Hi,

Buonaparte's given lots of great links for learning French resources in other posts. However, i'm interested in seeing more African french resources. If anyone knows any good resources with both audio and text, please let me know! I'm also interested if anyone knows of any downloadable french subtitles for French language films from Africa, since my search abilities are rather meagre right now...

Here's some good beginnerish resources i've found so far... Hope at least one other person finds these useful at some point

RFI has an african story for total beginners, news stories in easy french about Africa, and a round up of the day's news in easy French with a transcript, including some African news.
It also has a whole africa section for not so beginners...
http://www.rfi.fr/lfen/statiques/accueil.asp

Medicins Sans Frontiers page has videos with excersises & transcription.
http://www.msf.org.uk/schools_french.aspx

TV5Monde has a learning site as well, with some Africa videos:
http://www.tv5.org/TV5Site/enseigner-app...rendre.php
TV5 also has a section dedicated to Africa, but not for beginners.

African Independance: unfortunately no subtitles, but these seem like interesting short documentaries, and not so difficult, and they're from lots of different african french speaking countries.
http://afrique.arte.tv/

how different is French French from African French?

it's not so different, as far as i know, it's more that i'm interested in Africa, so want to see stuff connected with it

The accents are a bit different, and i imagine there are some different phrases & stuff, but i guess they'll be hard to find...

im tempted to try french just to see if it really is as easy as that fsi list seems to suggest. ie. learnable in a quarter of the time it takes to learn japanese.

haha yeah, that'd be great, right?!? if it only takes a few months, may as well really

btw, i really recommend the RFI's "le talisman brisé". I'm getting quite into it!!!

I suspect though, that while listening fluency will be quicker, speaking fluency might be equally hard to attain because the grammar has lots of exceptions, genders for nouns, and an accent i've never managed to not butcher horribly.

Oh, one more resource, not sure if this has been mentioned elsewhere, but Lingoes: http://www.lingoes.net/ is Rikaichan for multiple other languages, and has tons of different dictionaries (i have both French - English and French - 日本語 for example), has TTS ability, can be used in multiple browsers, you can configure to do instant mouseover popup, and is free. So yeah, it's great!!

IceCream Wrote:Oh, one more resource, not sure if this has been mentioned elsewhere, but Lingoes: http://www.lingoes.net/ is Rikaichan for multiple other languages, and has tons of different dictionaries (i have both French - English and French - 日本語 for example), has TTS ability, can be used in multiple browsers, you can configure to do instant mouseover popup, and is free. So yeah, it's great!!

If there would be something like Lingoes with Rikaisamas ability to export lookups to a tab-separated text file, that'd probably be the ultimate language study utility in my opinion.

At least from my experience with French in grade school and high school, what'd be really neat for languages like French, Arabic, Finnish - languages with lots of irregular verbs and complex conjugation - is a dictionary like this one. It can recognize conjugated words like rikaisama does, but it gives you a translation for the lookup word's conjugation. If you lookup أشرب, it will output "I drink", not "to drink".

IceCream Wrote:haha yeah, that'd be great, right?!? if it only takes a few months, may as well really

French really is incredibly easy, *en particulier* if you're a native English speaker. A lot of the *vocabulaire* is really similar to English. You can take *avantage* of some *très excellent* learning *matériel* out on the market.

OK, I'll stop. Assimil's New French With Ease is outstanding. 30 lessons or so with this, and I was able to pick up some basic introductory material on Chinese grammar and get the gist of it (due to the similarity of vocab in higher-register writing, which comes from Latin in both languages). French in Action is a video series done completely in French, but which actually starts from zero and builds up your knowledge. Let me say that again: all in French. It may be the most genius course available for any language, in any language. It also has tons of audio recordings, along with a textbook and workbook, again all in French. Then, there's also a book called French for Reading, by Karl Sandberg (who also wrote a similar one for German), which only focuses on reading skills since it's intended for those who need to be able to read academic papers in French but have no need to speak it, but it is excellent.

Those three should take you a very long way. Assimil and French in Action can be finished in 3-4 months, easily, and work very well together. I do think it's best to learn French French first, then branch out into other varieties later, since you'll run into much less frustration that way, both while learning and later while using (everyone understands French French).

Thanks for the resources!!!

French in Action is just, completely awesome... i hadn't heard of it before, so thanks!!! It's kind of like Rosetta Stone through video, only much better cos you see so many situations for the phrases / words, and contextually understanding the boundaries of use of expressions is really important, i think. I wonder how come this hasn't been replicated for every language already, it's already 25 years old!!!!!

Speaking of which, does anyone else imagine the 80's / early 90's every time they imagine France?? hahah i realised that i do last night, i guess it must come from the textbooks i used in school. It was sort of like the moment you realise that the world probably didn't look all that different in the 60's or 70's than it does now, it's just that different video technology was used then.

Yeah, French vocabulary is soooo easy... almost every word you already know some word in english that has the same root. Grammar, on the other hand... reading Tex's French Grammar last night, really it's no wonder i was so confused in school!! Japanese may be difficult to learn to read, but the grammar is so clean and simple and just, nice. Chinese doesn't seem particularly difficult in comparison either...

@walruz: Yeah, i wish you could export too... it would make life a million times easier. That conjugation thing would be awesome too, i wonder why they don't just do that as standard?!? If i come across anything like that, i'll let you know!!!

IceCream Wrote:French in Action is just, completely awesome... i hadn't heard of it before, so thanks!!! It's kind of like Rosetta Stone through video, only much better cos you see so many situations for the phrases / words, and contextually understanding the boundaries of use of expressions is really important, i think. I wonder how come this hasn't been replicated for every language already, it's already 25 years old!!!!!

It really is incredible. I also can't think of any reason it hasn't been done for other languages, but it would for sure change the way people learn them. I always tell people that if nothing else, they should learn French just to see how genius this program is and how easily a language can be learned.

I'd say get a good feel for the language using French in Action and Assimil before using any sort of dedicated grammar guide. I look as grammar as an explanation of why the language works the way it does, rather than a set of rules to be followed. Approaching it that way makes it clear rather than confusing, IMO, because you already know what sounds right and what doesn't so you're just reading about what you already know. I'm not sure if I've explained that clearly, but anyway I've found it easier not to worry too much about the grammar, just learn to use the language and worry about grammar later.

Have you seen Yabla btw??

It's almost entirely what i'd want from a learning program!!!!!

Video, with difficulty level, transcription (and hidable translation), click on any word and it brings up the definition on the right hand side, as well as an easy way to repeat a single line (and hear it more slowly if you need to). You can download the videos too.

You have to subscribe, but i think it'd be worth it for anyone who's beginner - intermediate in a language, just for the extreme ease of use. They also have sites for Chinese (mandarin) & some other European languages. Look's like they're expanding so, maybe check back for Japanese sometime in the future.

Anyway, for my purposes, they have French videos about Africa.

check out their demo if you find it interesting!!!

http://french.yabla.com/

I recall nest0r making a French anki vocab deck with audio and sentences (2K or 5K?) based on an everyday expressions book or something.

here it is There might be some other useful resources in that thread too.

IceCream can probably decipher the instructions...

^^ Yeah, i also wish we had a deck... unfortunately both sharebee and megaupload don't work anymore, so that deck is dead now, unless anyone else has it...?

I've been searching around the last few days, and found this:
http://www.audiofrench.com/index.html

It's actually very easy to make this site into an anki deck, because the tables copy directly into excel, and only need a little cleaning up. The audio is a little more difficult to fudge into table format, but doable. Is it something you would be interested in Hyperborea? I wasn't sure whether to bother or not... i was thinking of maybe using Yabla's flashcards when i sign up. Anyway, if you'd like it too, i'll get on and make it.

The other option is to make Tex's french grammar into a deck, since all the audio is downloadable. The sound is clearer, but it looks like it'd be a Lot of work...