Learning French

Now should be a good point more me to discuss, how to start learning French. This is just my advice and collection of resources that I have done over time, this might save your effort in that searching for resources.

To start with I must tell you that I am a addicted internet user. I am also a self-proclaimed geek. I like to make friends on the internet from different regions, places and countries to discover their way of thinking and living. Its basically hard to describe what motivates me to do so.

When I started my UG studies here in Hyderabad, I somehow got interested in learning Telugu and my Telugu batchmates were really helpful in teaching me the same. Result: soon I was able to understand most of their conversations and sometimes able to say something to a non hindi/english fellow in Telugu. Also I just realized that when you learn some language and do some silly mistakes in talking with the native speaker of that language, they enjoy ur mistakes and help you improve. There is nothing to loose.

Now I had this interest in Learning some forieng language from long time. My choice got narrowed down to French and Spainish as they were the most popular once besides English. I had some different inspiration for learning French too, most influencial was probably that I loved Alizees’ songs, second was my misunderstanding that all those ppl in orkut from Brazil talked in French ( I later realized/was told it was Portuguese).

So I started searching on google for beginners french lessons etc. I got some good links, the ones that turned most helpful are as follows( the order in which the proved useful to me).

www.frenchtutorial.com This is very good tutorial. Just need one free registration and they provide a good introduction to the language, you will learn some common words and phrases. The audibles tell you how to pronounce words/alphabets.

Google Language Tools This is of great help to decipher the sentences/words written in french and converting your English thoughts to French. Beware its machine translation so errors are inevitable in tuff input cases.

Notes by Binaa This also great collection of phrases and their usages. Found this link through orkut. You should follow the link to more notes too.

Translateme.org Some free chapter agains. Also has a discussion forum to chat with other learners.

Orkut There are lots of learn french groups there. I will give the list later. “Learning French” looks to be one good one.

About.com Reached here quite recently, I haven’t seen much of it but their is a lot of stuff there. Also you can subscribe to daily emails etc. Check it out.

Other than these I bought one English-French-English Dictionary too. That is also of great help sometimes.

The best way to learn any language is ofcourse to practice it by writing or speaking. Until now I haven’t been able to find a person to chat in French.