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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 1 of 7 09 August 2012 at 4:16am | IP Logged | |||||
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Calling all B1/B2 lovers of French. I don't want to sound like a shill, but people interested in speaking French should check this out. It is a relatively new blog for learning advanced French at www.fluentfrenchnow.com The two latest posts include a detailed transcription of a French YouTube video, the translation and a very comprehensive technical analysis of the language used. If you want to see what spoken French sounds like and looks like on paper, you can't get any better than this.
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 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 7 09 August 2012 at 5:13am | IP Logged | |||||
That's a really nice analysis, and it covers lots of important points. You don't sound like a shill. :-) I learned a huge fraction of this stuff by listening to French speakers interact with toddlers. It sort of gradually overwhelmed and replaced the French I had learned from Assimil, even though I never studied any of it implicitly. Something else to watch out for: Spoken French is shy about using nouns for subjects. You'll see doubled subjects like Le fromage, c'est delicieux, and clefts like J'ai la tête qui turne or C'est moi qui paye. In each of these cases, the natural subject of the sentence has been moved elsewhere and a pronoun has been used instead. I'm not going to try to explain the rules, which are hard to state without getting into topic vs subject distinctions and discourse pragmatics. But it's worth noticing this stuff, even if you can't completely explain it, and giving your brain a chance to absorb it naturally. Two other really good sources for spoken French are the Buffy fan transcripts (not the official subtitles) and viedemerde.com. The latter isn't truly spoken, of course, but it tends to be much closer to casual spoken French than most materials, and it's edited for spelling. Just don't trust the verb tenses on VDM; they tend to be wobbly because of the format used for the stories. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| freakyaye Senior Member Australia Joined 4839 days ago 107 posts - 152 votes | Message 4 of 7 09 August 2012 at 2:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
Hi Emk, I always like reading your stuff about French, could you go into more detail about this if you have time? 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 5 of 7 09 August 2012 at 4:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
I haven't found much material for students on this stuff. You can find some good papers on Google Scholar if you run the following search: "spoken french" Pay special attention to anything which mentions "cleft", "discourse", "pragmatics", "topic" or "antitopic". But be careful about trusting the explanations in the papers— some of the papers are brilliant and insightful, but go a little too far. Other papers make claims that I can disprove simply by listening carefully for day or two. Just sort of flip through the papers, look at the example sentences, and don't take anything too seriously. All the linguists are really doing is collecting interesting sentences and trying to explain them. My usual strategy for learning this stuff is to pay attention, collect examples and make Anki cards. For example, here are some "fill-in-the blank" cards in Anki 2 format, gathered from various sources:
Card (5) is the best here, because it includes more context. And you need context, because a lot of the rules for these constructs involve new information versus old information, changes of topic, and other stuff that isn't visible at a sentence level. Notice that my cloze deletions (the "blanks") are usually one or two easy-to-guess words. The clozes should be easy. I'm just trying to force a little active recall in the general vicinity of the interesting words. Basically, if you find a good source of spoken French transcripts, just keep your eyes open and collect examples. Even though I'm way past the supposed "critical period" for learning a foreign language naturally, I find that my brain can still infer the rules naturally if I give it a little extra help by noticing and reviewing. And I'd like to apologize for not giving you nice, cut-and-dried rules. I don't trust my own explanations, and I only half-trust the professional explanations. So that's why I'm sharing my toolkit for learning grammar by observation. :-) 3 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 6 of 7 15 August 2012 at 3:03am | IP Logged | |||||
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If you want a written guide, there's the book Colloquial French Grammar by Rodney
Ball. From the way it's written it seems like this may have been this guy's thesis or something which was converted into a book. He analyzed tons of recordings of French people speaking naturally and noted what he observed as "rules" of spoken French. It doesn't replace tons of exposure to the language, of course, but it can be handy to get an idea of what's going on. Not cheap though. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Tsopivo Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4472 days ago 258 posts - 411 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Esperanto | Message 7 of 7 30 August 2012 at 11:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Another way to learn colloquial French would be to watch French TV. The major French channels have website were you can watch some of their shows for free though it is not always available from abroad. The major channels are : France télévisions (watch their shows online on "Pluzz"), TF1 (watch their shows online on "Replay"), Canal+ (no special category to watch their shows online but you can easily find it on their website) and M6 (watch their shows online on "M6 Replay"). This is however quite advanced and I am not sure a B1 or B2 would be able to understand that content.
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