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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 do not know 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 ...
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
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 ...
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
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.
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
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
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 ...
7
My preferred online dictionary for French is Word Reference (http://www.wordreference.com/). It has English to French translations as well as French to English translations. It doesn't have Portuguese-French, but it does have Portuguese-English, so you might be able to translate a word into English and then French if Portuguese is your native language.
...
7
There is an amazing site called Les films français avec
sous-titres where one may find a plethora of films to watch of different genres (comedies, dramas, adventures and the like).
Very useful: TEDx chanel in YouTube.
Also: French films with French subtitles in
YouTube.
Yet another very useful site cinema-dossier-pedagogique.
An old relevant discussion in ...
6
I recommend you "Ma france" series by BBC. It's really a wonderful training programme.
Visit: Ma France - French video course for post-beginners (BBC).
6
Lexique.org provides an advanced search tool.
Searching for words ending with -age or -ade is done from that page that way:
and leads to this result.
...
6
Well, if you want to listen to French being spoken by a Frenchman, talking about the French language... I can't think of anything better than Merci Professeur. :)
6
After three weeks of holidays in Québec, here is what i could say:
grammar is almost the same than in France
pronunciation can be VERY different, probably depending on the area of Québec (but this is also true in France: pronunciation can be very different in the South of France and in the East of France!)
some words are totally different, most of the ...
6
Ceci n'est pas vraiment une question de langue française mais comme il n'y a pas l'équivalent de writers pour le français, je vais donner des pistes sous forme de sites ressources.
La première chose à faire est de regarder des exemples de sujets donnés les années passées. On peut en trouver sur le site du CIEP. Cliquer sur DALF C1 Exemple 1 et DALF C1 ...
6
I would recommend Le Bon Usage. The online version is probably a boon since it can be somewhat challenging to search in the paper version. It is very extensive, is replete with examples, and includes advanced constructs too.
6
You have also really nice Youtube channels to learn (or improve) french for free among which:
Learn French with Vincent
Vincent is a French teacher with his own YouTube channel, and he will teach you thousands of phrases, as well as vocabulary, grammar and the correct pronunciation. He aims to take you from being a beginner in the language all the way to ...
5
For a native English speaker with no previous French experience and limited time, I would recommend dividing one's efforts between reading a phrasebook, for vocabulary, and using Duolingo, for general familiarity with the language, its grammar and its constructs.
5
There is an old TV show from the late 70's that was made in Ontario (for the channel TVO) for English speakers to help them learn French. It's called "Parlez-moi" and feats Marc Favreau.
The sketches are about real life situations. Marc Favreau first tells people the expressions and their translations then there's a sketch using these expressions.
You can ...
5
I do not know of a dedicated subtitle site with more subtitles available than opensubtitles.
Old website, opensubtitles.org:
New website opensubtitles.com:
My favorite methods are SMPlayer in Linux, MPC-HC in Windows, and VLC anywhere.
In SMPlayer: Subtitles - Find subtitles.
In MPC: "File -> Subtitle database -> Download" option
VLC integrates the ...
5
@citizen: That's a great question... The only book that I have been able to find that matches your description, is a book called "Easy French Reader," by R. de Roussy de Sales (ISBN 978-0-07-142848-4). The book starts off with "easy" stories, and the level of difficulty progresses with each chapter. There is a small glossary, and on average about three of ...
5
EDIT: back in 2014 Deepl wasn't out. Go for Deepl, I use it all the time.
Old answer:
I usually use reverso to translate.
As you can see in this link, when I translate devis into English, I have a lot of synonyms and context at the bottom.
When I translate it on linguee I can't find as much information without analysing all the sentences.
Online translator ...
5
I am amazed at the realistic translations of DeepL.
And I think—just my impression—they are not wildly gathering data as google does.
Translations Comparison
Judge yourselves. I translated my own sentence above ;)
DeepL
Je suis étonné par les traductions réalistes de DeepL.
Et je pense - c'est juste mon impression - qu'elles ne collectent pas
les données ...
5
You could try some audio book if you only need to hear French speaking, accessible from youtube such as "Le Petit Prince".
As mentioned by Anupama, tv5monde is a good source too. It also provides exercises to practice and listen to French through news.
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