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Posts Tagged ‘Learn French fast’

With the arrival of spring, many of us want to be on the move and are actively preparing for their holiday. For those planning to visit a French speaking country this summer, we selected a few sites to initiate you in French, and French for travelers websites that will surely be useful.

The following language method is a courtesy of Learnissimo. It includes illustrated phrasebooks, audio, and quizzes to test your skills while having fun. This method, based on everyday French, is perfectly suited to travel and will allow you to learn essential vocabulary as well as correct pronunciation.

http://www.loecsen.com/travel/discover.php?lang=fr&to_lang=3

Travlang also offers language courses especially designed for travel. You must initially select your native language, then the one you wish to learn. The French course is accompanied by audio files in standard and Quebec French . The vocabulary is divided into the following pages: Basic Words, Shopping and Dining, Travel, Directions, Places, and finally Time and Dates. At the bottom of each page, there is a quiz to test your knowledge.

http://www.travlang.com/languages/index.html

About’s Laura K. Lawless offers French travel lessons in a newsletter you receive over six weeks. She covers topics such as: Travel Vocabulary, Accommodation, Airport, Directions, Emergency! , Shopping, Ailments, Banking and Money, Restaurant and Transportation. You may also have direct access to all these lessons by clicking on a link that appears on the following page: http://french.about.com/c/ec/22.htm

Have a good trip!

French and English have hundreds of cognates (words which look and/or are pronounced alike in the two languages), including true (similar meanings), semi-false (somewhat similar and somewhat different meanings) and false (different meanings), known in French as « faux amis », i.e false friends. One of the most common mistakes made by English-speaking learners is to assume that an English word that looks like an French word means the same thing in both languages. That’s why we are pleased to offer you today three links to help you to detect these false friends who are so deceptive in appearance.

Mount Holyoke College : Faux amis (false cognates). This page shows a list of « false friends » in a 4 column table. The first column contains the English words to translate, the second, the French false cognate whose meaning is given in 3rd column. The last column shows the correct translation of the English word. http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/lhuughe/FR201/TP/5TPFauxamis.html

French.about. com : false cognates. You will find here a 4-page list of the most common false cognates in French and English in French alphabetical order. http://french.about.com/cs/vocabulary/a/falsecognates.htm

Villemin Gérard.fr : Faux amis (false cognates).  There is a table of 4 columns on this page. The first column contains the French meaning of the English false friend; the second, the English false friend itself; the third, the corresponding French false friend and the last column, the meaning of this word in English. http://villemin.gerard.free.fr/Langue/FauxAmis.htm

Amicalement,

The Bon Français’ team.

This week we will focus on the main difficulties faced by advanced learners who, like native French  speakers are not always flawless. We will also see a list of common mistakes en français as well as a quiz on them to have fun while reviewing.

French.about. com : mistakes- advanced. Top 10 advanced French mistakes made by students. Find clear explanations about : Rythm, À vs de, De, du, de la, or des?, Verbs with prepositions, C’est vs il est, Le facultatif, Indefinite french, Impersonal French, Reflexive vs object pronouns and Agreement. http://french.about.com/od/mistakes/a/advanced.htm

French.about. com : French mistake of the week. This page displays a long alphabetical list of common French mistakes analyzed by Laura K. Lawless, to aid your learning. http://french.about.com/od/mistakeoftheweek/French_Mistake_of_the_

Week.htm

French.about. com : French mistake of the week – test. This page provides a test on the most common errors in French in four different versions: 25, 50, 75 and 100 questions. Explanations are provided with answers. http://french.about.com/library/weekly/bl-mistakest.htm

Next week we will see why some friends are unsavoury

See you soon

Always with the goal to help you learn French quickly, we now offer three links that will save you time because they tell you what mistakes you are more likely to commit in French. They also give you all the explanations needed to help you immediately. This week, we examine the major errors associated with beginner, intermediate and upper intermediate levels.

French.about. com : mistakes- beginning. Top ten French mistakes made by beginning-level students.  Find clear explanations and quizzes about : gender, accents marks, to be, contractions, French H, que, auxiliary verbs, tu and vous,  capitalization,  and the famous word cettes… that does not exist. http://french.about.com/od/mistakes/a/beginning.htm

French.about. com : mistakes- intermediate. Top ten French mistakes made by intermediate-level students.  Find clear explanations about : y and en, manquer, le passé (past), agreement, faux amis, relative pronouns, temporal prepositions, depuis and il y a, « ce homme » étrange, and finally pronominal verbs and reflexive pronouns. http://french.about.com/od/mistakes/a/intermediate.htm

French.about. com : mistakes- high intermediate. Common French mistakes made by high-intermediate-level students. Find clear explanations about : se and soi, encore vs toujours, what, ce que, ce qui, ce dont, ce à quoi, si clauses, final letters, subjunctive, negation, and two or more verbs. http://french.about.com/od/mistakes/a/intermediate_3.htm

Continuation and end of the subject next week.

See you soon!

When starting to learn French, it is always a good idea to memorize the most common words first. This will enable you to understand many more situations than if you were leaning your French vocabulary from random sources.  The three sites that we present today, although different from each other, are all aiming to help you build a really useful vocabulary that allows you to quickly reach an operational level in French.

French Language Daily : Most Common Words. Here’s the list of the 1000 most common French words along with their English translations. The first page also includes audio files. You can use the word index at the bottom of the page to jump to any part of the frequency list. http://french.languagedaily.com/wordsandphrases/most-common-words

Fr.wiktionary.org : Liste des 1750 mots français les plus courants (list of the 1750 most common French words). According to the Academy of Amiens, these words are typically known by a 4 year old child. Words are grouped by themes such as class and school, cooking and food, animals, party, time, home and outings. http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionnaire:Liste_de_1750_mots_français_les_plus_courants

French.About.com : Most Common Words : Here are the 100 most common French words accompanied by their English translation, grammatical notes, examples of the way they are used and quizzes. http://french.about.com/od/vocabulary/ss/mostcommonwords.htm

See you next week.

Today we would like to give you tips, tricks and advice to help you learn French. The three proposed sites are from people sharing their experience as second or foreign language learners with you, or from publishers specialized in the field of language teaching. You will definitely find in these lists of suggestions something to inspire you and make your work easier.

Ask Oxford.com : Language Learning Tips. Oxford dictionaries provide you with a dozen great tips aiming to help you learn a new language effectively and make the most of the whole experience. http://www.askoxford.com/languages/takeoffin/language_tips/

Language Learning Tips.com : Here on David Bolton’s site, you will find lots of free articles with  helpful suggestions as to how you can acquire a foreign language faster and more efficiently, and thus make language learning more pleasurable.  In addition, there are essays on how to get the most out of a trip abroad with the goal of perfecting your language skills. You can even download a free E-book that contains ALL the articles in convenient PDF book format! http://www.language-learning-tips.com/

The Language Learning Blog : 25 Tips for Language Learning. You will find on this page creative tips and tricks easy to incorporate into everyday life to help you effectively learn a new language in a pleasurable way. http://thelanguagelearningblog.com/25-tips-for-language-learning/

Have a nice week.

Bonjour!

Have you ever added to your list of favourite sites or to the toolbar of your browser the best links to online dictionaries, spell-checkers and translators?  As in all things, to learn French fast or improve your command of French as a second or foreign language, you need to have quick access to the best tools available on the Internet if you also want to get the best results.

To help you achieve that, we recommend that you visit the following sites where you will be able to adopt or update your current selection of useful online dictionaries.  Each of these sites will help quickly and freely access definitions, grammar rules and language examples.  This will in turn speed up your progress in French, be it by enhancing your vocabulary or else, improving your reading skills or the way you express yourself in writing in French.

Here are our suggestions for good and useful online dictionaries:

http://dictionary.reverso.net/ A whole box of language tools (numerous dictionaries, translators, spell-checkers, etc.).  By far our favorite resource!

http://www.wordreference.com/ Fast access to an online translator and several bilingual or multilingual dictionaries.

http://www.lingvozone.com/ Dictionaries, translators, stock phrases, flashcards and a lot more.  

Do you know of any other first-class language tool?  If yes, then we want to hear from you.  Please write to let us know of your resources.  Your help is always much appreciated.

Bonjour

Let’s go back to the articles I discussed on February 18.  In one of them, the author stresses the importance of having penpals while learning a second language.  The author also talks about the importance of including cultural elements in learning French, as one would to learn any other languages.  Great!  Yet, only one link is later embedded in the article leading to a method to learn French fast . . . for which you have to pay, of course!

This is, unfortunately, a current practice on the web these days.  We have, on the contrary, chosen in this blog, Bonfrancais.com and at its brother site http://www.gofrenchgo.com to list only free quality resources, the very best that we know exist on the web.  Why?  Because it is common knowledge that ready-made language learning methods generally end up on the shelves after only the first few lessons, that is, when the novelty starts to fade.

Learning how to carefully choose from the legion of resources freely offered on the web will help you keep your interest high, while continuing your progress in French without having to spend a lot of money.  It is, however, only possible if you can find what you are looking for rapidly and effectively.  It is also where our expertise, which we so happily share with you, comes into play.  Visit and re-visit us often as to make your learning experience simultaneously more pleasant and successful.

To find what you need to learn French fast, the second site I would suggest you to visit is http://www.francaisfacile.com/.

Their user-friendly homepage menu covers a wide variety of exercises, tests, courses and activities in French that are well developed and rich in content.  Here is another example of an excellent site to help you learn French which does not make it to the top of the list in a Google search.  Worse, it is not even included in the first 60 results.

Bonjour

If learning French or bettering the French language is one of the resolutions that you took at the beginning of the year, now is the time to get to work, get started and get results.

If you are a beginner, you must logically start with an easy-to-follow online course and commit to it . . . now.  And, yes, you can find the time… that precious and fleeting thing that we seem to be all running after!  No more excuses, please!

No more procrastination. First, go to Google and type in “Free Online beginner French courses”. And what will you get? About 139,000,000 entries.  You typed in the word “courses,” remember?

To make your life easier, we have done some of the leg work for you. About the first three online resources suggested by Google:

1^st site: www.lsfrench.com/beginners2.html – Yes, there is material for beginners here, although the site contains mainly vocabulary lists of and interactive online exercises.  This material is really useful, but we are not yet talking of a “real” online course.

2^nd site: http://www.word2word.com/coursead.html#french  - Here’s a great place to start from if you want to have an overview of the variety of free courses available online.   You are a few clicks away from finding what you have been looking for, perhaps.

3^rd site: http://www.frenchassistant.com/ – A great place where you can find free online French lessons.  You will be asked to register and you will have to get familiar with the environment before taking advantage of the free high-quality French material you have access to. And you will also need to pay for sound after a 14 days free trial period. Ahum…

And so it goes… But are these the sites an experienced French teacher would recommend to beginners with little time to spare? Not likely…