Russell Clark

Using Audiobooks to learn a foreign language in just 12 weeks

A brief history of Audiobooks

Like most school kids growing up in the UK in the 1970’s I attended French classes at school – 2 lessons a week, 40 weeks a year, for 3 years. During all this time, I don’t actually know what I learnt! I know that I didn’t take the subject particularly seriously, but after a total of 240 lessons I should have had a better command of the language.

Just how poor my command of French was, was illustrated in a family trip to France in 1978. As an eighteen year-old, I joined my parents on a car trip to France. The ferry trip was uneventful and we hopped into our car at Calais.

My dad, being a typical pom, assumed everyone drives on the left hand side of the road – and within 5 minutes we had a head-on collision! Fortunately no one was hurt. But, as expected the other diver was pretty angry, hurling abuses to us in French.

As someone who had taken French for 3 years, my parents looked at me to speak to this chap in French and calm him down. To my embarrassment all I could say was “The sky is blue”. Not very useful!

Some thirty years later, I decided to give French another go. This time, I actually wanted to speak the language and made a commitment to learn French within 3 months.

As a seasoned user of audio books, I found and then bought the "Teach Yourself French" series of audio books. I listened to these books while walking the dog each morning and driving to and from work each day. Initially I didn't pay that much attention and it all seemed too difficult. Then, it began to get easier and easier.

Within 8 weeks I became quite comfortable with hearing French and could follow most of what was being said. Within 12 weeks, I’d say that I was almost fluent! All this from just an hour a day listening to my audiobook during “down” time!

I’m please to report that on my latest trip to France, I could say a lot more than “The Sky is Blue”. And no, I didn’t drive on the left hand side of the road and didn’t have a collision!

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