A language learners’ forum

tastyonions wrote:

MorkTheFiddle wrote:

javier_getafe wrote:But, at this moment, I am pretty enthusiastic to reach a goal. I think it is a believable and approachable target. To reach A1 level in one year, isn't it?

If you study an hour or so a day with proper materials, then, yes, IMHO A1 in one year seems like a reasonable goal.

For a native Spanish speaker, I would say at least A2 or B1 with an hour per day would be reasonable.

For goodness sake! B1 is completely out of my head! I really like being completaly realistic about that. You only need to take into account that it took me to reach B1 certificated english level 3 years ( and, back then I began from A1, since I was a false beginner) so..., moreover, I can assure you that I worked very hard.

"État Présent
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In the sixty years since its inception, French Studies has been a leading forum for the publication of ground-breaking work and for critical debate. The editor and board members of French Studies are pleased to make this scholarship freely available - just click on the full-text links below to access the article(s) that interest you..."
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aravinda wrote:"État Présent
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In the sixty years since its inception, French Studies has been a leading forum for the publication of ground-breaking work and for critical debate. The editor and board members of French Studies are pleased to make this scholarship freely available - just click on the full-text links below to access the article(s) that interest you..."
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These all appear to be in English.

rdearman wrote:These all appear to be in English.

Yes, most of them are in English unfortunately, but there are a few in French. For example:
Les Études sur les femmes écrivains du XVIe siècle français
Écritures du voyage à la Renaissance
Also, there're some articles on French verse, French syntax etc which of course are very academic. There's even an article on Obscenity in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France!

There was a lovely tune on the radio this morning that turned out to be by a french composer: Pavane Opus 50 by Gabriel Fauré.

An alternate source for French g r a d e d native input:

https://www.ilini.com/learn-french

Carmody wrote:An alternate source for French g r a d e d native input:

https://www.ilini.com/learn-french

Ilini looks to be a useful resource. Have you tried it yourself? Although Xenops mentioned it August of last year, and DaveBee and Issemiyaki in August 2017, they don't expand on their experiences with it.

The Ilini site offers beginner, intermediate and advanced levels of videos, though they are relatively short, under 10 minutes. A few of them are songs. Each video has French subtitles. Subtitles in English are available, too, somehow. The subject matter of the videos is topical and covers news and culture, music, entertainment and "ideas." A visitor can view only three per month, but a free account allows watching two more videos per month. There are two paid accounts (https://www.ilini.com/en/pricing). $5.99 per month gives you unlimited views of videos plus online quizzes, vocabulary storage, and flashcards. $9.99 per month gives unlimited access, all the benefits of the $5.99 per month membership, plus pdf exercises. The three videos I watched had mostly accurate subtitles, and to my ears the advanced dialogue did indeed sound advanced with language of the sort that you might hear real French people saying.

The site looks a lot like what I remember of Yabla, and it looks promising, though IMHO a bit scanty in videos on offer. Certianly 5 videos a month are not going to help many people improve, so the $5.99 membership is necessary to get real value from the site. So I guess I can give one month a shot. There is a 10-day free trial period, and I am going to test out the $5.99 membership.

I'll let you all know how it turns out.

Edit to add: I will report my findings in a new log: https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=10087&p=132909#p132909

I have a tip for beginner/intermediate people to get more French reading in. So recently I got the idea to watch the America drama You from lifetime (surprisingly good considering that it's on lifetime) with the original English audio with French subs. Of course just doing that bothered me so I wrote down words/phrases down in English as I watched whenever there were French words on the screen I didn't know that I wanted to know. Writing the French words down is just not practical because there are accent marks and I'm not used to French spelling and I do not pause the episode to write the words down. Then I ran the episode through subs2srs and filter the lines using the list of words/phrases I had. I then took the French dialogue from the .tsv file that was generated and ran it through deepl and reverse context so I have more stuff to reference while doing anki reviews. Then I import the .tsv into anki without the audio field ( I don't need the video file of the episode since I'm only trying to grab the dialogue in the English subtitles and the corresponding lines in the French subtitles. However you have to enter a video or audio file longer than 45 minutes for subs2srs to run.). Also I do not use the default anki settings (it's set so good cards are pushed out 5 days and easy cards are pushed over 7 days and I have only 1 step of 2400). I am aware of the limitations of this since there's no French audio involved here and because I just mass generated cards off subs2rs using subtitles.

I definitely think as a beginner this activity is more productive than watching some show in French with no subs... I plan on doing activities that involve reading and listening after I learn more words. I have no desire to watch American shows dubbed in French so all I have in mind is French stuff with transcripts...

The advantage of this is that I get words in sentences or phrases that I want to learn, I have context, the sentences are sometimes are very fun, I get to learn from dialogue (I absolutely prefer learning from dialogue when I'm a beginner/intermediate over articles. I just have no motivation trying to remember stuff that I will never hear anyone say. It's one of the many reasons why I don't care for duolingo. Also the idea of learning a bunch of words by category is absolutely unappealing to me.), and the anki cards are relatively easy to generate. I generated like 500 cards watching 5 episodes and it took 15 minutes?? As I do my reviews I mercilessly suspend cards if there are any cards that are too easy, redundant, or whatever other reason. This activity is a form of multi-tasking in a way. I would've watched this show with no subs or English subs anyway if I hadn't thought to try this. However, I definitely won't do this with every American drama I watch since some of them are more demanding to watch.

Bonjour et salut

I'm new here, I learnt a bit of French in primary school and did a semester of it in college. Recently, I've been told that I have to become fluent-ish in French for a job, so here I am.

The resources I have so far are:
Duolingo
Memrise
Rosetta Stone
The Great Courses
Pimsleur
Miche Thomas
Paul Noble
Podcasts
Harry Potter

So far I'm only using Duo, TTC and Paul Noble, I'm trying to figure out a schedule that lets me use all of them, given that I only have 2 hours a day to practice.

iwanttolearn wrote:So far I'm only using Duo, TTC and Paul Noble, I'm trying to figure out a schedule that lets me use all of them, given that I only have 2 hours a day to practice.

Easy: just work on one or at most a few at a time, move onto others when you're finished, and maybe skip the ones that overlap too much. Working through lots of courses in parallel that cover the same ground seems a little crazy, although two hours per day is plenty for a beginner and many would argue that if you have that much time it'll be more interesting and effective to split it between two or three resources rather than slogging through several lessons of one.

I'd drop Rosetta Stone as it's universally considered awful and in any case it's redundant with all the other and better courses on your list, and to plan more effectively perhaps separate the other resources into beginner-level (Pimsleur, MT, Paul Noble), intermediate material that will be much more useful once you're past the beginner stage (podcasts, Harry Potter), and things that are accessories to other study rather than comprehensive courses in themselves (Duolingo, Memrise). I've never heard of The Great Courses so I'm not sure where that fits in.

I'll leave it to the real "course experts" to suggest which order could be most effective, but in my opinion what you have in your list is more than enough to learn the basics. You might just want something to help bridge the gap between the basics and "real" language like Harry Potter and podcasts and TV; Assimil is a good course for that (and is highly recommended in general, but I don't think it's the most appropriate for absolute beginners), and learner-oriented podcasts are helpful too. But you can worry about that when you come to it.