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For understanding I suggest (besides the obvious time spent listening) to listen specifically to children's audio books and to "bad" movies.
The reason is that in these settings there are over-emphasized phrases that are "over-pronounced" and this is one of the ways to actually get your auditory brain to decide what kind of new sounds are important before ...
24
Quelques dictionnaires explicatifs (donnant le sens des mots en français), c'est toujours bien de vérifier le sens des mots donnés par les dictionnaires bilingues.
http://atilf.atilf.fr/ le Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé (malheureusement les liens vers l'intérieur du site sont temporaires)
http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/ (une série de ...
21
This may sound obvious, but avoid translated movies/series — pick ones which are natively in French. There aren't so many French series, though. A list of French television series is maintained on Wikipedia.
I'd probably recommend starting with animated series. Being targeted at children, the language may be easier. The "Once upon a time..." (Il était une ...
20
Not exactly a series per se, but I found "Qui veut gagner des millions?" to be very interesting to watch to improve my own French. The questions (and answers) are comparable to the English version, with say 50% being cultural (which I mostly hadn't a clue on, but learned a lot from) and 50% being general knowledge (which I knew or could guess at in English), ...
16
I don't know of any resource as complete as the Oxford 3000, but lists of words sorted by frequency have been compiled by lexicologists, such as:
one published on Éduscol (direct PDF link), created by Étienne Brunet, has the most used 1500 words. It is commonly used by elementary or middle school teachers.
Wiktionary has another one, with 1750 words all ...
15
French pronunciation is more regular than English, even if the rules are complicated and do have exceptions. So natives and learners need pronunciation information less often than they do with English. Nonetheless most dictionaries do include phonetic transcriptions, so I'm a little puzzled why you feel a lack of those. (What doesn't exist for French is a ...
13
I already tried Rosetta Stone, for a short time (so my review could be not exactly the best), also a lot of methods for learning languages. And I get very impressed when I see people talking about it.
Here are my thoughts about Rosetta Stone software:
The learning system is repetitive. (this is the principle of it, but it didn't work for me) Images and ...
11
http://www.linguee.fr is great for human translations of common and even not so common phrases within the context they occur, it searches translations that are on the web.
11
Le premier outil qui me vient à l'esprit est Dialang qui permet de tester le vocabulaire, mais pas uniquement.
C'est un outil de diagnostic basé sur les niveaux du CECR mais n'est pas un outil de certification.
Nécessite une connexion à internet et de s'enregistrer mais c'est entièrement gratuit.
Je tiens à préciser que ce n'est pas réservé au Français et ...
11
I have been teaching myself French for a couple of years now, so I can give some advice from experience.
I started with fundamentals:
noun genders + le, la, les, un, une
oui – non – peut-être
pronouns: il, elle, ils, elles, tu, je, vous, nous, difference between tu and vous
definition of infinitive tense, make sure that basic concept is understood.
être, ...
11
It's because a dictionary does not have to show conjugation. It's purpose is to explain the meaning of the words and the correct spelling.
In French (i dunno for other languages) we differentiate spelling and grammar. If you want to see all the forms of a verb, you don't want to look into a dictionary but into a "conjugueur" (most known is the "Bescherelle")...
10
Having lived in France for a few years, I myself spoke well enough to live there happily, play for a local football team, run a business and have French friends. My partner at the time however did not. She only had a very limited French vocabulary and had no idea how to string a sentence together.
You say me where bakery. Bakery where? Where is the bakery? ...
9
This may be off-topic (downvote if you think so!) but I think books are just as useful for learning a language as movies, if not more so. I especially recommend the Harry Potter series, for the following reasons:
It was written for children, so it's fairly easy to understand, especially the first two books.
It's very long (the English version is about 3,500 ...
9
Les corpus ESLO (Enquête socio-linguistique orléanaise) 1 et 2, aussi connu sous le nom de corpus d'Orléans est le plus grand corpus de français oral. Il est transcrit et partiellement étiqueté. La version 1 date des années 60, la version 2 des environs de 2010.
En ce qui concerne les travaux sur les parties du discours le French Treebank de l'équipe d'Anne ...
9
C’est l’usage qui crée ce type d’abréviation. Le but est probablement à l’origine d’économiser d’une part le nombre de caractères (160 par SMS, longtemps facturés par message) et d’autre part le temps de frappe (écrire avec un clavier de téléphone était long).
Si ces abréviations ne sont pas codifiées, elles souvent sont le fruits :
de suppressions de ...
9
Aller sur Dicollecte
Cliquer sur Lexique [5.2] et télécharger.
Après décompression, votre bonheur se trouve dans le fichier lexique-dicollecte-fr-v5.2.txt
... bienvenue en francophonie !
8
I'd strongly suggest finding a local group that speaks French socially, and going along!
Meetup.com is a good way to do this, but it isn't the only way to find groups. (It just so happens to be very strong on French language groups near where I live, which is why I know about it).
Once you've located a nearby group that welcomes people at your level, go ...
8
Here are some observations while learning French.
The French spoken by native French is very fast. For beginners its very hard to catch up. Also the pronunciation is not always clear or sometimes there is no distinction between two words. As our brain is not trained yet for these sound patterns, for beginners its hard to understand.
For beginners, I would ...
8
Tu auras du mal à trouver des manuels scolaires directement téléchargeables à cause des problèmes de copyright.
Mais tu pourras peut-être trouver quelque chose qui t'intéresse à partir du portail FLE (Français Langue Étrangère) Le Point du FLE.
Dans la rubrique activités il y a de nombreuses adresses probablement intéressantes. J'ai repéré ces deux là :
...
8
Having the same issue in the opposite way, the best advice I have is to rely on Wikipedia's interwiki, both for the style and for the vocabulary. Try to read the same proof in French and in English and to see how sentences and symbols map1, if you need a translation of a word, look at the article in (en), then follow the interwiki to (fr). It works for ...
8
First 7 results on google :
http://french.about.com/cs/vocabulary/a/falsecognates.htm
http://www.oxfordlanguagedictionaries.com/Public/PublicResources.html?direction=b-fr-en&sp=S/oldo/resources/fr/Difficulties-in-French-fr.html
I think this last one (oxfordlanguage) offers a good small list :
http://www.frenchcrazy.com/2011/08/french-english-false-...
8
Je peux recommander C'est pas sorcier, qui m'a beaucoup aidé lorsque j'apprenais le français. C'est une émission qui cible les lycéens et explique un éventail énorme de sujets (savants, historiques, économiques).
7
Pour ajouter à la liste d'@Un francophone je conseille de visiter frengly.com - facile et qui traduit bien à mon avis.
To add to the list of @Un francophone I would recommend frengly.com - easy to use and it seems to work well enough for most things - providing that you can read enough to spot the typical machine translation faults.
7
Le Littré is a well known french dictionary, download its freeware here.
Le Robert is another well known french dictionary, you can download it here (10 days trial).
7
Le Grand dictionnaire terminologique de l'Office québécois de la langue française est une bonne référence pour les termes techniques de tous les domaines, mais pas toujours aussi complets que des dictionnaires spécialisés dans un domaine particulier.
Pour le cas particulier de l'informatique, le glossaire de traduc.org est très complet.
Sinon, j'ai trouvé ...
7
Comedy in French quite often rely on play of words, regional / foreign accents and idiosyncracies, or pre-conceived ideas tightly linked to the French culture. This is definitely not the easiest way to learn the language.
However, if you are a motivated beginner, you can look for sketches by Raymond Devos, Pierre Desproges or Daniel Prévost, which in my ...
7
Try audiobooks!
I don't know why I didn't think about them earlier but they perfectly fit your request in a certain way, doesn't it?
You can buy the book to read it while you listen to the narrator.
I know there are several audiobooks out there. Personally, I had the first Harry Potter (in French of course) when I was younger.
7
Since you have indicated in your comment that you are not only looking for textbooks, but any resource, I will provide a road map of resources of any form.
Disclaimer: I will not provide my opinions or a rating on the resources that I list, but solely how they work and for what level they are meant for. This is to avoid an opinion based answer.
Roadmap
...
7
Actually, about anything that airs on French TV has captions for the deaf and hard of hearing, by law. However, I've never seen them available for download anywhere. To make matters worse, French DVDs practically never offer French subtitles.
The few French subtitles you'll find online are generally of poor quality and don't match the text very well. The ...
6
It looks like Frendees offers a collection of dual language e-books available as kindle editions. You can use the free kindle apps to read them on your PC or you Ipad.
Amazon has other books in dual language kindle edition available.
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