You must train on all of these skills, and they will then reinforce one another. The very best way to learn French is to visit France or another French-speaking country. This allows you to start with a clean slate, as babies do. However, since most of us are unwilling or unable to take that step, the next best option is immersion. If you are serious about learning French, a period of immersion during which you live in a Francophone culture is a good idea once you have some basic familiarity with the language.
If you can't travel to a French-speaking country, then try listening to French-language programs on the radio, TV, or the Internet. Rent or buy French-language movies many American and U. Pay attention to pronunciation. Grab a French speaker you meet and talk to him or her in French. Listen, speak, and practice. Read French newspapers and magazines.
Google's news page, which links to French-language news stories, is an excellent source that will enrich your vocabulary. This book, like all French training material, is oriented towards the written language. The speaking examples are straight from the standardized written language. If you were to become an expert in this French, you would probably be completely confused when you arrive in a French speaking country.
Unlike the written language, the spoken language is very dynamic. The French people would not readily understand you, and you would not understand them.
You can picture in your mind, a person learning English from a two hundred year old book, and coming to your town and saying "Hast thou" or "Wherefore art thou. The reason written French is stressed in learning Schools and Internet courses , is that you can go from this standardized language to modern spoken French much easier than English to spoken French, and then going backwards to learning written French. A simple example is: Je ne comprends pas I don't understand. For a business person not wanting to sound too plebeian this would be spoken as: Jeun comprends pas , with the Je ne joined together.
But most people on the street simplify this even further. The ne is deemed redundant and falls by the wayside, and the hard Je sound is reduced to a sh sound: French is a language that is read, spoken, and sung. Each has different rules. Lyric and Poetry have pronunciation rules that are different than the written, and spoken French has no rules in comparison.
Learning written French is only step one, and modern spoken French is your step two. This book is for learning written French.
Many courses of language study assume you are going there for vacation, and so begin their lessons with common survival phrases that people use. There is some of that in this book, but consider that "verbs" are what makes a language. There are six verbs in French that, when memorized, will give you a head start when moving on to learning sentences.
The distinction between a phrase and a sentence, is that a phrase does not have a subject or verb. This is why they are easy to learn, and a main part of vacation type books. You can't go wrong with a phrase.
Unlike a phrase, a sentence is a grammatical unit. You will need nouns, pronouns, adjectives words that modify nouns , adverbs words that modify verbs and adjectives , etc. There are also different types of sentences: The structure of sentences, and not just phrases, must be studied and practiced in order to learn a new language.
Most important, at beginning levels, is to get your French face on. This means pronunciation is critical. You do not want to have to unlearn anything when you get to the next level. The textual pronunciation examples here are based on the International Phonetic Alphabet IPA , and should be used to prepare your mind. The IPA symbols are designed by scientists, and are no match to listening to French people within their own environment. It is important to actually listen to a real French speaker at this stage.
Use the example voices contained in the book, but also watch French media on the Internet. You should be cautioned about French songs. It is acceptable for artists to twist a word for style and for rhyme, and they love to embellish endings. You will also find that mutes are pronounced in lyric and poetry. It is often the case that a singer or poem recitation will say "ewnuh" for une and "veeuh" for vie. You may also note, to prevent boredom, a lyric may be "veeuh" on one verse, and "vee" on the next. Examples, as to why songs and poetry are added experiences in learning and enjoying the French language.
Just as in English, you will use these as a base to create the fourteen 14 French tenses. Present, Future, Conditional, etc. Don't worry about tenses for this exercise. They are complications that will take months and years to master. Generally, only ten 10 tenses are used except for advanced levels of French. The above verbs must be mastered to even begin. You might think the list is too short, so feel free to add verbs into your flash-card rotation.
The next verb examples, that are important to any language, are the movement type verbs. While you can "have, know, can, etc" you also need to "go, come, or stay" in many conversations. These verbs are considered basic building blocks. That brings us to the "Big Seven" French question words.
These, like the above will quickly become complicated as well. The following is obviously simplified, but your understanding at this level, will quickly get you to the next level. There are many methods for students to learn new subjects, and the first method is to use what are known as "tricks," designed to make it easier so it would seem. These tricks, in most cases, merely prevent the brain from storing the information for direct lookup. One example is the French word chat. Others, such as changing -ment to -ly or -ant to -ing are a similar waste of time.
A good example of the damage that can be done by these "tricks", is in learning Morse Code. Many teachers will begin by showing the dit's and dah's visually, and then make the sound using the key following each symbol. So that dah-di-da-dit "-. Alas, this technique only works up to a certain speed, and then the students brain is so damaged, they have no hope of using the code any faster than 10 Words Per Minute. It was found in the 's , that if you just associate the whole sound with a letter, and ignore the combinations of dit's and dah's, that new students listening to 20 Words Per Minute for several weeks, were able to go to work immediately.
A famous Scottish-American named Andrew Carnegie went from a message boy to head telegraph operator by learning to associate sounds with whole words, and not just writing down each character, as the method used by his peers. The advice offered in this book, is to avoid these tricks , and to associate word and sentence sounds with their meaning. Listen to the new word or sentence, and store the meaning in your brain. Do not try to translate one language into your native language before responding. Simply associate the word or sentence, but do not translate it. When you go shopping, and hear customers saying in English "How much is that?
After associating ten things about the word "Combien" the brain will simplify matters for you, much like it pulls the steering wheel with your arm, after the eyes see a pot-hole ahead. Forever more, "Combien" will be associated with a quantity "How much", or "How many" just as pot-holes are associated with "avoid. French is based on the Latin alphabet also called the Roman alphabet , and there are 26 letters. Originally there were 25 letters, with 'W' being added by the mid-nineteenth century. Unlike the English, who call it a "double-u," the French use "double-v" and pronounce it doo-bluh-vay after the 'V' which is pronounced vay.
These two letters are used mostly with adopted foreign words. The French alphabet used today is less than years old. In addition, French uses several accents: A circumflex applies to all vowels, except Y considered as a vowel: Two combined letters called orthographic ligatures are used: Finally, a cedilla is used on the c to make it sound like an English s: In French, certain consonants are silent when they are the final letter of a word.
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The letters d , l , n , s , t and z are pronounced with the tip of the tongue against the upper teeth and the middle of the tongue against the roof of the mouth. In English, one would pronounce these letters with the tip of the tongue at the roof of one's mouth. Unlike English, when you pronounce the letters b and p in French, little to no air should come out of your mouth. In terms of phonetics, the difference in the French b and p and their English counterparts is one of aspiration. Fortunately, in English both aspirated and unaspirated variants allophones exist, but only in specific environments.
If you're a native speaker, say the word pit and then the word spit out loud. Did you notice the extra puff of air in the first word that doesn't come with the second? The letter 'q' is always followed by a 'u'. There are only two exceptions, 'cinq' five and 'coq' rooster. A final 'r' after 'e' is generally mute, but it is pronounced on words of one syllable 'fer' iron , 'mer' sea and 'hier' yesterday.
The h is never pronounced, whether it is aspirated or not aspirated. The only way to tell if the h at the beginning of a word is aspirated is to look it up in the dictionary. In short, the words must be memorized. Five different kinds of accent marks are used in written French. In many cases, an accent changes the sound of the letter to which it is added. In others, the accent has no effect on pronunciation.
Accents in French never indicate stress which always falls on the last syllable. The following table lists every French accent mark and the letters with which it can be combined:. Since this reform is relatively recent and mostly unknown to laypeople, the two spellings can be used interchangeably. The acute accent is the most common accent used in written French.
This accent is often called a 'hat' in language and mathematics, and usually indicates the disappearance of the old-French s after the vowel wearing it the hat but this s can still be found in a noun or a verb of the same lexical family. The cedilla is used only with the letter c , and is said to make the c soft , making it equivalent to the English and French s. When talking to one's peers or to children, Salut is used as a greeting. Its English equivalents would be hi and hey. Bonjour , literally meaning good day , should be used for anyone else.
One is upon arrival, the other upon departure.
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In addition to being used as an informal greeting, Salut also means bye. Again, it should only be used among friends. Another informal greeting is ciao , an Italian word commonly used in France. Au revoir is the only formal way to say Good-bye. It is normal to just reply by stating your name, however you may also respond with [[wikt: Je m'appelle [ name ].
The phrase literally means It goes? A more formal way to say this is Comment allez-vous? Bien is preceded by certain adverbs to specify the degree to which you are well. Highlight or hover over a line to show the answer. This is an important difference between French and English today. English no longer distinguishes between the singular, and the plural, formal version of you.
The use of thou for the informal singular version faded almost completely by the mid-nineteenth century.
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Vous is the plural form of you. This is somewhat equivalent to you all , you guys , all of you , except that it does not carry any familiarity when used with the plural. You would use it to address your friends as well as when talking to the whole government at a press conference. Vous is also used to refer to single individuals to show respect, to be polite or to be neutral. It is used when talking to someone who is important, someone who is older than you are, or someone with whom you are unfamiliar.
This is known as Vouvoiement. Note the conversation between M. Lambert above as an example of this use. Conversely, tu is the singular and informal form of vous you in French. It is commonly used when referring to a friend or a family member, and is also used between children or when addressing a child. If it is used when speaking to a stranger, it signals disrespect. This is known as Tutoiement. As a rule of thumb, use tu only when you would call that person by his first name, otherwise use vous.
French people will make it known when they would like you to refer to them by tu.
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The use of vous is less common in Quebequois than in French from France. In sociolinguistics, a T—V distinction describes the situation wherein a language has second-person pronouns that distinguish varying levels of politeness, social distance, courtesy, familiarity, or insult toward the addressee. The expressions T-form informal and V-form formal , with reference to the initial letters of these pronouns in Latin, tu and vos. In Latin, tu was originally the singular, and vos the plural, with no distinction for honorific or familiar. It was only between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries that the norms for the use of T- and V-forms crystallized.
Note that with vous , the verb appelez is spelled with one 'l', whereas with tu it has two l's appelles. This is an irregular conjugation which will be covered more in-depth in a later lesson.
dis tu rves french edition Manual
You are at your first business conference representing your new company, and your manager begins to speak with a colleague you have never met. You want to greet him, tell him your name, and ask him his name.
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We can remark that 21, 31, 41, 51, 61 and 71 can have et un with or without a hyphen; otherwise this it is simply both words consecutively vingt-six , trente-trois , etc with a hyphen in between. For , cent is added before the rest of the number; this continues up to and onward. Many speakers of French outside of France refer to the numbers 70 to 99 in the same pattern as the other numbers.
On May 5, one would say "C'est le cinq mai. In French, il est is used to express the time; though it would literally translate as he is , it is actually, in this case, equivalent to it is impersonal il. Unlike in English, it is always important to use heures hours when referring to the time. Time is often abbreviated using h for heure s. For example, 9 o'clock AM would be 9h or 9h They also use hour time in this format, so 10 o'clock PM would be 22h. In addition, French uses several accents which are worth understanding. A circumflex applies to all vowels: Two combined letters are used: The French time system traditionally uses a hour scale.
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