Learn The High-Frequency Patterns That Make French Tick
As Tim Ferriss argues in The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life:
"Language is infinitely expansive (much like cooking) and therefore horribly overwhelming if unfiltered.
... what you study is more important than how you study.
Students are subordinate to materials, much like novice cooks are subordinate to recipes. If you select the wrong material, the wrong textbook, the wrong group of words, it doesn't matter how much (or how well) you study. It doesn't matter how good your teacher is. One must find the highest-frequency materials.
Material beats method."
One of the best linguistic filters is Ferriss' Deconstruction Dozen, twelve carefully selected sentences that reveal the "soul" of a language. Think of it as the "80/20 Rule" (a.k.a. "Pareto Principle") applied to grammar.
Here are but a few of the essential patterns and grammatical rules that you will uncover in the French Deconstruction Dozen:
You'll immediately notice that French is a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) language like English, but with some important exceptions.
You'll see that verbs have to "agree" with the subject pronoun, change form based on tense, and pair with auxiliaries in the infinitive.
Unlike English, which places object pronouns after the action (e.g., "He gives it"), French moves them right in front of the verb.
You'll discover that nouns have feminine and masculine forms, and that ownership is expressed with the word de ("of").
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My version of Ferriss' Deconstruction Dozen has a few modifications to be aware of:
I add literal translations so you get a better sense of how French equivalents are constructed.
I include the French in three forms: standard French, English approximations, and the International Phonetic Alphabet.