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>>Bonnie,
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>>To help a bit getting you fluent without too much study: Buy some books while you're over there. Nothing very difficult. Things that are of some interest to you. eg buy some books of Harold Robbins in French. And if possible, the ones that you have read in English. Read a couple of pages every night. If there's something you do not understand, read on. You'll understand it a couple of days later
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>
>PMFJI,
>
>Are you suggesting not to lookup every new word in a dictionary but instead to get the meaning intuitively?

Yes, that is exactly what I mean - I've been there
Once you start doing that you spend more time reading the dictionary than the book - no fun any more. eg, you come across a word like get (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/get) or put (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/put), you feel like giving up
To avoid the dictionary as much as possible, you need the books which are easy to read for you at that point in time. It's not really meant to learn, but getting more familiar with and repeating the language. This helps you getting from (a) to (b)

(a) your brain is involved actively in saying what you want. Think, translate word by word, construct the sentence, then output the sentence

(b) your brain is not actively involved any more. The feeling or what you want to say is output with no apparent effort at all as if it were your native tongue


Oh, and there is no problem in looking up a word in the dictionary occasionally.