I know this is a Japanese learning forum but still, it's the best language learning forum on the net, so I just kinda feel at home here. Anyways...

I've been studying it for about a month just sounding it out. Decided I'm officially learning it now I got interested in it mid 2010 after finding some french hip hop that I liked and lately have been listening to that a lot. Decided it's definitely worth my time to learn it. I'm still continuing with Japanese of course! I'm also living with Japanese at the moment so it's kinda hard to escape it! I won't be focusing on it 100% of the time though now.

What's interesting is, Khatz made the recommendation to watch your favourite American shows with the Japanese dub. Tried it for Japanese and it made me wanna vomit. Just plain wrong. Tried it for French, really love it. I guess it's something about white people speaking European languages that just comes a little easier.

I kinda made the accidental discovery that about 1/3 of the series that you can get on DVD also have the French dub and French subs (tho not exact subs, still mega helpful). Unlike Japanese I couldn't really find a wealth of native media available for download for French so discovering I have all the access I need to french through my local video store was like a god send. Hence the decision to take the plunge.

My method basically goes, watch American shows in French with French subs from day 1 (already doing it) and look up words I'm curious about in my dictionary - add the example sentences from there into Anki. Rinse. Repeat.

The dictionary I'm using (iPhone version + PC version) is the Collins French dictionary. It's pretty wicked cos it has tonnes of good example sentences with good translations and includes PLENTY of idiomatic phrases aswell! Plus the pc version is copy and pasteable so input into Anki is really fast.

I'm basically skipping official grammar study as grammar words occur so frequently I'll look them up and their example sentences along the way anyway. From my experience learning Japanese, good example sentences are really all you need.

Anyways, wish me luck.

I studied French for 5 years in high school from 2005-2009, and ended up with a fairly good grasp of the language, although I've forgotten a lot now since I've moved onto Japanese. If I could recommend a single thing that helped me with French, it would be "Bescherelle". It's a book which covers verb conjugations for virtually every single French verb, by presenting the different conjugation patterns as the meat of the book, then having all the thousands of verbs in the index and linking you to the correct conjugation pattern for that verb. An excellent book. Also, the about.com site for French is really good. Hope this helps By the way, check out France Gall's "Babacar"; that song was stuck in my head for months after we heard it in French class.

In case you missed it, from my French Core 2000? thread: http://tinyurl.com/22v3hjl

Listen to Starmania (Tycoon in english) if you liked France Gall. And if you like stupid stuff, look at YouTube videos of Groland and Jean-Yves Lafesse.

Bonne chance !

http://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3D-HSmnIMvgyE&h=598a5

Hey mezbup.
Good for you!

Just a little advice. In Japanese, you really need to get the kanji out of the way when learning. Well in French, it's the conjugations.

Try to buy the Bescherelle and copy a page every week (that's all the forms of one verb, that should take you two hours). (correction: you can skip subjonctive except the present. You can also skip the past conditional second form. We never use all these tenses).

This way you'll get acquainted with the forms, and will be able to read without looking up verbs all the time. You can stop after 3 months. It will also be best if you do it everyday at first.

Good luck!

yeah, conjugations in French are intense!

Thanks for the advice guys!~

Good luck bro, good language choice. 3rd coolest language in my opinion, first being Chinese then Japanese. My dad is a translator/university professor of French so I feel it'll be my duty to learn this language when I'm done with Japanese. He told me like 50% of the words are cognates with English, so that should make things way, way easier. Also there's spaces in between the words and no Kanji... that'll certainly make it less intimidating at the beginning levels. Good luck bro.

I don't know about 50% but certainly 20% of the words are like exactly the same as English! It's a huge leg up.

I don't know concrete figures but what i've been working is that a native knows roughly 30,000 words passively and maybe 20,000 actively. Meaning a pre-installed passive vocab of 6K! It definitely shows too.

Even though I've only been studying it for about a month or so, I can understand 20% with the subs on which is way more than I could at that time for Japanese! It's quite easy to see how people master languages closer to their own in a much shorter time frame.

50% is about right in my experience, but you need to have a very large English vocabulary to be aware of all the cognates. Often an obscure word in English is the common word (slightly modified) in French. Same for Spanish, Italian etc. That's why, having never learned Spanish or Italian, I can travel easily in those countries, get the gist of road signs and notices etc without needing to translate.

nest0r Wrote:In case you missed it, from my French Core 2000? thread: http://tinyurl.com/22v3hjl

Why French Core 2000? The audio comes from here:
http://frenchpod.com/

Conjugations, I don't know if it's quite useful to copy Besherelle pages with all the forms.
Learn the conjugations when you learn a new tense. It's like that french are used to learn their conjugations, and I learnt spanish like that.
Second point is there's a big gap between tenses used in oral, which is very reduced, and tenses used in writing. For example, "passé simple"/simple past is only used when you write.

' Wrote:Why French Core 2000? The audio comes from here:

I already explained why, as well as where to get more. I'm surprised you didn't follow that reference, it would've saved you some time! If you need more tips, let me know.