.

[Judgeneo]

At a very basic level, then I've had some success with Rosetta Stone but you need to be pretty disciplined to make it truly work.

I'm using Rosetta Stone for Mandarin, and it seems to be very effective. Though I would reitterate the point about discipline, I've been slacking a lot lately...

parlez vous anglais

However, this has been more than sufficient for my trips to france so far.

 

[Rotty]

Oh look....

was just asking

 

[Freefaller]

The regular verbs are all well and good, it's the *******ing ones that don't. Then the future, past, future conditional and all that gubbins.

Je mangerais beaucoup de glace, si je veux. Or something.

Indeed - even I muck up the conditional/indicative/subjunctive/imperative tenses, especially as they all contain several tenses (present, past, future and then there's the passé simple and antérieur which I cannot get my head around. The anterior future is also a bit of a mind boggling one.

The French generally try to stick to present, passé composé, imparfait, futur simple. Even then they oft get it wrong.

was just asking

<3

 

[randomshenans]

That's what I was told as well. Most people we speak to (tbh that's not saying much around here) use the present and passé composé so we were told. Then you think, surely you should know it? Like, it's your language? Not you, the French. *shrugs*

 

[Ranger07]

I've been learning French for a while now.

I started off with the Michel Thomas complete French CD, it does the job but I like to listen through each CD several times to take it all in. The problem with his CD's are there is this stupid dopy bint that keeps making mistakes when he asks her questions, its mildly amusing at first but when re-listening it fast becomes annoying.

I then tried the Paul Noble complete French CD, I found it really good, very easy to understand and nothing annoying to grate on you when re-listening.

I now need something intermediate on audio(I tend to listen on my commute). If anyone could suggest anything I could buy or download that would be great. I'd like something with actual conversations with help to understand them.

Thanks to this thread I've now found Duolingo, thats quite fun and I'm breezing through it although I've only listened to audio CD's until now. I'm pretty pleased I've picked up so much.

 

[Ransom]

google for
how to learn any language

many helpfull people an ideas on there its a forum
on phone so cannot post a link

 

[platypus]

@Ranger07 I'll look into the Paul Noble disk, I've done the Michel Thomas course and yes the woman is irritating as hell, which really does make re-listening to it difficult.

Duolingo is great too, I think my next step though now is just to start speaking to French people.

 

[D.P.]

The unfortunate thing, and this is true for all languages, is the most common verbs like have are irregular. Nothing for it but rote learning.

The problem I had with French was the listening, I just found it incredibly difficult. I got my reading up to level C and my writing lower B but I struggled to take part in fluid conversation because I just couldn't comprehend what people were saying to any reasonable level. Your basic simple slow chats directed at me were fine, but as soon as people spoke naturally then it was game over.
It was really annoying, I could read the newspaper on the train just fine but sounded like a rated when speaking to anyone.


I'm finding the inverse now I'm learning German. The listening is far easier but the grammar much harder for me. I'm also getting confused when I try to speak German because the French expression always jumps into my head first then it is impossible to search my German lexicon for the right words.

 

[platypus]

Yeah well, it's looking like I have 6 months to pick up fluency .

 

[Kreeeee]

.

 

[mejinks]

Its difficult to also convey humour into French, for example:

fromage manger singe rendu
or
singe qui mange du fromage se rend

 

[Arterion]

A free site like Duolingo is a good starting point to master the basics at least.

This. And Rosetta Stone.

 

[Kreeeee]

.

 

[Spursingham]

I haven't tried them myself, but a few Russian's in my office say they used these Skype Community websites.
I guess you'd need to get a basic understanding of a language first....or maybe not. I have no idea.
Basically, if you want to learn french, you pick a french speaker who wants to learn English and you learn off of each other. I guess it's another example of immersion.

Here's the website: http://www.easylanguageexchange.com/

 

[squerble]

As has already been mentioned, using Duolingo or Rosetta Stone to get a basis and then immerse yourself otherwise (Skype etc). I'm trying to learn Bulgarian but "това е много трудно" luckily I have a Bulgarian fiancée and some of her friends to practise with, as learning materials such as Duolingo or RS don't cater for smaller languages.


One thing you will (may) hate is grammatical gender. Luckily, English has mostly abolished it but for most European languages it is still very prevalent. Here is a table which I broadly agree with as the difficulty of language to learn for native English speakers. Norwegian is often touted as one of the easiest to learn as it has very similar sentence structure and grammar.

 

[dirtychinchilla]

With regards to the genders, you get used to them and I was good, while I spoke French actively, at determining which genders words are. You just get a feel for it.

 

[squerble]

With regards to the genders, you get used to them and I was good, while I spoke French actively, at determining which genders words are. You just get a feel for it.

Luckily, in Bulgarian, the ending letter of the noun defines the gender (at least for the vast majority of cases). Unfortunately, the changing gender also changes every other word related to that subject, so saying "my car" or "my coffee" would actually use a different for 'my'. Pain in the arse

 

[Destination]

Immersion and living in the country is the best way to learn.

However, things like Rosetta stone are okay as an introduction but without formal tuition and 2-way conversation it can be quite limiting.

Do you have any night classes you can do?

Long haired dictionary is the best, or in BrightonBelle's case the short haired version

 

[Shocky-FM]

A free site like Duolingo is a good starting point to master the basics at least.

Good site, but I wish they would add Japanese.

 

[Souleh]

Rosetta Stone getting some good endorsements in here. My French is rusty and was A-Level grade at best- Is RS still the best for this or is it too beginner biased?