Skip to main content

Learning the language of love - useful links for learning French

By
I always wanted to learn French. I think this desire appeared when I was still a teenager. Why? Because I like the way it sounds, because it's a romantic language, and besides I had a goal to learn to speak English, German and French. When I got married my husband and I led a home group where we had two young people whose mother tongue was French. It was funny how much I could understand because I already spoke English and German. Listening to them talking to each other made me crazy, I wanted to be able to understand everything and to speak it just as fluently as they did!

So when my daughter was 8 months old my journey started. I decided to study French by myself using the Internet. And I found lots of really good resources there!

So, here are some quite useful links that have helped me and hopefully will be useful to you if you decide to learn this increadibly beautiful language:
FrancaisFacile.com - an absolutely fabulous website with tests and tons of excercises on various topics and grammar issues.
TV5Monde - when I just started learning French I wanted to get used to the rythm of speech, so I watched the news on TV5 Monde every single day. I chose to watch the news because I watch them in Russian anyway, so I more or less know general topics that are going to be covered in each issue.
Telequebec - I just ran across this TV channel recently and I love the cartoons there. They are in easy French and I understand absolutely everything!
TCF - it's a great website with exercises that help people prepare for an internationally recognized exam in French called TCF. I find the exercises there very useful.
French.about.com is a wonderful website where you can get 10 free lessons for beginners (it took me about a week to cover one lesson, so be prepared for lots of information!) and overall it's just a wealth of useful information in French and about learning French + there's a forum where you can train yourself and communicate with French speakers. And they have great audios!

But as I continued my studies I realized that this Internet-based learning process lacked one essential part - a system. Without it, I got a lot of knowledge but as there was no structure I kept stuck on the basic level. So I started looking for textbooks. After trying several not too good textbooks I'd quit the learning process, and then after a few months I'd gather all my strength to start all over again. The vicious circle went round and round: I would resume the studies, come to the point when I realized that I really needed a more structured approach and then I'd quit and get angry and disappointed. This summer I finally made the decision to reach at least the upper-intermediate level by winter, and the Lord has heard me! I finally found a great book that was initially published in 1950s and had the structure that is the easiest for me to "digest". Thanks to it, I finally seem to get the feel of this wonderful language.

Another important step for me was that my friends who I mentioned at the beginning of this post agreed to speak to me in French! They live in Montreal, Canada, now so we meet over Skype. =) The first time we had a conversation they had to write almost everything they said to me. That's how bad I was at oral comprehension after almost a year when I didn't study any French because I thought it was beyond my capabilities! Now I'm slowly getting better. I had to make a break in my Skype lessons for a while, but I will resume them as soon as I can.

So I hope that one day I'll be able to say that I speak French fluently. This will be a happy day =) By the way, if you know of any good resources that I could use, you are more than welcome to recommend them to me!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

10 interesting facts about the Russian language

By
In my previous post  I promised to follow with the  interesting info about some other languages. So here are 10 facts about the Russian language which might be of interest to those who are studying it. If you would like to have this list in Russian, please contact me and I will send it to you by email. So, what do I find interesting about my native language? 1. Russian has about 500,000 words, but only 2,000-2,500 of them are used frequently. 100 most frequently used words make 20% of all written and oral speech. A high school graduate's vocabulary usually has 1,500 to 4,000 words. Those who have graduated from a higher educational institution normally have a richer vocabulary consisting of approximately  8,000 words. 2. It's compulsory for all astronauts in the international space station to learn Russian, so we can call it an international language of space :)
8 comments
Read more

15 interesting facts about the English language

By
I prepared this list for one of my English classes. And then it dawned on me that I can share it with you, too! So here are 15 facts about the English language that I find very interesting. Hope you do, too ;) Rudyard Kipling was fired as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner. His dismissal letter said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Kipling, but you just don't know how to use the English language. This isn't a kindergarten for amateur writers." No language has more synonyms than English.
11 comments
Read more

Clients vs translators: how do we show that we're honest?

By
This is a personal post, and I'd really like to hear the opinion of my colleagues about such situations and how to deal with them. My situation is kind of like the one described in Mox's blog . In December a new prospective client wrote to me asking about my availabiility for a new project. When I read the overall description of the project, I got really interested in it. But the client needed to know exactly how much time it would take and how much it would cost. No problem, just send me the text to look through or a part of it so I could get the gist of the style, level of complexity etc. In the reply that person just stated the wordcount, but there was no sample. I thought, maybe they didn't understand me. English is not my native language after all. In my reply, I stated the estimated time and cost based on the client's wordcount, but I repeated the request to see a part of the text. And then the person thanked me and ... disappeared.
17 comments
Read more