s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish
| Message 17 of 19 30 April 2010 at 2:33pm | IP Logged |
I'm of the same opinion as Cainntear. Why learn a language for the sole purpose of learning other languages when there is already a wealth of materials available in your native language? French is a wonderful language--I'm biased--but to make a huge effort to learn it as vehicle to learn other languages requires some serious thought.
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chalokun Tetraglot Groupie FranceRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5475 days ago 58 posts - 55 votes Speaks: French, Spanish*, English, Japanese
| Message 18 of 19 27 May 2010 at 5:14pm | IP Logged |
onebir wrote:
"Are better and broader resources available in French or German?"
"Just my guess: French would be more useful for African languages..."
Apart from African languages, there are quite a lot of French resources for SE Asian languages (eg Burmese, Thai), Arabic, Persian & central Asian languages (published by INALCO) plus the huge Assimil series.
"I've noticed that the French usually have the best materials for learning languages"
I'm not sure this is true. I'm a recent convert to Assimil, but quite a lot of the French material I've seen strikes me as user-unfriendly. (But perhaps that's partly because my French isn't great.) |
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user-unfriendly:that must be true as a consequence that studies in france are much more structural than empirical & they stressed the structure of the object you're studying:we can talk of ontologicals models opposed to hermeneuticals ones....the asset is that you are way much precise in the things you want to learn because they explain you the true nature of things & not just the way things works.....i agree this could be very difficult when you start(I think of let's say thai method of the inalco)but it is the only way of really advancing :not giving you rules(grammar) but explaining you trends(linguistics)...
Edited by chalokun on 27 May 2010 at 5:18pm
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FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6868 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French
| Message 19 of 19 28 May 2010 at 1:34pm | IP Logged |
I would agree, French learning materials for other languages are amongst the best
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