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French beginner resources | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| london1919 Newbie United Kingdom Joined 6078 days ago 2 posts - 3 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 1 of 13 19 November 2008 at 6:16am | IP Logged | ||
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Hi all,
Been reading this forum for a while but this is my first post, have learnt lots of useful info over that time. I've decided I want to learn French, and have been listening to Michel Thomas for the last few weeks. I'm going to get Assimil's "New French With Ease" and use this as my main learning source. I'm going to need a few other things aside from that. What's the best grammar book to get for a beginner? Any other books/texts that are useful or essential? I also want to follow one of AJATT's main points of listening to massive amounts of input by using my mp3 player as often as I can. Does anyone have any useful links for podcasts/slow news bulletins etc. that would be good for a beginner? I'd probably go mad if all I used for input were the Assimil recordings. Any other useful resources? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Rich. Edited by london1919 on 19 November 2008 at 6:17am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6794 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French | Message 2 of 13 19 November 2008 at 5:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, if you want to follow AJATT's point more closely, it's listening to massive amounts of native-level input. Since anything below that is ultimately below you, I guess. As to the point of where to find material, I suppose there's a lot of movies with French audio tracks you could use. You could rip French online radio; there are lots of options at http://www.listenlive.eu/france.html and http://www.multilingualbooks.com/online-radio-french.html. Although you'd probably want to find one with more talking, since there's an obnoxious tendency to play songs in English on music stations.
As far as a grammar, although I've not used it extensively, I've seen Schaum's Outline of French Grammar mentioned elsewhere. It looks to have a lot of exercises, if you're into that. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Julie Heptaglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6911 days ago 1251 posts - 1733 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French | Message 3 of 13 20 November 2008 at 4:46am | IP Logged | ||
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You should definitely try French in Action (there are not only videos, but also recordings).
I recommand podcasts too - native ones and podcasts for French learners(e.g. frenchpod.com - I'm using it right now and I really like it). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6447 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 5 of 13 24 November 2008 at 6:50pm | IP Logged | ||
The majority of worthwhile language learning material (courses, reference grammars, dictionaries) is in English, French, or German. Secondary useful languages include Russian, Polish, Japanese, and Chinese - but they all seem to be dwarfed by French and German in this regard (and, happily, French and German are easier to learn for native English speakers). Professor Arguelles has written about this at more length. Aside from that, French and German have ridiculously large amounts of stuff worth reading, even outside of language-related material. A random example: a book I have on Georgian, a language spoken next to Russia, talks in the introduction about how most of the good reference material about the language is in.... German; there's some in Russian, but less. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6447 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 7 of 13 24 November 2008 at 7:45pm | IP Logged | ||
Necessary - no. Useful - yes. If you're aiming for polyglottery anyhow, why cut yourself off from a huge percent of the most useful material? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dmg Diglot Senior Member Canada dgryski.blogspot.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 7019 days ago 555 posts - 605 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Dutch, Esperanto | Message 8 of 13 24 November 2008 at 8:10pm | IP Logged | ||
I have Schaum's Outline of French Grammar. I'm sort of torn. It's ok as a reference grammar, although at I find more and more that it doesn't have the answers I'm looking for. I think there are better grammars for students of French out there, but since I moved on to the Bernard Pivot series of reference books (way overkill, even for natives) I've stopped looking. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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