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Starting off in French

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22 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3  Next >>
diplomaticus
Newbie
United States
Joined 3725 days ago

23 posts - 31 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: German

 
 Message 1 of 22
10 April 2015 at 4:20am | IP Logged 
There are more suggestions for ways to study French on this site than there are grains
of sand in the Sahara. I hope you can all forgive me adding one to the list. It seems
people get the most help when laying out their goals when asking for help, and I tried
to do due diligence first.

I am used to the ILR table as that is what my girlfriend learned and had her German
judged on. I'd like to eventually get to 3/3/3 for reading, speaking, and listening in
French. This appears to equate to C1, which is quite a row to hoe. No rush. I get
that these things take time.

If I can reliably give 2 hours to French study every weekday and 3 to 4 both weekend
days, how far can I get by the end of July? I have some personal and professional
commitments that kick in then, and my available study time may drastically decrease.
That is ~15 weeks, so in the 250 hours of study range. That seems enough to get to a
solid A2 or a very, very wobbly B1 according to a DELF study chart I found. B1 in that
time frame would greatly please me. Is it possible in that amount of time (from now
through the end of July) to get to a solid enough base where time then spent in a
Francophone country would be a great opportunity for big gains in my skills as opposed
to just overwhelming me?

Onto the study plan. I don't wish to live my life in textbooks. But I think a good
base is important. I have questions about a variety of programs I have read about on
here as well as ideas I am just curious about.

First, French pronunciation seems vital to getting by. My library has a pristine copy
of the newest Pronounce it Perfectly in French edition I plan to work through before
working through anything else. Does this seem like a good idea, or is pronunciation
something to tinker with later? It was a free checkout, so nothing lost except gas if
it isn't worth the trouble.

Second, is Michel Thomas worth it? It seems it isn't the most well-regarded for French
due to Thomas' poor accent and saying to ignore noun gender, which seems odd. If it
is worth it, is it better to use it early or later in studying? For example, would
working through the French for Beginners 10-hour course be a good way to start this
first weekend of study? Or are there better things to use to get going?

Third, what is the deal with Assimil? I live in the US and would have no idea this
thing existed if it weren't for this site. I don't believe in snake oil or miracles.
Is it that Assimil is so great or that so many other courses over-promise and
underwhelm so much? I guess I am just unsure on if it is the gem it is meant to be.
Nevertheless, I do appreciate word-of-mouth and ordered it on Amazon. It isn't hard to
risk it when it is so affordable compared to other courses.

This leads me to French for Reading by Karl Sandberg. Since reading is one of the
three things I want to do well at, this book seemed right up my alley. It already
arrived. Is this a book I can dive right into? The intro says 70-to-120 hours of study
and I will know ~1,500 words and all of the grammar forms in Le Francais fondamental.
Does this mean this covers enough grammar that I don't really need to stress on
getting another outside grammar source unless it proves to be a big issue for me? I
did order Resnick's Essential French Grammar since a well-regarded poster, emk, seems
to suggest it often to people. I am unsure if these two together, plus whatever is in
Assimil, is enough to get by.

It seems Assimil will provide a decent bit of speaking practice with repeating aloud
and all. French for Reading obviously will help with reading. This leaves listening.
Any suggestions on this? Is News in Slow French worth it? Here is the price chart:
http://www.newsinslowfrench.com/subscription_info.php

It seems a bit pricey. Money isn't a huge concern, but I don't want to spend just to
spend. There is also this rfi link:
http://www1.rfi.fr/lffr/statiques/accueil_apprendre.asp

But my French is so elementary I am unsure what to do. I click "Lire le script" and
then "Ecouter 10'" and I see that the script is for everything spoken. But is there an
English transcript I am not seeing that I am supposed to use to compare? Or should I
just listen and read and hope things start coming together? Listening seems like the
trickiest skill to develop to me, so any suggestions on that front would really be
appreciated. Are there other things on that page I am missing? It just seems getting
in listening practice from the very start is going to do a lot of good in the long-
run. Or should I forego these audio sites and just watch free episodes of French in
Action over and over?

I do *not* want to just study course after course for forever. I just foresee the
above to be things to get me going for the first month or so. Then just keep working
through Assimil (if I am enjoying it), doing some sort of listening and reading work,
and then looking for French penpals online. Once again, thank you for your time in
reading this and any suggestions.

My background in French is minimal. I had two years in high school a long, long time
ago. Minimal exposure to other foreign languages since.

If the above was TL;DR, here is a summary of what I am thinking of doing at the
moment:

1. Work through Pronounce it Perfectly in French over the weekend.

2. Monday start doing one Assimil lesson a day. Since it appears to be a course that
doesn't take long each day;

3. Start working through French for Reading. Flip through the Resnick grammar for any
spots that seem tough in here.

4. Listen to either a News in Slow French or that RFI site each day and try to suss
out meaning.

Whenever I finish working through the French for Reading book, start trying to read
real, native materials at a low level while continuing to work through Assimil and
listening/reading to the news each day. At that point, also try to find a Skype pal to
practice speaking and listening with.

Thoughts? Tweaks? As I said, there seem to be a ton of great resources for French out
there. If I really have trouble with grammar for whatever reason, I was thinking to
either buy a Hugo in 3 Months or Living French: A Grammar Based Course since they are
affordable and have good reviews. But I figured why buy more courses if not necessary?

Thanks a million to anyone with input. Learning French is important to me for a
variety of reasons, I am a steady position with my work and home-life routine
currently to really dive into this, and I am excited for the challenge!

3 persons have voted this message useful



tarvos
Super Polyglot
Winner TAC 2012
Senior Member
China
likeapolyglot.wordpr
Joined 4467 days ago

5310 posts - 9399 votes 
Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans
Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish

 
 Message 2 of 22
10 April 2015 at 5:27am | IP Logged 
Sounds like a good plan, but don't make it uber strict on yourself. Even the best laid
plans... no textbook can get you to fluency. Natives and native materials can. Assimil
has a good layout and is funny and well-written (usually), that's why it's highly rated.
2 persons have voted this message useful



1e4e6
Octoglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4050 days ago

1013 posts - 1588 votes 
Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian
Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan

 
 Message 3 of 22
10 April 2015 at 5:45am | IP Logged 
I fail to understand why Assimil would be unknown in the USA. I live in both the UK
and USA and I knew what this was years before I joined this forum. There are forum
members here from all over the world, be it Singapore, South Africa, Algeria,
Argentina, Thailand, Portugal, New Zealand, who know about Assimil and use it
regularly who knew about it before this forun. I hope that it is not like
Americans and the metric system, they would never know how to use the units or that it
even existed if they never left their borders.

Assimil are very good but I never saw anything about miracles advertised. I would
prefer it to for example the products by a company that starts with R, or any of the
other language materials. But no one said that Assimil just alone. Assimil with
grammar books and native television, radio, and newspapers is a fairly good
combination to me.

Edited by 1e4e6 on 10 April 2015 at 5:47am

2 persons have voted this message useful



luke
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6965 days ago

3133 posts - 4351 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Esperanto, French

 
 Message 4 of 22
10 April 2015 at 10:14am | IP Logged 
The US will completely convert to the metric system by 1978, or at least that's what I was told in elementary school. It's used and appreciated by students of physics.

Assimil is a different beast. It's not in the big bookstore chains like Barnes and Noble and the now defunct Border's. They had long bookshelves full of courses, but I hadn't heard of Assimil until the Administrator dissed it, and Professor Arguelles elevated here on the forum many years ago.

To diplomaticus, bonne chance, it sounds like you have a good plan.


2 persons have voted this message useful



chaotic_thought
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 3302 days ago

129 posts - 274 votes 
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Dutch, French

 
 Message 5 of 22
10 April 2015 at 1:51pm | IP Logged 
diplomaticus wrote:

If I can reliably give 2 hours to French study every weekday and 3 to 4 both weekend
days, how far can I get by the end of July?
...
Is it possible in that amount of time (from now
through the end of July) to get to a solid enough base where time then spent in a
Francophone country would be a great opportunity for big gains in my skills as opposed
to just overwhelming me?


It's often said that you can't really plan "how far you can get" in language learning. Some people learn faster than others. And some languages are easier depending on background (e.g. Dutch for a native English speaker). If you've never self-learned a language before you may be slowed down at first because you have to work your way into the proper discipline for efficient self-learning, etc.

What I find helpful to do, however, is to plan your time to get through a specific course or set of materials. Your goal should not be "make it to B2 level" or whatever. Instead make your goal "finish learning every lesson in this textbook using a 2 or 3 pass learning strategy".

In my studies, I can't just focus on one textbook or material. I need to be able to switch to some other materials as the desire arises, e.g. listening to the news, reading newspaper articles, watching recorded television series or movies.

For the materials like textbooks + recordings, you can pretty accurately calculate down to the minute the time requirement to listen to it in its entirety (over the course of 1-2 months for example). If you plan to make 2 or 3 passes, then you just multiply the total time requirement by 2 or 3. Also, I recommend not to make more than one pass of the same material on a given day. If you want to review a conversation or audio recording of a lesson, let it settle in your brain first and then wait until the next day to re-listen.

For the materials that are unbounded in quantity (e.g. news broadcasts), I like to allocate a fixed time for consuming those as part of my study (15-30min per day, for example). In that case you, if you design a 20-week study program, your overall goal would be to listen to 70 hours of news over the course of your study program.


Edited by chaotic_thought on 10 April 2015 at 1:58pm

4 persons have voted this message useful



rdearman
Senior Member
United Kingdom
rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4996 days ago

881 posts - 1812 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin

 
 Message 6 of 22
10 April 2015 at 4:53pm | IP Logged 
I'm surprised nobody mentioned the FSI (Foreign Language Institute) public domain courses which you can download here. Although dated (they talk about French Franks for example) it is a very, very , very good system for helping you with language drills and speaking practice. Of all of the courses the FSI did, I believe the French course was probably the most comprehensive. The MP3's and the PDF files are all free to download and in the public domain.

There is some ungodly amount of hours of practice and vocabulary in this course. The lessons/drills are about 30 minutes long. I would recommend doing one lesson per day along with the rest of your studies.

Seriously, check out FSI you can't beat the price, and the US Government spent a lot of money developing the course, so you might as well use it.
3 persons have voted this message useful



chobbs
Newbie
United States
Joined 4337 days ago

35 posts - 47 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Esperanto, French

 
 Message 7 of 22
10 April 2015 at 6:25pm | IP Logged 
It sounds like you will get plenty of grammar with those resources. I don't really see any
point in spending more money to grab another resource for it given the huge amount of free
material available online. The only reason to search out more grammar is if an explanation
isn't making any sense, and a quick Google search will easily give enough results to find
something that makes things clear.

FSI is an interesting resource, and if Assimil doesn't float your boat then it may be your
best bet for a course. At least for one that is much more complete than all of the other
options out there. Whether you like it or not is another story entirely. People seem pretty
divided on the course. However, since it is free you can easily grab it now and see if it
works for you. There is also an FSI French Phonology course to use beforehand which is a
bit more thorough than Pronounce It Perfectly. Another possibility with FSI is to save it
until later on when you understand more and simply use it to better engrave the patterns
into automaticity for speaking. Lots of material here and a lot of ways to use it depending
on your exact goals, priorities, and preferences.

Regarding pronunciation though, I personally believe that Chorusing is the most efficient
way to internalize the prosody of a language. From there it is easy enough to tune any
sounds which are giving you trouble. I think the Pronounce It Perfectly book/cd is better
utilized after some base to tune sounds giving you trouble. IMO it doesn't help much with
the hard part of French speech - stringing all of those crazy sounds together with the
correct prosody. Then again, you mentioned having had French in school so it is possible
you do have enough of a base already (or that it would come back quickly).

FWIW, I had my son who is currently learning German, start with some sentences from
Book2. I grabbed a few that provided a
decent sampling, fired up Audacity, repeated them 20 or so times and re-saved the mp3 file
for him. Chorusing those gave him a good base in the sounds of German long before he had
ever seen the writing. From there he moved onto some Glossika sentences, and then once he
started struggling we finally moved him into Assimil for some explicit, albeit relaxed,
studying. This has worked very, very well for him. I have started chorusing German as well,
which will be the next language I tackle, and wished I did this for French before studying
the language.

One other suggestion I will make is for some passive listening throughout your day paying
attention whenever the mood grabs you. While your understanding is still low it will help
tune your ear. And, once your comprehension is higher, you can loop some audio which you
understand and help internalize those things outside of your official "study" time.
Podcasts are great for this, but it can be difficult to find ones at a lower level which
are also interesting. One possibility is to sign up for an account at LingQ and find some
content which interests you that way. Assimil can work good too, but I have found there to
be a huge jump between listening to Assimil and listening to most native material, so the
sooner you can get to the native material the less painful the transition will be. Also,
the more hours you can put to this endeavor the more likely you will be to reach your goal.
Putting in more study time can lead to burn out though. So, passive listening, where you
can also switch into active for a few minutes multiple times per day, is a good way to
boost those numbers without feeling obligated like with actual study time. We all have a
ton of downtime we can use, especially if it is already right there and we just need to
direct our attention towards it.

- Chris
2 persons have voted this message useful



diplomaticus
Newbie
United States
Joined 3725 days ago

23 posts - 31 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: German

 
 Message 8 of 22
11 April 2015 at 1:22am | IP Logged 
rdearman wrote:
I'm surprised nobody mentioned the FSI (Foreign Language Institute)
public domain courses which you can languages.yojik.eu/languages/french.html">download here. Although dated (they
talk about French Franks for example) it is a very, very , very good system for
helping you with language drills and speaking practice. Of all of the courses the FSI
did, I believe the French course was probably the most comprehensive. The MP3's and
the PDF files are all free to download and in the public domain.

There is some ungodly amount of hours of practice and vocabulary in this course. The
lessons/drills are about 30 minutes long. I would recommend doing one lesson per day
along with the rest of your studies.

Seriously, check out FSI you can't beat the price, and the US Government spent a lot
of money developing the course, so you might as well use it.


This looks incredible. A friend of mine used a course that seemed to be similar
conceptually called Modern Russian (though I think it is a few decades old now as
well) and had amazing results. I believe he tested out of the first 4 semesters of
Russian when trying to enroll in courses at a local university using just that course.

Is there a way to buy these books already printed out? I think I'd tire of using
this on my computer for so long.

Edited by diplomaticus on 11 April 2015 at 1:33am



1 person has voted this message useful



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