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Can anyone suggest a good French course? | ||
Tags: Language Program | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| SlickAs Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5883 days ago 185 posts - 287 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, French, Swedish Studies: Thai, Vietnamese | Message 9 of 11 16 December 2008 at 10:07pm | IP Logged | ||
I don't know about FSI for a beginner. Now, I must say that I never open the book on the FSI, and I think that is why I dont find it boring. My friend lent me his Barrons FSI when I was an intermediate learner. But it was too hard for me. I could not "hear" the words properly. It was spoken too fast, I didn't have the vocab and comprehension. I would have needed to "read along", and that would have been so mind numbingly boring that I was never going to do it. I gave it back to him. I came back to it with fleuncy in French, and gave the whole thing a listen to once over (and there is like 60 hours of it) while doing other things (like driving, or walking, or doing the dishes) over a month or 2. And I felt it helped enormously. Because it found little problems in my French that had become fossilised, and everyone could understand me regardless, and I was not being corrected. Especially when you are learning from colloquial French, and they shorten sentences and leave out sounds, you stop hearing them. Like when you are used to speaking and hearing regular spoken French where they say: "Chu pas la" instead of "Je ne suis pas la" or "ye pas la" for "il n'est pas la" and any number of other shortenings of pronouns and prepositions, you get to think that getting it perfect is unimportant. Same as Australians (or Brits or Irish) might say "Gi's'a Coke, please" instead of "Give us (me) a can of coca-cola, please". (I heard a New Zealander in Honduras say "Gi's'a pollo frito, por favor", and the locals mistaked "Gi's'a" for "Quisiera" (I would like), and the whole sentence made sense: I would like to have some fried chicken please.) But with FSI forcing you to get the language right, by making you try to come up with it yourself, then giving you the correct to immitate, finds problems in your french although you just purr along for 80% of the time on autopilot. Just forcing you to speak it correctly where you say to yourself "nope, I have that wrong ... this is important, and I have not even been hearing it correctly, they are not mincing their vowels because they are lazy, there is an important point here ..." And I dont find it boring at all, as long as you are doing something else at the same time. No more boring than listening to classical music, say you had to listen to the complete works of Beethoven, you would want to be doing something else at the same time. Most of it you can just turn your brain off and follow the exercises changing their sentences and saying it out aloud while changing lanes to make sure you don't miss your exit, etc, but from about unit 7 or so, it starts getting hard in places even if it were in English. Like getting your pronouns right. In exercises, the program will have you replace all nouns with pronouns. The recording says: "Did the actrice throw the ball to her brother in the kitchen?" and you have to say "Yes, she threw him it there" Then the recording says: "Did the the nurse drive her father to the train station?" How do you change all them to pronouns? That uses your mind in a creative way. The answer is "Yes, she drove him there". It is kind of a tricky puzzle in English, but really stretches you in your foreign language, especially French where you have je, vous, nous, tu, il, elle, ils, elles, lui, leur, me, te, vos, nos, votre, toi, moi, soi, notre, y, en, la, le, les, etc, etc and not only do you have to shift tenses, conjugate the verb to the right person, you also have to put all the right ones in the right holes to represent the right thing and get the liasons all right all in that small space of time they give you before he starts speaking over you with the answer ... it is challenging, and you have to really concentrate. Then it will get easy again for a 5 or 7 hours until you come across another hole in your understanding and "I cant drive in peak hour traffic and give this the concentration it needs both at once ... I will have to stop it and come back to it when I can just be walking in the park alone in silence to give it my all ..." I like it because it forces you through the parts of the language that you don't use much in conversational French, it is easy to speak around it, but are important for mastery. It will force you to get your imperative tense right for example. There is no going around it, you listen to the whole thing. Frankly, I can not imagine learning from this as a beginner, or sitting there with the book reading it along with the audio without having to create it yourself. But how anyone who is not fluent can do somenthing like that from lesson 8 or so is beyond me. I think some of the other suggestions in this thread are better for the beginner. There is no need to speak it perfectly when you start, but rather to just make fast progress and get to "native mateirals" (i.e. web-sites written by native French, magazines, books, films, etc.) as fast as possible. Once you have the language in some sort of shape, FSI is to force you through all the little problems and weaknesses you have created yourself in the language by putting it together so quickly. In my opinion, FSI is best for an advanced student, and sould only be done without the book. Edited by SlickAs on 17 December 2008 at 6:13am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| COF Senior Member United States Joined 5837 days ago 262 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English* | Message 10 of 11 22 December 2008 at 9:10am | IP Logged | ||
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Can anyone tell me how good the Assimil French course is, and how does it compare to
other commonly available methods on the market such as Colloquial and Teach Yourself. The basic structure of a Colloquial and TY book is to start off with a conversational dialogue both written in the book and spoken on the audio, and then the individual words are given in a vocabulary list below with their meanings in English next to them, then below that explanations are given for alien grammatical points and a few verb conjugations. Is the structure of Assimil courses much the same as what I have described? Thanks 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| MattNickson Newbie United States Joined 5827 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes | Message 11 of 11 23 December 2008 at 6:47am | IP Logged | ||
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thnx i tooo was searchin for a gd french course ....i'll look up for the ones told .
XD Check Grammar, Spelling or Style and Enhance It! English Writing Software 1 person has voted this message useful |
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