France Tales » Learning French

French Friday’s

Owen — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 19:12:20 +0000

I just got back from French Friday. It was a group organized for English speakers to practice their French, I think. It has turned into an English conversational group. Now there are many French who attend to improve their English conversation skills. I’ve invited my students many times, but no one has come yet. They all promise but they never show up. Oh well, I’ll have to look elsewhere to practice my French.

English in Toulouse: French Friday Group

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Livemocha-learn a language while social networking

Owen — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 06:25:13 +0000

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I came across this tool while reading the blog Social Web Tools. Livemocha is a social networking site but also you can complete 4 levels of language training in many languages. It looks very promising. I don’t think it looks great above the intermediate level but for getting the basics it looks quite good for a free tool.

View the Social Web Tools review here.

View Livemocha’s site here.

View my Livemocha profile here

Join, be my friend, send me lots of messages, umm you can send me messages but just don’t send lots of silly messages.

If you are going to spend the money, why not buy the grand-daddy of all language learning programs Rosetta Stone. Check out the links below.VVVVVV

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Alliance Française- Niveau 4 farewell

Owen — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 06:55:22 +0000

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Last Friday was my final day for Level 4 at the Alliance Française and for French classes for a while. Here is a picture of everyone. Stay in touch.

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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.