 Poster: A snowHead
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| Claude B wrote: |
I was chatting to a neighbour this afternoon about another neighbour who mysteriously disappeared. He complemented me on my much improved french which made my day  |
Well done. I have noticed your conversations in FB too. Neighbour as in adjacent apartment?
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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I signed up to Audible for my free trial, download both box sets of the Paul Noble French then cancelled. Feel a bit guilty for taking advantage of the free offer but it's amazon so I got over that guilt in seconds.
There are some good French fiction books too that are cheap for kindle. I like to read French news sites online and try figure it out. Also duolingo does French podcasts which are not bad.
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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@achilles, she's the one who disappeared. Was chatting with someone from the othet side of the building.
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
You need to Login to know who's really who.
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Linguaphone is pretty good on a listening-only basis for the car.
Also, Glossika is worth a try. It's a bit ghastly as you're learning sentences parrot fashion (which isn't the bad part) but the sentences are translated into French from English (and in turn were translated from Chinese/Thai or something) so it's scarcely idiomatic... But it will give you a huge amount of repetition. It claims to get you all the way to fluency which is complete rubbish but it's good for time spent in the car.
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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It claims to get you all the way to fluency which is complete rubbish
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 I once did a Serbo-Croat thing in the car, driving to work in Scotland - I did indeed become entirely fluent, provided I only had to say "I would like a table on the terrace please". I could rattle that off in splendid style. However, it is true that actually speaking out loud is very important. My husband knew quite a bit of French, he just couldn't actually make it come out of his gob. So when he said to me, in a hardware shop "We need to ask whether switch is the correct one for our set up" what he meant was that I had to ask.....
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You'll need to Register first of course.
You'll need to Register first of course.
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I learnt french by glueing myself to the French coverage of the TDF, ( which I'm very interested in ) , with a dictionary on my lap. Nowdays you can probably even have French subtitles to help.
It's all about two things - Immersion and motivation. If both are present you will learn it.
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I've been learning Italian for the last couple of years.
Re OPs original question about having time in a car for deliveries
If you're sat around for a few minutes here and there then these helped me
1) Duolingo - good for basic vocab and grammar - Free but I pay USD60 pa as the premium gives more flexibility and you don't get kicked out of a lesson just because you made a couple of silly mistakes. The main thing is to do at least one lesson each day.
2) Any flashcard tool - good for vocabulary, I use memrise as you can make your own cards into a 'course' or they have a library. There was an Italian Duolingo course which worked well as this drilled in the vocabulary very well whereas Duolingo helped with the grammar. Also a course to learn the simple conjugations of the top 100 verbs which was slow but invaluable. These tools work by spaced repetition. I tried the Duolingo flashcard tool, it was ok for the basics but didn't allow for synonyms so not much use after you've got the basics.
When driving - Coffee break Italian podcast is very good, they have a French version so as suggested by others I would definitely try this.
I can see how the various audio courses would be helpful to start with.
Once you get past the basics then ebooks on the Kindle work well, just install the French language dictionary. There are quite a few books aimed at specific levels but you need to know roughly your level (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2) books start at A2. Once you get to B1/B2 then you can start picking up simple books written for the appropriate nationality rather than just written to teach the language.
However after a year or so I found I was getting ok at reading but that was about it, I needed a more structured course and to speak more. I see others are joking about the same thing  I tried a couple of local classes which were pretty good but a long drive for me as we live in the middle of nowhere. So someone at work recommended I get a private tutor (it had been good for them). There is a site called italki specifically for language tutors, there are thousands of them. I found a tutor who is Italian but lives in Peru so charges a bit less than European based tutors and I liked his approach (you can try several tutors at a reduced cost). I pay USD15 per hour and it has made a massive difference to my Italian, the site is www.italki.com but if you decide to give it a go you can use this link and spend USD20 we will both get a usd 10 credit https://www.italki.com/i/60b06G?hl=en-us
Finally Yabla - YouTube for language learners but fee based. You can watch videos with/without subtitles in English and your target language. They have whole TV series in the native language cut into 3-4 minute chunks with the option to listen and fill in the blanks so good for listening and comprehension but not for absolute beginners.
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