Archive for August, 2010
August 29th, 2010
A total of eleven numbers were included in the English version of the last post, four of them being ordinals, and seven, numerals. So many numbers in such a short message prove that the knowledge of numbers in French is not only useful, but indispensable.
See you soon
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August 22nd, 2010
Spelling, syntax, vocabulary, and the use of the words : the three following sites will help you to write impeccable French, whether to translate or to compose directly in Molière’s language.
Office québécois de la langue française
The home page of the Office québécois de la langue française (Quebec’s Office for the French language) contains many resources including Le grand dictionnaire terminologique (The Large Terminological Dictionary), a repository of linguistic troubleshooting help, a virtual library, and loads of interesting links. You will also find a section of language games and many specialized or bilingual glossaries. http://www.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/
Termium Plus
Termium Plus is a bilingual English-French website containing a Spanish section as well. It is the Government of Canada’s terminology and linguistic data bank specialized in translation and interpreting. This site’s French section contains among other things Les clefs du français pratique (The Keys to Practical French), ConjugArt (The Art of Conjugation), an analogical dictionary to find French equivalents of hard to translate English terms, and an invaluable co-occurrences dictionary giving the list of adjectives and verbs suitable for a given noun. http://www.termium.com/
Trésor de la langue française informatisé
This web site provides a spellchecker. Enter a word as you pronounce it, without accents or hyphen to get its correction and a comprehensive definition with its etymology and history, its pronunciation and even statistics of its use. http://atilf.atilf.fr/tlf.htm
Have a good week !
August 18th, 2010
To learn how to count in French, it is necessary to learn the names of numbers. This essential vocabulary is very useful in everyday life. Time, money, addresses and phone numbers are only a few examples where the knowledge of numbers is obligatory.
Numbers and Their Pronunciation
The first site has five parts. It includes all the numbers from 1 to 100 and some examples of numbers up to one billion. The MP3 files will allow you to hear and to memorize correctly their pronunciation. Remember that it is strongly recommended to repeat each word several times to pronounce them correctly.
http://french.about.com/od/vocabulary/ss/numbers.htm
Cardinal & Ordinal Numbers
The second site presents a list of cardinal and ordinal numbers. Even though the old style vocabulary for the numbers above 70 is given, we recommend that you learn only the first of the two terms shown. This is the one which is accepted in International French and which is used in most of the French-speaking world.
http://www.girouard.org/cgi-bin/page.pl?file=numbers&n=3
A Fun Quizz
To reward you for having thoroughly studied the vocabulary of these two previous websites, we offer you as a third and last site a quizz allowing you to evaluate your new knowledge while having fun.
http://french.lovetoknow.com/index.php?title=Numbers_in_French_Quiz&ref=87154&hdnStartLimit=0
See you soon.
P.S. Circle all the numbers included in this message. Answer next week.