Comments on: Learning French — Help Required

By: wwspd

wwspd — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:19:39 +0000

you know, if you’re going to learn french (or any latin based language, for that matter) it’ll be helpful to pick up latin first…

latin is extremely easy to learn for english speakers, and it really helps with french, german, spanish and the like.

By: Lymarg

Lymarg — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 04:19:08 +0000

mmm Moi, Je pense que le probleme avec le Francais ( exusez moi j’ai n’avez pas la cedille ici) est la grammaire, et le sense de ca que vouz ecrivez, que vouz parlez, c’est tres difficile .
Well, at least that’s what i think, i don’t have that big trouble with the pronunciation( Must be cause my primary language is Spanish), maybe the syntax’s, coherence of a sentence( therein lays the TRUE problem of French), I’m still studying it, but if i can be of any help, send me an e-mail. ciao

By: Tsunande

Tsunande — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 10:12:49 +0000

ehm, J’aime le chicken?

By: Beowulf Lee

Beowulf Lee — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 05:54:11 +0000

Perhaps this Wikipedia article will be useful to you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_language_acquisition

By: ale

ale — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 11:59:53 +0000

Hi darkmirage
Studied french till JC1. took french h1 mais helas je ne peux pas vous aider cos i got “C” or sth. Ah but mon professeur francais said the same thing to watch anime in French sub/dub! SERIOUSLY.
never managed to do that though… mainly cos its too gross! secondary reason is that i n’ai jamais trouve much of this kind of stuff.
oh btw im ur junior! haha ;)

By: quendidil

quendidil — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 03:02:41 +0000

Oh and for literature in easy French, L’Étranger by Albert Camus is great.

By: quendidil

quendidil — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 02:41:58 +0000

What do you plan to do with French primarily?

If your main goal is reading, try to borrow this book called “French for Reading” at NLB, it moves fairly quickly. You’ll be reading simple (but authentic) science articles for the first few chapters and move on to unadulterated literature by the end of the book, including Voltaire, Baudelaire and Pascal. It’s out of print, so you might want to photocopy it for your personal use.

There’s also this series called “French in Action” which uses the direct method (completely in French) from the first lesson to the last. There are torrents available.

For finding native speakers, you might want to try http://www.mylanguageexchange.com/. Personally, the Japanese speakers there have never replied favourably to me (either they ignore me or they are female and don’t feel safe) but I dunno about the French people.

By: incendio

incendio — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 03:49:27 +0000

To be honest IMO it’s alliance francaise. Now I haven’t taken classes there personally, this is just my impression of alliance francaise. The classes there are quite slow, and it would seem that slow classes would be a sure killer for someone of your track record.

IMO learning french was a total waste of my time. There’s hardly any exposure to it in singapore, aside from the Boisson au Soja etc that you get on packet drinks. And the worst case is, as so many people above have commented, it messes up your english.

However if you’re still keen then I can only suggest that you keep on it. http://www.viedemerde.fr (my personal favourite) is an excellent website, I only wish I had it when I was learning french. Anyway my advice would be to do what you did for japanese, just expose yourself to a lot of french. Movies, films, songs, the like.

Good luck

By: Letale

Letale — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 03:03:06 +0000

Hmm… French, I have such horrible memories of learning that language.
I learned it to near fluency and sadly I can still have a decent conversation.

The worst part is that French being my second language messed up English, my first language. Stupid Canadian immersion program teaches you all the necessary schooling (Math, Science, etc) in French from the time you’re about 6 and then suddenly you have to know everything in perfect English when you are 12.

Ah oui, vous pouvez vous sentir à quel point fort de mon amour pour la langue française est, ne peux pas vous?

By: GNdynames

GNdynames — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 20:35:36 +0000

I had to learn French while I learned English. My approach was learning the basics (conjugations and stuff), once that’s done practice by reading children’s books. You familiarize yourself with the grammar and develop your vocab then. Well, I managed to do decent using that method, but I dropped it the first chance I got.