun shouting to her, "Mom, I love your soup today! There's some onion, potato, garlic, carrot, etc. etc." She was so confused, but it worked wonders for me! Within a week I had mastered most vegetable names, condiments, etc. (Rinse and repeat this process) I did the same for all my favorite topics.