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 ...
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
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
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 ...
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
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
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.
5
Simple French
Unfortunately I can't comment yet, because I'm not sure if something like French English News is quite what you're looking for or if it is a little too simple. Therefore I'll leave that coupled with another recommendation.
Slightly More Advanced French
A site like Slate France is not too bad. I assume you're familiar with the original ...
5
Two excellent story tellers (who could really captivate or even electrify TV and radio audiences) are:
Alain Decaux, who was a member of the Académie Française. He specialized on historical topics (See Alain Decaux raconte).
Pierre Bellemare. He was more into real-life mystery stories.
If you search for them on Youtube you should find plenty of material.
...
4
Linguee inclut des traductions de l'UE. Beaucoup de contexte. Je l'utilise beaucoup:
http://www.linguee.com/french-english
4
Disclaimer: I write software for Yabla.
Yabla is a video site designed for language learners: http://french.yabla.com/
Our videos are transcribed and translated. Each video is transcribed, translated, and proofread using at least 4 different people: two native French speakers and two native English speakers. It is rare that our videos have an error in ...
4
I recommend both Jean de Florette and Manon des sources (Manon of the Spring), based on the novels of the respected author, Marcel Pagnol. The language is clear, unhurried, and nuanced.
If you watch literary films like these, you can use the books as companion material (or vice versa).
4
I like to use the TV5 app in my mobile. It has a lot of videos in native French, most with the option to use subtitles and they are updated very often.
4
You may find my bilingual educational blog useful. It aims to help people keep up-to-date with what’s in the news in France whilst gaining insights into French language and culture.
4
I've never been in a position to try this myself, but one thing you could do is go talk to elderly people. They are often bored and will be grateful for some human interaction and conversation even if it's with a foreigner who can't speak very well. Just go to wherever they hang out, or go to an old folks' home. Elderly people love telling stories.
4
Try tunein.com and search for "French Talk". You will get a few hundreds of French-talking radio stations.
Something else that I found interesting while learning French was to follow dictation for children, like this one: www.ladictee.fr
For radio stations, I particulary like Radio France Internationale, especially the section "apprendre, enseigner la ...
4
The obvious answer is the Gutenberg project, with thousands books in french.
If you want to analyze french texts other than novels, an option is to extract text from french news with the Readability service.
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