Ooh!
I want to say a few things. First, give you a bit of my French background. Well, first, I originally discovered French at the age of 8, when reading Harry Potter. In 6th grade, at like 11-12 years old, I took formal French classes in school. Then, for a while, I never spoke French (it's useless in Virginia, as well as very rare) but I'd always stop to read anything in french, usually warning and safety labels on thing. But ever was there enough to really practice. And then, in 2008, a good friend of my sister gave me an old French-English English-French dictionary he had:
That was published in 1991. Then, I started flipping through it a few times a week looking at random words. But I still didn't really learn. In late 2008, I started taking formal Latin classes in High School. These were simple for me, having the french background I did. So those two languages advanced each other. But I still didn't know anything of French modern culture. Until this year when I discovered Alizee. And then, I picked a lot of idioms, turns of phrase, and the like. So she helped me a bit too. And about two weeks ago, I met a guy named Riki Sanon from haiti. And he has ever increased my french skill.
Now, why does any of this matter to you? I can't really say, but I tend to rant. But anyways...
First, make sure French is what you want to learn. If it is, I highly recomend you sing along with Alizee WITHOUT looking up lyrics to her songs, french, or translated. That's what I did, I just memorised the sound patterns, and that is a much greater help to your pronunciation. It gets your mouth used to making the sounds. When I first decided to learn Korean, I just sang with the songs a lot. And it made my throat hurt
a lot. But now, it's no problem. I can sing for days on end with SNSD, Kara, whoever, without any pain in my vocal cords. Then, of corse I had to learn the alphabet, which was easy since I knew how to make the sounds. You won't have to re-learn an alphabet, which the Korean alphabet is 1000000x easier than the two Japanese alphabets, but whatever. This means going against what Chuck said, I advise you learn the pronunciation first. Reading it in your head and not knowing how to pronounce it will just confuse and unnecesarily worry you. Then, work on the simplest vocab, like pronouns, a few simple verbs (I agree 'avoir' and 'etre' are good places to start), hello, goodbye, thanks, basic stuff. Then learn the grammar. Then, take the rest of your time to learn the vocab. there's a whole lot more vocab to learn than grammar. And as long as you know how to make sentences, then any new word you learn you will already know how to use.
But that's just my way, and it may not work for you. If it doesn't don't give up. And yes, scruffy, French may not be the most useful language there is. And no, I think it's a bad idea to focus on french just to learn her songs. But I have a true passion for French anyways. Before I learned of Alizee. So, dwightks, if you feel french is the language for you, learn it. More people should be interested in learning languages, it's sad they aren't; I commend you!