Yellow Fang said:Somewhat middle-aged or elderly women for the most part, or young women who did not come back after several weeks.
The ones in my class came every week
Yellow Fang said:Somewhat middle-aged or elderly women for the most part, or young women who did not come back after several weeks.
The beeb stuff is great, and free, and well-thought out. I know about this sort of stuff (I have been training language teachers for nigh on 20yrs ) and my advice would be toPanter said:Thats some serious guarantee
Mind you, they are expensive. I'm not sure I'm keen enough to spend that sort of money but I'll see how it goes.
The good old BBC also offer online language learning FOC so I'll proabaly have a play with that first and spend some money if I do manage to persist with it
Fnaar said:a) learn as much vocabulary and stock phrases as possible
study grammar but not at the expenxse of (a)
I think that's just lazy teaching to be honest... I'd say that a teacher needs to present the language to students in a way that helps them to understand it, not simply expect lists of verbs to do the job... also, research shows that vocab/stock phrases (e.g. ways of greeting, ways of complaining, ways of complimenting, etc etc) are more successful than emphasising grammar ... both impt, but with more words you can get your meaning across even if grammar not 100%. Grammar will usually follow on, depending on interest and motivation of the student. Compare it to learning how to ride a bike... you can do it, fall off, get back on etc, or you can study the theory of balancing, steering, mechanics etc and then get on....yello said:Interesting, I'm glad you chipped in. My wife's lessons are very much vocab focused... she gets lists of verbs to learn for instance. That'd do my head in! It's pure rote learning to me, VERY difficult and dull. My classes are much more grammar biased and I like that because I get to grips with the mechanics of the language, I enjoy it because my mind works that way... BUT my fellow students find formal grammar difficult and a turn-off.
Fnaar said:d) read read read... French newspapers, online stuff....
Odyssey said:I keep trying to learn French. I'm struggling to get past the 'Bonjour' stage, tbh; I'm really not sure I have it in me to learn another language, I struggle with English! But I find the online stuff invaluable.
I did have a lot of good sites. There's one somewhere full of french vocab, grammar and phrases (from beginners to advanced, including slang if I remember correct), complete with the audio of pronunciations for every word. Another one that had various French writings (childrens stories and more) with the english translation adjacent. Unfortunately Firefox spat its dummy and I lost all my bookmarks (twice!), but if I find them again I'll post them up.
Since there does seem to be a few French speakers here, it'd be interesting if anyone knows of any decent online content. Maybe some French cycling sites even? And what Newspapers would be recommended?
'Something else which I tried to get in the habit of, is when using big global sites, such as Youtube for example, using the French language version.