Do you want to learn the spoken language or do you just want to be able to read it? French spelling is arguably even worse than English: very low correlation between sounds and letters. In some words half the letters are silent. To make it worse, sometimes you pronounce the last letter in a word and sometimes you don't, depending on the sounds in the following word. If you only want to learn to speak French and understand speech I would strongly recommend that you stick with oral lessons and don't concentrate too much on the written language. It can drive you crazy. Furthermore, French grammar is much more complicated in writing, precisely because of all those silent letters. Je parle--"I speak", tu parles--"you speak", ils parlent--"they speak." You have to learn to write three different versions of the verb; but when spoken they all sound alike!
I want to be able to read and speak both. I think just being able to speak and not being able to read and write is odd! English is not my first language but I really don't have problem with the dictation. But french seems to be super hard in that area, but I try my best.
