PARLEZ-VOUS FRANÇAIS? - CultureShock! A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette: France - page 199

You can learn French sufi ciently to survive: to eat, i nd a hotel
room, i nd the toilet, i nd the métro , add up the restaurant
bill, and so on. This kind of learning is primi (from primitif )
Français . You should be able to learn this type of French
fairly quickly, since you are going to ignore 50 per cent of the
grammar, acquire only the vocabulary you need and practise
your pronunciation. Primi Français is functional but limited.
A step above and beyond that is mini-French, which uses
articles and conjugate verbs and adds attributes. It is the
French of French children who are learning their language.
It contains a considerably larger vocabulary and attempts
to observe the speech contours of French statements and
questions instead of the hortatory, declamatory production
of primi French. Thus one moves from Pain, s'il vous plaît to
Je voudrais du pain, s'il vous plaît .
A tutor who is a native speaker of a foreign language
may prove to be a good solution for learners who have
gone beyond the practices of the classroom and want to
create their own programmes. Tutors may be expensive,
so you should have fairly compelling reasons for giving up
the classroom for self-instruction with good tapes and texts.
Tutors who are simple agreeable native speakers will probably
not have sufi cient experience or skill to satisfy the learner
looking for alternative ways of learning.
Television, video tapes, video disks and computers offer
us further the potentialities for language instruction. Any
method you try will help.
Envoi (The Moral of the Story)
Learning French may not be necessary for people who want
to visit for a short time in France. With the European Union
now well established, the French are speaking more English.
But learning French will give you a wider world of pleasure
in France. And a deeper cultural understanding as well.