Hi, we're Ron and Kate and we're originally from England. We spent about 15 years holidaying in France before we moved here permanently. In that time we tried quite a few different ways to learn French - some of them more successful than others!

Today we get along with the French language pretty well - but there's still room for improvement so we continue to try new ideas, programs, software and books as they come along. We're also having lessons with a retired teacher who we met locally.

What we're hoping to pass on, via a series of articles, is our experiences (both our successes and our failures) in order to perhaps be of some help to those of you who are visiting France - whether that's just for the occasional holiday, in search of a second home or moving here permanently. Here we go then...

There are many ways to learn French. Kate and I both have our preferences and you will probably need to try a couple of methods before you find what suits you best. We've found that investing in a few books and couple of CD or pc-based courses is well worth it.

However, one of the largest learning resouces is, of course, the internet and there are many ways to start to learn French online. An added bonus is that, with a little searching, you can find several sites where you can begin to learn French for free. No single site has all the answers - and we strongly advise you to look at other methods as well - but as it won't cost you anything, why not dive in?

So where do you start? Well if you type "how to learn French" into a search engine you'll get millions of answers - far too many to list here. We're also unable to give you direct link to websites in this article but if you visit our site at www.how2learnfrench.com you can get access to a few of the places we like best such as, for example, the excellent resources of the BBC.

When you're ready to move on from the feee exercises, which can be a bit limited, you'll be looking at home-study or "distance learning" via CD, pc software, books etc. Some courses offer an interesting and entertaining mixture of medias which all help speed up learning. We'll be covering some of those in a further article and again, our website has plenty of details. We'll also look at what we think is the most effective way of learning French which, for those with pockets deep enough, is to be right here in France.

But that's for another day. In the meantime, remember that almost any learning is better than none at all. The only proviso we would give is that with a language you need to be able to hear it so as not to learn bad pronunciation habits - this is where language CDs are at their most useful.

Until next time, good luck with it. Maybe we'll see you over here one day!