I started attending a local, monthly session of French music over a year ago (playing mandolin as I find it easier to pick up single melody lines quickly on that instrument than on guitar). Problem was, even though I got to grips with a new tune fairly quickly during the session, the moment I got in the car to go home - no memory of them remained!

I took a Zoom H2 along to one session , which was a help, but what really helped was the session organiser emailing me a PDF of the dots for the core session tunes. This reminded me of what the tunes were and helped me to learn them and practice them at home. As has been said above, the "feel" of the tunes comes from the playing of them in the session, and the dots help you to get started and to practice away from the session.

Reading Standard Notation can be daunting if you started, as I did, to play by ear. I have a good ear, which got in the way of reading music at first, then I started doing song arrangements for other people. This forced me to get to grips with the mysteries of notation - mysteries which grew less with time and patience.