France Tales » French

Lost in France

Owen — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 07:28:14 +0000

Lost in France is a blog about living in France and in particular about living in Toulouse. I found it before we moved to France and found a lot of info on it funny and useful. One of my favorite parts is where he creates lists of stereotypes. Below are some links to his lists of stereotypes. Every so often I look them over and getting a kick out of thinking about them and their “validity”.

http://cyberfrance.blogspot.com/2006/10/french-stereotypes-of-french.html

http://cyberfrance.blogspot.com/2006/10/french-stereotypes-of-americans.html

http://cyberfrance.blogspot.com/2006/10/french-stereotypes-of-europeans.html

Read them and weep or laugh. Make comments and add your own stereotypes, we bloggers love that.

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Rosetta Stone: Learn French Fast

Owen — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:09:57 +0000

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Image from WikipediaRosetta Stone has really helped me continue learning French fast. I took a few French classes at the Alliance Française in Toulouse, but now I am on my own. Using Rosetta Stone, I can keep practicing and learning French.

Today I worked on Level 1, Unit 6, Lesson 10: Tout seul, plusieurs, une foule, des amis, la voix passive. My favorite part of Rosetta Stone is the typing and dictation part. The other elements are easy for me but the typing section really makes me think and learn. It will not mark something correct unless there is gender and plural agreement, accents are in the right places, capitals are correct, punctuation and spacing, and a whole host of other things that often language learners think of being outside of the actual process for learning a language.

The hardest part about Rosetta Stone is when a word is dictated and it sounds the same as many other words, for example gens, jeunes, jaune. It is hard to determine which French word to use just by sound so you have to think about the context. Even the context doesn’t give it away sometimes. Then you have to look for plural and gender agreement because, even though they are spelled differently, they often sound the same. This is what makes it hard to learn Frenc, many words sound so similar.

I will keep at it and I’m sure I’ll make progress. Ill try to keep track of the good and bad about using a language learning program to learn a language so you can decide if it is right for you.

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Alliance Française or Rosetta Stone

Owen — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 03:57:05 +0000

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Source: WikipediaToday is the last day of my French class at the Alliance Française. I have been taking classes there since January. 3 months straight, 9-12:30 everyday Monday through Friday. I have enjoyed my classes and meeting all the people but I am burning out. The levels of the people in the same class are beginning to vary too much for me and I feel I am learning more outside of class than in it. I started using Rosetta Stone again and I find I really like it. So for now I am going work on my own.

The benefits of going to a class are easy to see. You get an instant community of people to share your experiences and practice the language with. It is harder to blow off doing classwork. The teacher is watching. You make a financial commitment and you feel obliged to continue. You have a live teacher so your mistakes can be corrected immediately etc. You can build a social life and learn about wonderful things happening in your city. ETC ETC ETC.

I like Rosetta Stone because it is quite dynamic. There is a listening, reading, speaking, and writing component to each and every lesson. Actually multiple ones for each lesson. You can use it extensively or just a little bit, it is really self paced. I find the dictation and typing part the most helpful. It helps me understand when I am being spoken to. It helps me learn the French keyboard. It helps me learn how to spell as well as learning gender, subject verb agreement (in French this is hard because many verb tenses have the same sound but are spelled differently so you need to examine the context), d’accord with the passe composé, and many more things.

The speaking part is interesting. You plug a USB mic to your computer. You do the lesson for a particular skill. The speaking part will show you a sound wave. It will speak the phrase to you and you see the sound wave. Next you speak into your mic and it records your voice and shows you the sound wave your voice made. You can listen to what you said and what Rosetta Stone said. You can also see how your sound wave compares to the model sound wave. It is very interesting. I did this more in the US but now that I live in France it is easy to practice with real live people so I don’t use it as much.

So we’ll see how it goes. The class gave me a quick jump start and a solid foundation but now I am ready to direct my own learning. Try the Alliance Française if you have the chance but for less than the cost of only one month of classes you can purchase Rosetta Stone and have the equivalent of all 9 levels. You can also try it out online to see if you like it. A mix of the 2 is probably best anyway.