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A space for real stories, honest reflections, and small victories from life with tinnitus and hearing loss.
Here you’ll find comfort, perspective, and maybe even a laugh or two as we learn to live a little more peacefully with that damn noise.
Learning French With Tinnitus & Hearing Loss: Without Getting Your Knickers in a Twist
By Marie
If you’re lucky enough — like me — to have both a hearing impairment and tinnitus (insert sarcastic grimace here 😩), then you’ll be thrilled to learn that picking up a spoken language comes with a bonus challenge pack. Think boss-level difficulty, but without the inflation-busting pension at the end.
My French origin story (Spoiler: I had a lovely teacher)
I started learning French at school with an amazing teacher, the kind you remember for years. I struggled with reading in English, but somehow I felt more confident reading in French out loud in front of the whole class. Yes, I know. It makes absolutely zero sense. Welcome to my brain.
Fast-forward a few decades and we decided to move to France and build a house. Top tip: do not do that. Not unless you enjoy emotional cliff jumps, paperwork avalanches, and learning the French phrase for “what on earth is happening?” — which, by the way, is “Mais qu’est-ce qui se passe ?”
Then Came the Real Test: Learning French… Again
Once we moved here, learning French became non-negotiable. Except learning French with hearing loss and tinnitus is like trying to dance while someone keeps moving the floor.
Here’s the thing.
Pronunciation relies heavily on listening.
Listening relies heavily on, well, hearing.
Pair that with the fact that French is not a purely phonetic language. There is a difference between how words look on the page and how they sound. English is guilty of this too, which is why both languages keep us humble. Spoken French is full of silent letters, swallowed sounds, and squashed syllables. So we need more time, more practice, and more repeats than the average learner. And that is okay.
Another Reason Why it’s Harder
When people speak their native language, many of them can fill in the gaps in a sentence from context. If they miss a word, context does the heavy lifting. Hearing-impaired learners can do that too to an extent, but there are simply more gaps to fill. Our tinnitus can be competing for attention, and the energy it takes to decode speech can drain us.
You know the phrase “fake it till you make it”?
We can’t.
We must actually hear the sounds. Otherwise the whole sentence becomes a swirl of polite noise.
The Usual Advice (Useful But Boring)
Of course, you will hear the classics:
- Listen to podcasts
- Watch French films and TV (not my favourite — I struggle with TV in English these days because it is so mumbled, let alone French TV)
- Read in French
- Consume as much French media as you can
…blah blah blah.
Still helpful, but everyone already says that. Here are strategies that actually help when your ears are on their own agenda.
1. Shadowing a Native Speaker
Shadowing means listening to someone speak and repeating in real time, copying their rhythm, pronunciation and intonation like a slightly malfunctioning French parrot. You can use all kinds of media for this. YouTube is an obvious goldmine.
Why it helps:
- It forces your brain to link sound, meaning and mouth movement quickly.
- You start to recognise patterns, not just individual words. Our brains are excellent pattern machines.
- It builds confidence in speaking even if you miss details.
Shadowing might feel ridiculous, but so does most language learning. Embrace the ridiculous.
2. Shadow a French Person Speaking English
This one sounds wild, but trust me: hearing a French native speaking English helps you understand the essence of how French sounds.
Example: Emmanuel Macron.
His English is excellent, but he still sounds unmistakably French.
When you shadow a French person speaking English:
- You hear French rhythm, melody and mouth patterns without needing to understand French.
- Your brain trains itself to predict French pronunciation at a safe, accessible level.
It is easier for those of us with hearing impairment because we already know the English meaning. That frees us to focus 100 percent on sound patterns. Pronunciation training without the overwhelm. Genius.
3. Comprehensible Input (Your New Best Friend)
Comprehensible input is a fancy linguistics term that basically means this:
Language you can mostly understand, enough that your brain can fill in the meaning without panicking.
It is the opposite of staring blankly at a French TV debate where everyone is shouting, the subtitles are too fast, and your tinnitus kicks off like a fire alarm.
For people with hearing loss or tinnitus, comprehensible input is an absolute game-changer because it lets your brain relax. Instead of trying and failing to decode every single sound, you use context to carry you.
Here’s what makes it so powerful.
- You get the gist, so the details fall into place naturally
When your brain understands the main idea of a sentence, it starts predicting the missing bits even if your ears did not catch them. This is huge for us, because our lack of auditory detail is offset by visual cues, story context, gestures, tone, repetition and pacing.
It’s like reading a book with a few words missing but plenty of clues. We all know that is how children learn.
- It builds vocabulary without brute force memorising
Instead of sitting down with a list like chien, maison, voiture until your soul leaves your body, you absorb words inside stories and conversations you actually understand.
Your brain stores them faster because it sees them in action, in context, with emotion and in a real situation.
- It reduces listening anxiety
Traditional listening practice can be stressful.
Comprehensible input is gentle, predictable and pause-able.
The speech is:
- slower
- clearer
- visually supported
- full of repeats
- designed to make sense even when you miss some sounds
Perfect when your ears have had enough for the day.
- It works at every level
Whether you know five French words or five thousand, there is comprehensible input for your stage.
Examples:
- Beginner: very basic YouTube videos with props, gestures and pictures
- Intermediate: vlogs with clear speech and visual clues
- Advanced: faster content that is still structured so you understand 80 to 90 percent
You are constantly pushed just slightly beyond your comfort zone, which is the sweet spot for fast learning.
- It mimics how children learn
Kids do not start with grammar textbooks. They learn with meaning, repetition, body language and emotional context. Comprehensible input recreates that natural process, but for adults who also enjoy sitting down and not running around screaming.
What to look for on YouTube
Search terms like:
- French comprehensible input beginner
- French with gestures
- French stories with visuals
- French slow audio with subtitles
Channels and teachers such as Comprehensible French Input, Alice Ayel and InnerFrench are great examples.
Why this method is perfect for hearing-impaired learners
Because it allows you to:
- rely less on perfect hearing
- rely more on visuals and meaning
- learn at your own pace
- rewatch and revisit as much as needed
- avoid the exhaustion that comes with high-speed native speech
It turns French into something approachable instead of overwhelmingly fast and mumbly, which, let’s be honest, it often is.
4. Awareness of the Shape of Your Lips
This might sound a bit odd at first, but stick with me. One of the biggest shifts I made in my French pronunciation came from doing something very simple: stopping worrying about how I looked and really rounding my lips.
French uses mouth shapes that English just… doesn’t. If you keep your lips fairly flat and restrained, your French will almost always sound a bit “English-flavoured”, no matter how hard you try. The trick is to exaggerate the shapes. Push the lips forward, round them properly, and commit to the movement. Yes, it can feel ridiculous. Yes, it works.
This is not a subtle technique. Half-hearted lip rounding gets you nowhere. You have to go all in! That is emotionally, physically, and aesthetically.
A lot of French sounds live right at the front of the mouth. If your lips aren’t involved, those sounds never quite land where they should. Once you start over-doing the rounding, things suddenly click: vowels sound more French, words flow better, and your pronunciation improves far more than you’d expect from such a small physical change.
The goal here isn’t elegance. It’s effectiveness. French pronunciation improves long before you start looking cool doing it.
It’s one of those rare tips that’s easy to try, costs nothing, and delivers surprisingly big results. If you’re curious about this idea, I highly recommend David Huxtable’s video “How to sound French when speaking English.” It’s a bit weird, very fun, and brilliantly demonstrates how much mouth shape alone can change how “French” you sound.
Final Tip: Get Out There and Embarrass Yourself
Honestly, no amount of tips will replace real conversations.
At some point:
- You will mix up bœuf and beau. (beef and beautiful, masculine)
- On a hot day you might tell someone you are feeling sexually hot. Je suis chaude X — yeah baby — and j’ai chaud ✓ — that is your temperature.
- You will definitely say “merci beaucoup” in a way that sounds a bit too much like “merci beaucul,” meaning "thanks, nice arse."
C’est la vie, baby!
Because I Have Made so Many Mistakes in French ...
... I have done all of these endlessly. Here is one mistake I am super proud of. It gives me great pleasure to share what a right plonker I was.
For context, I built a house in France.
Picture this: the builder and his team have pretty much finished our place. I am proud. My neighbour strolls over and I wanted to say, with all the pride of a new homeowner, “J’adore ma maison!” meaning “I love my house!”
Instead, out of my mouth came, “J’adore mon maçon!” I had declared “I love my builder.”
One small pronunciation slip. Cue the neighbour’s raised eyebrows. Suddenly, I am not the proud homeowner. I am the star of a very unexpected romance story.
To make matters worse, the grammar that usually betrays me did not this time. I used mon, which is correct for maçon, instead of ma for maison. So not only did I declare undying love for the builder, I did it with impeccable grammatical conviction. My lucky guess about masculine or feminine helped convince my neighbour that I did indeed love my builder.
The neighbour looked ready to RSVP to the wedding.
Meanwhile I launched into a full explanation: “No, no, I meant the house! The house! I do not love my builder. Well, he did a good job, but still!”
Moral of the story: in French, one small pronunciation slip and getting gender right or wrong can turn you from homeowner to hopeless romantic faster than you can say maison.
Learning French with hearing impairment and tinnitus is harder, absolutely. But it is doable, rewarding and often hilarious. Give yourself the time you need, double down on listening practice, and embrace the mistakes. They make the best stories later anyway.
Take care
Marie
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