I hope there's someone ready to help out with French because I've finally taken it up and I see this as a nice way of improving my skills outside the class. I'm not in a position to travel to France or any french speaking country yet, and I don't know any French aside from my teacher. Fingers crossed for this to work.

I've been learning French, I could help you out and that would be good practice for me too haha

That'd be great! My lessons haven't really started yet (I am starting next week) and until I see how I can manage on my own, I won't be needing much help. But as soon as I get the basics (which I hope are not that complicated, especially if one has a flair for languages :wacko:) I'm sure to be found here asking for advice.

^You're an English native speaker, right? If so, when learning French, you may want to pay attention to the morphological genre of nouns (la table 'the table' - feminine vs. le livre - 'the book' - masculine), since such a distinction is basically nonexistent in English. You may also like to pay special attention to the verbs avoir 'have' and être 'be' not only because they're important in their own terms, but also because they're used to form other verb tenses (passé composé, for example).

 

Sorry I can't give you any thorough advice, since I'm currently trying to learn French myself.

 

Best of luck anyway and enjoy!

Yes, I'm familiar with such thing as nouns being masculine or feminine, or neutral like in German. It takes some tome to memorize it but it's no problem with me. I just adore everything about learning a new language, be it writing, speaking, grammmar, vocabulary etc. There is one thing that I am slightly nervous about ,though, and that's the pronunciation of nasal sounds. Hopefully my teacher will be patient about it. Thank you for your advice nonetheless. I hope you become fluent in French one day :nice:

i've been trying to learn french for sometime now and i think i improved over the past few years...i can try and help out too but i'm still trying to learn myself :D

 

when i started learning it i discovered that it's better not to translate every single word in a sentence into English just to understand it. if you can understand the verb and a couple of words in the sentences it's ok just so long as you understand what's being said. keeping a journal in French also helps...you don't have to write stuff like "my boyfriend is cute!" you could just write things like "I woke up in the morning, showered, brushed my teeth, got dressed...." If you do this on a regular basis certain words become a habit...if you went somewhere and found it interesting, write about it too...it helps to have a verb book handy too and read some magazines, watch cartoons, read comic strips in french since their more pictorial so you can easily understand what's happening.

oh and by the way, i help can out with Turkish if anyone is interested. :) it's not my native language though but i can speak it fluently

Keeping a journal is an excellent idea, I'll definitely give it a go. : ) Oh, yes, can anyone name some popular series or cartoons in French that I could download, please? I'd be very grateful.

Keeping a journal is an excellent idea, I'll definitely give it a go. : ) Oh, yes, can anyone name some popular series or cartoons in French that I could download, please? I'd be very grateful.

 

when i was little i used to watch "Salut, Serge!" It's in English and in French, so it makes it easier to understand what's going on. "Jacob Jacob" is nice too. You can try watching other cartoons like "My Pet Aliens" and "Spongebob Squarepants" in French. (Spongebob Squarepants >> "Bob L'Eponge Carre" in french :) )

Italian...

For those learning French, Le Petit Nicolas and Le Petit Prince (audio files and text) are easy to find and very enjoyable readings.

 

I'm reading 'Schaum's Outline of French Grammar'. It's very detailed (in terms of number of rules, but not necessarily within a rule) and easy to understand. It may be a good guide once you grasp some vocabulary and grammatical rules (if you're in the beginning of the process, you may get confused with so many new expressions). It's organised by syntactic categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives etc), so it's helping to have a more systematic understanding of the language.

There are about 185 pages on this thread. Any chance that there is someone who can learn me a bit German? I know some basis German, and I think I know which words to put either, Das, Der,Die in front of.. But I suck at the language. :shame: Anyone willing to help me?

For those learning French, Le Petit Nicolas and Le Petit Prince (audio files and text) are easy to find and very enjoyable readings.

 

I'm reading 'Schaum's Outline of French Grammar'. It's very detailed (in terms of number of rules, but not necessarily within a rule) and easy to understand. It may be a good guide once you grasp some vocabulary and grammatical rules (if you're in the beginning of the process, you may get confused with so many new expressions). It's organised by syntactic categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives etc), so it's helping to have a more systematic understanding of the language.

 

 

 

where can you get some audio online that one can download?

^Well, it's the same way you search for other files, like albums and stuff. But I've already seen Le Petit Nicolas on youtube. It's not difficult to find.

Yesterday I had my very first french lesson and it was AMAZING. I mean, c'etait magnifique! :cheesy: I think I'm going to enjoy this so much. I was also recommended 'Le Petit Nicolas' and seeing this here definitely makes me want to read it.

^A bit late to the conversation, but I'm glad you're enjoying your classes!

 

Under 'spoiler' is something that may be useful to people interested in checking how sounds in the language being learned are produced:

 

 

For anyone who, like me, struggles with pronunciation, try googling [insert language here]+IPA+wikipedia.

 

'IPA' stands for 'International Phonetic Alphabet', which is basically an organised set of symbols to represent sounds that the human vocal system can produce. It's international because its symbols are supposed to represent the sounds that constitutes any human/natural language, regardless of its writing system (if it is represented by a writing system at all).

 

The page for the French sounds, for example, is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA_for_French

 

You can then click on the sounds you're interested in. You'll be redirected to the entry that corresponds to that sound, where a recording will be available.

 

A nice thing is that there's a list of graphemes (or clusters of graphemes used to represent a sound, which is quite nice if you're learning French - there isn't a very neat one-to-one correspondence between what is written and what's pronounced.

 

You can also visit http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/index.html and access an IPA table, where you can click in sounds and here samples of them.

 

Basically, the table is organised as follows: on the horizontal axis, the sounds are classified by the way they are produced; on the vertical one, there are the articulators used to produce the sound (tip of tongue against front teeth; back of tongue against soft palate etc etc). It may be helpful to understand the way the sound is produced if, again like me, you're kinda deaf.

 

Just a quick note: "Teach yourself"

 

 

and "Berlitz"

 

 

(available in many languages; French is just an example)

 

are quite useful for those trying to learn a language by themselves. CDs with audiofiles are available, which is very important to practise listening and to improve pronunciation.

How about sign language?? I'm currently taking a course in American Sign Language and was thinking of signing songs to help me practice it. But I could use some tips.. :uhoh2:

^ASL sounds like an interesting thing to learn!

 

A professor of mine showed us a documentary about a sign language used in France. In the beginning, people were reciting some poem in this SL. Maybe you could find something of this nature on youtube?

 

edit: This is it:

 

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-Ev68AmEXM]País dos Surdos Coral - YouTube[/ame]

 

Whole movie is here (Spanish subtitles).

^ Sign language is beautiful! It's a very expressive language. Signing a poem sounds a great idea.

Thanks for sharing the movie to me, happy to see it has English subtitles too. :) So far, I watched a bit of it and I noticed a few signs in French are similar in ASL (deaf and name)... Just remembered that ASL does share some similar signs with French Sign Language.

^Didn't notice English subtitles were also available. I think I assumed it was just Spanish because the title of the video is in Spanish.

 

Is the 'deaf' sign some sort of movement from your ear towards your mouth with your forefinger? I *think* it's something like this in Brazilian SL.

 

Hope you can find something in ASL on youtube or something that helps you!

Yeah you're right, that's the sign for deaf. In ASL it's slightly different though, it starts with an index finger towards to the mouth to the ear... I didn't know it's the same in Brazilian SL too. Interesting!

 

Thanks! There are some youtube and web videos for SL that are quite helpful. But I'm still learning the basics, translating a song will be a challenge.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x_SZ4foEBA]15 Tintin au pays de l or noir 0 - YouTube[/ame]

 

:awesome:

dont think anybody out of there would like to learn probably the hardest and least attractive language - cantonese ..

How hard a language is is a relative notion - for one thing, it depends on the mother tongue of the individual. I'd suppose that a person who knows Mandarin Chinese would find it less hard to learn Cantonese than would, for example, a person who speaks a romance language.

 

Do you speak Cantonese? :)