Award-Winning French Courses & Classes in Philadelphia, PA

If you'd like to enhance your study of the French language, whether you're learning at Germantown Friends School for your college application, at the University of Pennsylvania, on your own in hopes of securing a promotion, or going on vacation, Varsity Tutors offers a Philadelphia French course that can help you. When you sign up for a French class offered by Varsity Tutors, you attend virtually over the Internet. You meet live with a professional instructor and a handful of classmates, and can discuss things, in French or English, in real time. New classes start each month, so you never have to wait long to begin studying. Learning a language can be harder than you might think, and the more opportunity you have to study practice conversations and do vocabulary and grammar drills, the quicker you may reach the fluency level you desire.

French is spoken by hundreds of millions of people across the globe, and is considered second only to English as the most-used language in international business. When you learn a language, you also learn culture, and there's a wide variety of French-speaking cultures. Countries that range from Senegal to Canada, from Vietnam to, well, France, speak French as an official language. If you're looking to learn more about a particular French-speaking area, your online French instructor may be able to help you find resources. You can rely on comprehensive language coverage in your Philadelphia French course.

What material does a Philadelphia French course help me learn?

Learning a language usually begins with memorizing some basic introductory vocabulary, and using your new words in conversational sentences as soon as possible. You'll likely be using grammar rules that you won't learn until a bit later on, the same way you learn the language you grow up speaking. Because French is one of the Romance languages, it does have some commonalities with English, including common words we use that are actually French, such as information, café, and genre. Knowing this may help your confidence because you know you have the ability to speak French already.

There are also plenty of differences between French and English. If you've already taken French classes at area high schools like Germantown Friends School or Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, you're aware that French nouns have an assigned gender, which has nothing to do with the femininity or masculinity of the object. It's important to learn each noun's gender, as you can't use it in a grammatically correct sentence otherwise. The gender (and whether it's singular or plural in each case) affect the articles, adjectives, and pronouns you have to use along with it. Memorizing nouns and their genders is one of the first things can do, followed by learning various adjectives and how they respond to noun gender, and so on.

If you're at a higher degree of French fluency already, your Philadelphia French class may start right in with conversation, and your instructor may use an immersion technique (which is another French word we use frequently). This teaching method used in many full-language-immersion schools across the country, and can be very effective once you have some basic understanding of instructions. Your class may also be focused on situation-specific French. For example, you might be interested in learning different vocabulary and conversational conventions if you're the CEO of a major international corporation than if you're a young adult doing volunteer work in a French-speaking nation, and yet again if you're a chef working in a French restaurant.

During your live French classes, you may work on specific topics such as verb conjugation and verb tense, direct object pronouns, question words, relative pronouns, and Si plus tenses. You may also learn about French history and culture, and how the language was spread throughout so many parts of the world. You may be surprised when learning tenses that you've been using things like past perfect, irregular and regular future, and past conditional tenses all your life without even realizing it. One sign that you've reached full French fluency when you can use the correct tenses without thinking about it, the same way you do in your original language.

How do I benefit more from taking a Philadelphia French class than studying on my own?

Possibly the greatest advantage of studying in a French class is the ability to learn things right the first time. It's much more difficult to go back and re-learn a pronunciation after you've been saying a word wrong for even just a couple of weeks. Your instructor, or even your classmates, can help you learn and practice the correct pronunciation of new vocabulary so that you can grow in your language capabilities more efficiently.

Working in the type of collaborative situation engendered in a Philadelphia French class has been proven to improve both learning and retention. This happens in a number of ways. For one, being able to immediately use new vocabulary or grammar by speaking with classmates helps cement the knowledge in your brain. As nice as it is that you can get help from other students, you can also provide help to those who may be struggling with something you have mastered. It's long been known that you can secure your knowledge of a subject by teaching it to someone else.

Varsity Tutors can also provide one-on-one tutoring sessions for you if you fall substantially behind the rest of your French class. With their attention focused specifically on your challenges and solving them, you can quickly catch up to the rest of your peers. These are just a few of the many ways a Philadelphia French course can help you. Contact Varsity Tutors to learn more.

Sound good. How do I get started with a French course?

Whether you're learning French for academic, professional, or personal reasons, you can depend on quality help from your French classes. All you need to do to sign up is contact Varsity Tutors, and our educational consultants will ask a few questions about your level of fluency, your goals, and your schedule. Then they can enroll you in a Philadelphia French course that can meet those needs. We look forward to helping you as you work towards your own French-speaking goals.