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Beginning French - 2013 TAC - Team PaX | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 33 of 64 02 January 2013 at 3:32pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
The French future tenses are actually pretty easy for English speakers. Basically, there's two of them:
For now, you can just use the futur proche. To form it, use the present tense of aller and tack on an infinitive. This is pretty much just like English. The futur simple, oddly enough, is the more complicated of the two. But it's still pretty simple. For this one, you'll need to find the "future stem", which is normally just the infinitive minus any final "-e". (Sometimes the future stem is different. For example, aller uses ir- as the stem, and acheter uses achèter-. But these exceptions tend to be really common, so you can learn them mostly by osmosis if you're so inclined.) Then you need to add an ending. And just to make your life easier, there's an easy way to remember the futur simple endings. Just take the present tense of the verb avoir and strip off "av-" wherever it appears:
So this gives us:
I know this all sounds a little complicated now, but don't worry, it won't take you very long when you get around to it. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4689 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 34 of 64 02 January 2013 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Nice. Are you writing for Assimil now? The resemblance is uncanny! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 35 of 64 02 January 2013 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Well, I learned French from Assimil New French with Ease about 5 years ago, so maybe something stuck after all that time. :-) In general, French verbs are easier than they look, and there's lots of little tricks you can use. For example:
In general, once you learn a verb's past participle, its future stem, and its imperfect stem, everything else is easy. And those stems tend be regular except for a few dozen really common verbs, so you can basically just learn the rule and pick up the exceptions as you go. Once you get the present tense down, the other tenses get a lot easier. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5392 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 36 of 64 02 January 2013 at 8:45pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I learned once from a teacher that the future and conditional were once like the passé
composé until the auxilary verbs migrated from before the verb to be hooked on to the end of the verb. That was pretty mind-blowing for a lot of us. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 37 of 64 03 January 2013 at 11:45am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I'm sure I remember Michel Thomas saying something similar as well, about how the future started by using avoir as an auxiliary verb, which is why the future endings correspond to the present-tense forms of avoir. It's an interesting perspective. All that said though, I'm fairly sure the OP just made a statement about not feeling ready for the future tense yet, not a request for explanations of it, and understandably so as it's not really as important as most of the other verb forms for spoken French - even when talking about a future event, the present or near-future is used the vast majority of the time, apart from in some specific grammatical structures. Edited by garyb on 03 January 2013 at 11:54am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| fezmond Groupie Korea, South Joined 4927 days ago 72 posts - 78 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, French | Message 38 of 64 14 January 2013 at 6:54am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Wow, it's been a long time since I updated this log. Life just gets in the way sometimes.
About to start lesson 36 of Assmil NFWE. I had a look over some earlier lessons, mostly the late teens and realised how much I've simply forgotten or don't fully understand. However, some of the later lessons went well. Maybe it's all due to them being fresh in the mind. One thing I've really neglected lately has been listening and trying to shadow the lesson audio. Less free time and being stuck on buses makes me feel strange when I'm speaking to myself. I've started French Without Toil too. Did the first week and it was pretty easy, I've heard the grammar complexity increases at a more rapid rate than NFWE. Left pimsleur for a while and hit the Michel Thomas, nearly finished the course and it's proven to be pretty useful for basic grammar. I have Le Lotus Bleu but have yet to really dig into it, I fear too much time will be spent poking around in a dictionary and working out what's going on rather than enjoying the book. Maybe for another day. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Quique Diglot Senior Member Spain cronopios.net/Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4683 days ago 183 posts - 313 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: French, German | Message 39 of 64 14 January 2013 at 12:01pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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The plot of Le Lotus Bleu is pretty sophisticated; when I read it as a kid I probably didn't understand everything that was going on. Other Tintin books are simpler.
I've only read a Smurfs book so far, and the plots were really simple, you won't have any problem following them. It didn't have as many new words as a Tintin book, but it still had quite a bunch. For grown-ups they don't seem as enjoyable as Tintin, but I intend to read still some more Smurfs books. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| fezmond Groupie Korea, South Joined 4927 days ago 72 posts - 78 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, French | Message 40 of 64 15 January 2013 at 4:23pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I saw tastyonions made a log of his first two weeks of the TAC, I think it's a good
idea so here goes: Assimil NFWE: lessons 29 - 38 Assimil FWT: lessons 1 - 7 I write all the lessons out by hand, seems to stick in my head more, could be a bad idea. Pimsleur II - lessons 3 - 6 Linguaphone All Talk - units 1 & 2 Michel Thomas CDs 4-7 (beginner) French In Action - Units 2/3 of the workbook and textbook Countless RFI Facile but I'm not usually listening too intently, nice when I understand new words though. Also got Anki back on track last night. Hopefully the next 2 weeks will be more productive and I hope to start writing and possibly speaking in French too. Prepositions are still kicking my behind though. I changed my web browser to French today, will see how that works. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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