.

not quite what you're looking for but you could mine that if you can figure out how to get the audio:

http://www.coelang.tufs.ac.jp/modules/index.html

this one is interesting too, although the audio is very slow
http://www.goethe-verlag.com/book2/EN/ENFR/ENFR002.HTM

the word of the day section at french.about.com has 1-3 sentences for each entry that are more interesting. I'm sure that the words are recorded, you'll have to check if it has audio for the sentences. I remember that at one point learning these words (and there are quite a few of them there) helped me when I was plateauing.

There are several excellent websites with phonetic exercises, minimal pairs and so on. Perhaps srsing it would be a good idea too? If your native language is English you may want to look into that (not that I'm any better, we slaughter it in a different way).

Assimil has clear audio and it's all sentences. If you don't like traditional courses you could still dissect it into sentences I suppose. It is not sequential though - The first 100 words are not the most useful, but the whole course gives a vocabulary of around 2000 words.

French in action is not what you asked for but I still recommend it.

After these three things it's really enough to ditch courses altogether.

Since you're trying to learn french. You can learn it 10X faster than Japanese.

Since the writing system is made up of the same characters from English , plus you can read it already. Only leaves accent. So you can definitely become fluent faster than in Japanese or Chinese since they use a massive load of characters. And of course getting an accent in Japanese and Chinese takes time. Not too sure about french, but since it's similar to English in many ways. It can be learned/mastered in a faster amount of time.

Thanks, though I'm familiar with FiA and Assimil, Frenchpod, Pimsleur, all that stuff, and they're a pain to SRS. That's my main reason for wanting something like French Core, something I can easily obtain and study in Anki at a rate of ~25 new sentences/day with little effort. I guess smart.fm's still a rare gem when it comes to language learning.

On the side I'll likely be using a French TTS (I have two that are quite good) with Schaum's Outline of French Grammar. And media isn't a problem, either, but for now I just want to focus on easily SRS'd sentences with audio + translations and a certain consistent foundational focus. That's the ideal. ;p

@IceCream - Honestly those early cards are so personalized and disorganized it'd be too much trouble and too embarrassing to gather and share them. Plus I was erratic, as the book is so clear, I didn't always bother with example sentences.

Edit: That verlag thingy seems good, though!

Guess it's just text to speech stuff on smart.fm and laborious copy/pasting from books for now, and subs2srs'd movies/shadow-bound books at higher levels.

I found this site: http://www.example-sentence.com/french - But looks like it's been hamstrung to encourage some kind of subscription to another site, unfortunately. So I guess if you refresh it 20 or so times each day you'll have random sentences with audio. Better than nothing. ;p

It's a nice setup, though: Single word, French sentence, English translation, with clear audio. Must be some way to harness it... but alas, I'm not tech-savvy enough.

Is that a native speaker doing the audio? I'm not good enough to tell.

ta12121 Wrote:Since you're trying to learn french. You can learn it 10X faster than Japanese.

Since the writing system is made up of the same characters from English , plus you can read it already. Only leaves accent.

You can't read it. You have to hear the word to know the 読み方 it's totally different than what you think it is unless you're really, really, really used to french. I'm studying it a bit atm and it's only marginal more readable than Japanese.

I always use thefreedictionary and get the audio example of how to pronounce the word and put it on the front of the card.

TTS is pretty good for french too

Definitely easier to learn than Japanese but Japanese is 1000x easier to pronounce.

mezbup Wrote:

ta12121 Wrote:Since you're trying to learn french. You can learn it 10X faster than Japanese.

Since the writing system is made up of the same characters from English , plus you can read it already. Only leaves accent.

You can't read it. You have to hear the word to know the 読み方 it's totally different than what you think it is unless you're really, really, really used to french. I'm studying it a bit atm and it's only marginal more readable than Japanese.

I always use thefreedictionary and get the audio example of how to pronounce the word and put it on the front of the card.

TTS is pretty good for french too

Definitely easier to learn than Japanese but Japanese is 1000x easier to pronounce.

Oh yea. I forgot about that.

But it is easier to learn faster than japanese since you know english.

mezbup Wrote:You can't read it. You have to hear the word to know the 読み方 [...]

French spelling is actually mainly phonetic. There are exceptions, of course, like femme, but for the most part, French is pronounced the way it's spelled.

shirokuro Wrote:

mezbup Wrote:You can't read it. You have to hear the word to know the 読み方 [...]

French spelling is actually mainly phonetic. There are exceptions, of course, like femme, but for the most part, French is pronounced the way it's spelled.

Do you know French well? What do you think of the audio I referenced above? http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...7#pid95307

nest0r Wrote:

shirokuro Wrote:

mezbup Wrote:You can't read it. You have to hear the word to know the 読み方 [...]

French spelling is actually mainly phonetic. There are exceptions, of course, like femme, but for the most part, French is pronounced the way it's spelled.

Do you know French well? What do you think of the audio I referenced above? http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...7#pid95307

The audio definitely sounds like it was recorded by a native speaker. It is a bit slow, though.

(I can understand spoken and written French pretty well and can write pretty decently, but I almost never speak it, so I'm losing my speaking ability.)

shirokuro Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:

shirokuro Wrote:French spelling is actually mainly phonetic. There are exceptions, of course, like femme, but for the most part, French is pronounced the way it's spelled.

Do you know French well? What do you think of the audio I referenced above? http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...7#pid95307

The audio definitely sounds like it was recorded by a native speaker. It is a bit slow, though.

(I can understand spoken and written French pretty well and can write pretty decently, but I almost never speak it, so I'm losing my speaking ability.)

Sweet, thanks. If only the site was like smart.fm, it'd be perfect.

I grew up hearing a lot of french(in school, places near me but i forgot a lot of it). But don't know much of it. My Japanese is way beyond my french(which is horrible)

nest0r Wrote:On the side I'll likely be using a French TTS (I have two that are quite good) with Schaum's Outline of French Grammar. And media isn't a problem, either, but for now I just want to focus on easily SRS'd sentences with audio + translations and a certain consistent foundational focus. That's the ideal. ;p

nest0r Wrote:Sweet, thanks. If only the site was like smart.fm, it'd be perfect.

No problem.

I don't know of any resource like Smart.fm for French, but what about making up your own version following something like what IceCream recommends (BROKEN LINK) here? (I also agree with her points about the importance of context, not to mention that you'll end up with more interesting and natural sentences than the kind you find in textbooks, Smart.fm, etc.) You said that you have a lot of resources that you've collected already over the years, and there is tons of media available in French with exact subtitles and English translations, so I think this would be an excellent way to start learning French. I also think it's way nicer to have human audio than text-to-speech audio, and with just how much media is available in French with exact subtitles or transcripts, I really think there's no need to rely on text-to-speech software.

EDIT: Have you seen the Web site Tex's French Grammar? I just looked at it quickly, but it looks quite good to me. It also has audio for its example sentences and dialogues.

shirokuro Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:On the side I'll likely be using a French TTS (I have two that are quite good) with Schaum's Outline of French Grammar. And media isn't a problem, either, but for now I just want to focus on easily SRS'd sentences with audio + translations and a certain consistent foundational focus. That's the ideal. ;p

nest0r Wrote:Sweet, thanks. If only the site was like smart.fm, it'd be perfect.

No problem.

I don't know of any resource like Smart.fm for French, but what about making up your own version following something like what IceCream recommends (BROKEN LINK) here? (I also agree with her points about the importance of context, not to mention that you'll end up with more interesting and natural sentences than the kind you find in textbooks, Smart.fm, etc.) You said that you have a lot of resources that you've collected already over the years, and there is tons of media available in French with exact subtitles and English translations, so I think this would be an excellent way to start learning French. I also think it's way nicer to have human audio than text-to-speech audio, and with just how much media is available in French with exact subtitles or transcripts, I really think there's no need to rely on text-to-speech software.

We had a long thread about that: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...8#pid67858

There's nothing wrong with TTS (head over to Acapella and listen to the French voices) for listening, as well as speaking individual words. It's a valuable resource for when you have a great set of materials without audio. I would disagree with anyone that thinks you should skip structured sentence study if it doesn't have native audio/isn't from native media. Schaum's Outline has many useful example sentences with words I don't know, so I won't pass up the opportunity to mine them and use a TTS where it's of the most use.

As for the basic tenets, I think are best followed: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...6#pid81476

I'm also an advocate of using subs2srs/native materials as a corpus for such structured learning approaches. (See any of my posts with the word 'corpora' or 'corpus', haha. Or any posts about 'grammar'. ^_-) But I think we're a ways off. For now I think foundational sentences followed by native materials is best. And frankly, anyone who disagrees is wrong and I will fight them!! ;p

Anyway, I have most of my study planned out, just need to arrange the materials. In fact, I think at this point I've everything I need. Will update in a few months or something. ;p Thanks all for the tips.

Hehe, OK. I still think what IceCream recommends is a lot more enjoyable, though. ;p

IceCream Wrote:1. why would you ever use TTS? especially now rhinospike is around.

2. why would you use non native sources and audio when there are a billion better options?

;p

As I stated above, at the moment there's not much in the way of huge corpora of customizable foundational sentences with native audio. But if you know of a French grammar book with audio for all the example sentences... till then I'll bolster any example sentences taken from Schaum's with TTS, rather than pretending I know how to pronounce already. Or to put it another way, I intend to read and parse these sentences, and I could skim over all the words I can't silently articulate, but that's not my style, I'd rather keep up the flow with audio even when I'm neither using it for listening nor for pronunciation. It's free and takes mere seconds, so I don't see what the big deal is.

Once I've got the basic grammar down, it's on to example sentences w/ native audio. If I procure enough native materials at that level, I'll mix those in, but most likely I'll just use subs2srs with films.

I think there's probably enough audio in dictionaries to spare me the effort of using TTS for most words, but I like how some of the smart.fm materials are arranged so I'll likely use the built-in or my own TTS for any of those I use.

shirokuro Wrote:Hehe, OK. I still think what IceCream recommends is a lot more enjoyable, though. ;p

I think the unstructured approach is ill thought out and not enjoyable at all. But I just skimmed the post, so if IceCream suggests something similar to what the rest of us structured+native materials recommend (we don't think of it as either/or), then we agree. ;p

Perhaps I'm not being clear, but to reiterate 'where I'm at' with self-study:

Longform Listening/Speaking: Subs2SRS & example sentences with native audio--this latter comes first unless you have many subs2srs sentences with grammar at your level. At the moment I expect primary subs2srs materials to be relatively advanced films, thus holding off.

Shortform i.e. individual words: TTS or native, doesn't matter because TTS is nxtlvl and primary focus is meaning + basic understanding of sounds, not prosody and the like. You can do this at any point throughout all stages of learning.

Grammar: Begin with this, just SRS example sentences, focusing on understanding relevant structures. Audio here is bonus, especially for augmenting some modest articulatory rehearsal rather than staring at silent letters and accent marks that form a sense of obstructing gibberish while reviewing sentence patterns.

At various stages: non-SRS/SRS of audio-/e-books, depending on level. Fortunately there are many audiobooks at many levels out there and we have a new tool...

nest0r Wrote:I think the unstructured approach [...]

Mmhmm. I think you have a good plan worked out and know what methods work well for you based on your experience with Japanese. Anyways, I really hope things go well.

Perhaps I missed something in your post, nest0r, but what do you do about the stage where you know NONE of the words in the sentences you use for Grammar (where you begin)?
Just add them all to a vocab deck (do the shortform thing?), or just hope to remember them?

The reason I ask, is because I hope to begin learning German in a short while, and I'm currently at step 0.

shirokuro Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:I think the unstructured approach [...]

Mmhmm. I think you have a good plan worked out and know what methods work well for you based on your experience with Japanese. Anyways, I really hope things go well.

Thanks. But it's not just methods that work well for me. They are best for everyone. ^_^

Asriel Wrote:Perhaps I missed something in your post, nest0r, but what do you do about the stage where you know NONE of the words in the sentences you use for Grammar (where you begin)?
Just add them all to a vocab deck (do the shortform thing?), or just hope to remember them?

The reason I ask, is because I hope to begin learning German in a short while, and I'm currently at step 0.

When I did Japanese the Manga Way, I mostly focused on the structures in question (i.e. the basic grammar points), using the translation as a guideline. The sentences were deconstructed for me, which taught me valuable skills that I applied to all other sentences in the future. (Just as Pimsleur, long abandoned, taught me the value of working backwards piece by piece to get the structure of sentences down when you're a beginner or they're complex/audio-centric.) To me, I am hungry for words, since I know next to none, so I will likely study them as 'incidental components' to the example sentences and also make separate individual cards for them with TTS or dictionary audio.

Once I move on to creating a general reference corpus of sentences with native audio (I wrote about this a few times in the Goodbye Sentences thread) as the foundation to cement that grammar and practice basic speaking and listening and spelling, etc. (multisensory integration), I doubt I'll do words separately (for those sentences), as I'm a fan of 'failing in layers'/i.e. I think i+x is better than i+1. Plus I'll be busy adding individual words I come across that are interesting, adding words via smart.fm, etc.

Later it will be subs2srs'd video clips with an emphasis on listening/parsing for meaning rather than speaking or anything else, so I'll look up the new words in those sentences in the above general reference corpus (thus the subs2srs deck is the specialised monitor corpus) as well as make cards for them separately with TTS or dictionary audio, and once those cards reach basic maturity, then I unsuspend the video clip cards I took them from and do the listening thing.

Still working out how to fit in audio-/e-books with our new interactive transcript tools and potential developments with subs2srs and .trs files and notions I referenced to blackmacros in the 'totally innocent books' thread. Likewise at the moment I'm still working out some new ideas for output at the intermediate stage using imaginary conversations via cb4960's Audio tool thingy and the concept of 'comprehensible output' and various social networking tools we have, including microblogging.

Then there's dual n-backing and crosswords/wordsearch as mentioned in Forget Brain Age and Japanese Crosswords threads...

And I'm spent! BTW that 'example-sentence.com' site has German sentences w/ audio I believe.

nest0r Wrote:I found this site: http://www.example-sentence.com/french - But looks like it's been hamstrung to encourage some kind of subscription to another site, unfortunately. So I guess if you refresh it 20 or so times each day you'll have random sentences with audio. Better than nothing. ;p

It's a nice setup, though: Single word, French sentence, English translation, with clear audio. Must be some way to harness it... but alas, I'm not tech-savvy enough.

Is that a native speaker doing the audio? I'm not good enough to tell.

The audio does sound native. The sentences, however, are clearly translated from another language (I would guess English, as the English sentence feels quite natural) and many of them are not idiomatic (from a random sampling, but I didn't have to skip many "correct" sentences to find problematic ones).
Actually searching a bit more it may be Canadian French, so depending on your goals it is not necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn't feel like (France) French.

The following sentences have some problems, for instance:

Le tireur a frappé son objectif.
The shooter hit his target.

Les frites sont faîtes à partir des patates.
French fries are made from potatoes.

Le couple a marché à travers le parc en se tenant les mains.
The couple walked through the park holding hands.

J'espère que vous avez eu un vol plaisant.
I hope you had a pleasant flight.

La soupe est trop chaude pour manger.
The soup is still too hot to eat.

Ma peau est trop délicate pour utiliser du savon rugueux.
My skin is too delicate to use harsh soap on.

Great thread! What a coincidence, because I'm actually starting a French challenge for the next 30 days to see how far I can get in developing my reading ability.

Previously I'd done some of the user created lists on smart.fm. Currently I'm going through this one: http://smart.fm/goals/181573

The issue is that it's a little incomplete. I prefer nouns to have the definite article included so I can learn the gender as I go along. I also downloaded someone's attempt at a French core list: http://smart.fm/goals/92847
It's not great, but it's a start. However there are only 50 entries.

I saw Tex's French Grammar but I also found this: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/French
I arbitrarily started using the wikibooks grammar because I liked the look of it better. It does contain some audio. Does anyone have any opinion about the quality of the wikibooks textbook? There's also this girl's free French guide with native speaker audio: http://www.ielanguages.com/french.html however the audio is not really split in a useful way, it's read in one chunk.

For immersion, I've been watching Firefly with the French dub, which turned out to be quite good actually. I got the idea from this guy: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/29/15258/287

I'm also enjoying this: http://www.mangetaville.tv/Web-Tele/
A friend recommended this podcast to me, not that I can understand it yet: http://sites.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/chro/lhumeurde/

At one point I came across this excellent free wiki-like resource which had huge vocab lists for all sorts of different languages, and native speaker audio that was recorded for each word/sentence. I was trying to figure out how to extract the whole thing but I got distracted and lost the link. If anyone thinks they know what I'm talking about please let me know! :-)

nyquil Wrote:

nest0r Wrote:I found this site: http://www.example-sentence.com/french - But looks like it's been hamstrung to encourage some kind of subscription to another site, unfortunately. So I guess if you refresh it 20 or so times each day you'll have random sentences with audio. Better than nothing. ;p

It's a nice setup, though: Single word, French sentence, English translation, with clear audio. Must be some way to harness it... but alas, I'm not tech-savvy enough.

Is that a native speaker doing the audio? I'm not good enough to tell.

The audio does sound native. The sentences, however, are clearly translated from another language (I would guess English, as the English sentence feels quite natural) and many of them are not idiomatic (from a random sampling, but I didn't have to skip many "correct" sentences to find problematic ones).
Actually searching a bit more it may be Canadian French, so depending on your goals it is not necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn't feel like (France) French.

The following sentences have some problems, for instance:

Le tireur a frappé son objectif.
The shooter hit his target.

Les frites sont faîtes à partir des patates.
French fries are made from potatoes.

Le couple a marché à travers le parc en se tenant les mains.
The couple walked through the park holding hands.

J'espère que vous avez eu un vol plaisant.
I hope you had a pleasant flight.

La soupe est trop chaude pour manger.
The soup is still too hot to eat.

Ma peau est trop délicate pour utiliser du savon rugueux.
My skin is too delicate to use harsh soap on.

Damn, so they're grammatically incorrect? The use of example sentences w/ native audio in this case would be for the following: listening/subvocalizing/reading aloud i.e. proper rhythm and pronunciation of words as they fit together, getting used to common collocations, spelling/meaning of the words, and deconstructing to further internalize the grammar structures of French, not Canadian French or whatever.

I guess I'm wondering if you can go into more detail of what you mean?

Good luck, nemotoad! ^_^