[TigerMandingo]

I've been studying French on and off for about the last 5 years and I thought I'd share some free online resources that have helped me tremendously.

Le Point du FLE - http://www.lepointdufle.net

This one is my personal favorite. Youre gonna find all sorts of grammar exercises, audio samples, and vocab. In terms of difficulty, the content is aimed at an intermediate level speaker, but if youre confident enough i say why the fuck not) The site is in French, though, so you will most likely need a basic understanding of the language to navigate through it.

Les Films Francais avec Sous Titres Francais - http://filmfra.com

Great site for French movies, and superior to Netflix in this respect because it gives you French subtitles.

Quebec French Guide - http://offqc.com

Wonderful site for discovering Quebecois French, especially if youre planning to spend time in Quebec/game girls here. You will find videos, idiomatic expressions, and other tools to better understand the Quebecois dialect.

I will post more resources in the future as I continue to discover them. Bonne chances mes amis!

[Screwston]

How similar is French to Spanish? Im gonna improve my Spanish and was thinking of tackling French when I'm more comfortable with it. I like the French ladies ooh la la.

[Moma]

(04-11-2014 01:49 PM)Screwston Wrote:  

How similar is French to Spanish? Im gonna improve my Spanish and was thinking of tackling French when I'm more comfortable with it. I like the French ladies ooh la la.

There are several Latin based languages out there and both French and Spanish are Latin based. I would definitely say that French is a harder language than Spanish. Spanish reads as it is sounded (by and large) but French plays a whole other type of game.

However, I think if your Spanish is tight, you will be able to find French a bit easier as they both follow that annoying masculine/feminine rule regarding nouns etc and you also have to roll that R properly or risk a blank look from the native speakers.

[TigerMandingo]

(04-11-2014 01:49 PM)Screwston Wrote:  

How similar is French to Spanish? Im gonna improve my Spanish and was thinking of tackling French when I'm more comfortable with it. I like the French ladies ooh la la.

Good question. Native Spanish-speakers in Quebec have told me that French wasnt as easy as they thought. The pronunciation, in particular, can be hard. I remember taking French courses in the States and the students seriously struggling with basic words/phrases, constantly mispronouncing simple words like "bonjour" "au revoir".

[The_CEO]

(04-11-2014 01:49 PM)Screwston Wrote:  

How similar is French to Spanish? Im gonna improve my Spanish and was thinking of tackling French when I'm more comfortable with it. I like the French ladies ooh la la.

Knowing Spanish will also help with French with respect to vocab. (see: Cognates) due to the romance language thing that has already been mentioned.

Going from Spanish to Portuguese would be easier or vice-versa.
Same with French-Italian.

[Screwston]

I have no interest in Italian girls though Its gonna have to be French, Polish, German, Russian, whichever language will benefit me the most with pussy.

[Mentavious]

I agree with most said.

I went with French before spanish and I found French to be much harder. There aren't many spanish words I found to have silent letters as opposed to French where every other word has a silent letter.

il est ce chat

[mikado]

Le français est la langue de l'amour.
French is the language of love.
El idioma francés es la lengua del amor.

Good start.

[The_CEO]

The radio links here are not bad, and the accent is kind of cool

http://www.bbc.co.uk/afrique/

[Teutatis]

I have to admit that I love the sound of French

[Switch]

I will learn Spanish after fluency in Mandarin, then next will be French. For one, it sounds fucking cool. Also, French girls have some sort of thing about them that drives me absolutely crazy. I don't know what it is. They're stunning. Third, it's such a snobby thing to do as an American.

Cue Alizee before she hit the wall at 100 MPH.

[The_CEO]

(04-12-2014 02:48 AM)Switch Wrote:  

Cue Alizee before she hit the wall at 100 MPH.

[Screwston]

Is it common for French girls to have short hair like that? I always imagine them with bobs and smoking long cigarettes

[DarkKing]

You can find a lot of good stuff for French on Youtube.

As for Spanish speakers learning French, they especially have a very hard time with pronounciation.

[Architekt]

I'm in two minds about French. Sometimes I love the sound of it but other times it just sounds like a fat man spitting everywhere while he chokes on the cigarette tar and grease in his throat

Anyway, Michel Thomas French course is top notch, and the Paul Noble course is very much similar. Assimil course is good too.

Would be cool of this turned into a French language lounge thing

[Earth]

thanks for this, french is def. one of the languages i'd like to learn.

[Earth]

how long did it take for you to become minimally conversationally fluent?

[DarkKing]

(04-15-2014 10:23 PM)Earth Wrote:  

how long did it take for you to become minimally conversationally fluent?

Depends on what your definition of minimally conversationally fluent is.

[TigerMandingo]

Guys, another mini-update. Watching The Simpsons in French and following along with French subtitles helped me enormously. Not to mention the French dubs are funny as fuck

The following site has all of the seasons of the Simpsons in French (as well as many other TV shows)

http://streaming-series.org/?s=les+simpson

Now, if you'd like to follow along with subs go here

http://www.simpsonspark.com

Just as a heads up, the first site does contain pop-ups and such but that can be easily solved with ad-blocker etc. The latter site is all in French but gives you access to the scripts of each episode.

[DarkKing]

Yeah I wrote about the Simpsons in French on my language blog a while back
There were tons of episodes of Simpsons with French subtitles on Youtube back a few months ago, but they seem to have taken them down. However you can still find Simpsons in French on Youtube, however without the subtitles.

[TigerMandingo]

On a related note, props to Bradley Cooper for speaking a surprisingly good French.

[Rang off the Pipe]

I'm studying French right now for my own purposes and found the link below to be good for conjugation practice. I haven't gone too deeply into the website and there might be other useful stuff.

http://www.laits.utexas.edu/fi/vp/

[OMYG]

Je parle francais!

Took 4 years of it in high school so it got drilled pretty good but I am not going to lie it was useless living here in LA and forgot a lot of it. My first language was spanish but I am better in English and i can say french is very similar to spanish but it gets a little confusing in the more advanced stuff.

I love the language though and I know the basics I can make my way around if you dropped me in france right now but I want to dig all this back up from the depths of my brain.

[TigerMandingo]

Some things Ive been noticing as Im progressing through the French-language universe:

- the French compress A LOT. For instance, in French courses you will be taught to say things like "Est-ce que tu vas au cinema ce soir?" (Are you going to the movies tonight?). In conversation, youre more likely to hear something like "t'vas au cine?" which will blow the mind off a newbie French speaker. This might seem obvious but I find with French it is especially true. The French often engage in this type of speaking: highly informal and compressed. It is one of the reasons why classroom learning is almost always a time waster for learning this language.

- the French speak FAST. Especially the girls and younger people, in general. A good way to practice your French is to seek out older people. They tend to slow down and enunciate their word better. You need to crawl before you can walk, so to speak.

- the Bescherelle is an invaluable tool. The Bescherelle is a compact little textbook full of conjugated French verbs in all tenses. Highly useful.

[Don Juan Tenorio]

(04-12-2014 02:48 AM)Switch Wrote:  

I will learn Spanish after fluency in Mandarin, then next will be French. For one, it sounds fucking cool. Also, French girls have some sort of thing about them that drives me absolutely crazy. I don't know what it is. They're stunning. Third, it's such a snobby thing to do as an American.

Cue Alizee before she hit the wall at 100 MPH.

She is still très belle, pity she has ruined her body with ugly tatoos. IWB yet though.