Thinking about learning french

[dwightks]

Hi everyone, I was thinking about learning some french. Alizée has had a really big effect on me and I feel like learning french is a good idea. I just have a few questions.
1. Did anyone here have the urge to learn french because of Alizée and did you actually succeed.

2. What materials did you use and how long did it take you.

3. Is French a hard language to learn?

I already know a few languages. I'm fluent in English, I can understand Tamil and Telugu (indian languages), and I can read, write, and somewhat speak Japanese. I am also wondering if already knowing other languages will have an effect on learning French?

Thanks

[user472884]

Originally Posted by dwightks

I'm fluent in English, I can understand Tamil and Telugu (indian languages), and I can read, write, and somewhat speak Japanese.

Sorry, but those won't help you in the slightest.

French, like any other language used in Europe, is a Romance language. Although French is associated with love and stuff, "Romance" refers to the "Roman" language- i.e. Latin. Thus, knowing Latin, or any of it's descendants (Spanish being the most valuable) will greatly help you in learning.

Proper, thorough help doesn't come free. I've personally used Rosetta Stone. It isn't perfect, but it's the next best thing other than a formal class taught by a native speaker.

There are other, free sources available. The website I recommend the most is french.about.com

The author is a native English speaker, and she writes for native English speakers, so she understands the little things here and there that we English speakers will come across and not understand when learning French. Her website is awesome, and brimming with little tidbits here and there that you won't find anywhere else besides total immersion (figures of speech and cultural tendencies, for example)

I don't think it's necessary to classify a language as "easy" or "hard". The perceived difficulty stems from again, your previous familiarity with it and similar languages, but more importantly, your enthusiasm and motivation to actually learn it.

Good luck

[NaW]

1. Yes
2. Mostly internet
3. Yeas

..
Seriously: For first, Alizée was the reason why i wanted to learn French, but later time i became interested of the culture, people etc. so i wanted to learn more. I don't aim to be the most perfect foreigner French speaker with zero mistakes but i only want to be understandable as possible.
Internet serves the main basics to get stated with the language but for further it may be good to take lessons. Mainly use the language as much as possible to get trained. When you know English it can be easier with French, as you know there are only ''few'' differences

[Deepwaters]

Originally Posted by dwightks

Hi everyone, I was thinking about learning some french. Alizée has had a really big effect on me and I feel like learning french is a good idea. I just have a few questions.
1. Did anyone here have the urge to learn french because of Alizée and did you actually succeed.

Yes and yes. I'm still not great with understanding spoken French, but I can read it pretty well and speak and write it. I still make mistakes, though.

2. What materials did you use and how long did it take you.

I started with an on-line beginner's course. I used Rosetta Stone for a while, and Yabla. I read French on-line newspapers. I have several Facebook friends from France (including Alizée and her papa, plus another Corsican photographer and an amazingly talented artist, writer, and poet living in Paris) and I always read what they post which is usually in French.

3. Is French a hard language to learn?

I have not found it difficult, but it will depend to a large degree on what your background is.

I already know a few languages. I'm fluent in English, I can understand Tamil and Telugu (indian languages), and I can read, write, and somewhat speak Japanese.

Of those, English is the only one that will be of much help at all. English shares a lot of vocabulary with French because of the Norman conquest and the close interaction between England and France over centuries. Indian languages at least fall into the same overall language group as French (Indo-European), but they're not really very close. Japanese and French are completely unrelated.

[dwightks]

I checked out some of the websites from this thread, which are pretty good. The problem is that I don't know where to start learning. Should I start with vocabulary, grammar pronunciation, or something else?

[Chuck]

Hi, Dwightks! Pleased to meet you!

If you already know several languages, well, you obviously have a knack for learning languages. French may not be so difficult for you at all.

To your question #1: No. I'd learned French back as a kid in school. Then I forgot a lot of it from about 30 years of disuse. Until listening to Alizée, when I was inspired to brush up and relearn a lot of it. And since that time, we got new neighbors down the street - from France! They were quite pleasantly surprised that we were into French music, language, and culture, and now we're very good friends.

Vocabulary or pronunciation? Start with vocabulary! Words! You can't work on pronunciation until you have something to pronounce.

But seriously, my advice is start with the the most basic things: être and avoir ("to be" and "to have"). First learn "je suis" and "j'ai". You can say a lot with those. Je suis fatigué. J'ai chaud. Then work on the other present-tense forms (conjugations) of those two verbs. You are, he is, they are; you have, she has, and so forth. Tu es trop tard, Il a cinq euros. Most of the other verbs in French are a lot simpler to conjugate, but these are the two you'll be using most often.

Actually the library had a good book we got last month: "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Learning French Yourself". I highly recommend it! The internet's great, but so is a nice linear path like you get from a book. (If your library doesn't have this book, Amazon does, starting around six bucks.) Your local library may also have language CD's - even if they're not Rosetta, they'll still help a little with the pronunciation.

[Scruffydog777]

Originally Posted by dwightks

Hi everyone, I was thinking about learning some french. Alizée has had a really big effect on me and I feel like learning french is a good idea. I just have a few questions.
1. Did anyone here have the urge to learn french because of Alizée and did you actually succeed.

2. What materials did you use and how long did it take you.

3. Is French a hard language to learn?

I already know a few languages. I'm fluent in English, I can understand Tamil and Telugu (indian languages), and I can read, write, and somewhat speak Japanese. I am also wondering if already knowing other languages will have an effect on learning French?

Thanks

I think the main question here is how much will you get to use the French language outside of listening to Alizée? Do you live in an area where there is a good size French speaking population? Do you plan on possibly moving to France or maybe some place like Quebec or New Orleans some day where French might possibly come in handy. If not, I wouldn't do it just for the sake of understanding her songs.

I have a niece who's father for some strange reason talked her into taking German in high school. What a huge mistake. She never gets to use it. We have a large Spanish population in Boston. She would have been much better off taking Spanish.

Who knows? Alizee might decide to have another baby soon and quit her music career. What good will your French do you then?

I would suggest you do what I did. Just learn her songs. I've taken the time to learn 12 of her songs. I started of with Moi Lolita which is very easy to learn. You just have to realize some of the lyrics are controversial, so some sites try and clean up the lyrics, but once you know what they're trying to say, it's a very easy song to understand and learn.

L'Alize I think is one of her best songs to sing along with, once you've learned it. Took me a while but it was well worth it.

I took 2 years of French way back in junour high school. Never really had any use for it until now. Even though it's been so many years, I still remembered the basics. It's just like riding a bicycle.

I think the most difficult part of learning French is realizing their sentences are structured differently than ours, but if you know a couple of other languages, then I'm sure you've run into that problem before so it won't be a problem for you.

[Marquis<3Alizée]

I gotta say French is pretty frustarting, but then it's worth it in the end. I just stared learning French two weeks ago I know some of the basics. I'm not just taking French just to understand her songs, In the future I'm planing on moving to France. If not France then Montreal, If I get any luck I'll move to Corse.

Your going to have to practice your ass off, well I'm guessing you know that already since you knoow seven different languages.

[Ronald]

I've had french for 4 years at school, but that's almost 20 years ago, so I've forgotten most of it

Last year I decided to re-learn it, so I ordered myself a study called french for beginners. Now I'm finished with this and I actually can read some french, but it's very hard to make a conversation, because those french guys speak way too fast......

Spend my last vacation there (wanted to write holiday, but since that's british I won't use it here)
You have to know some french in order to communicate there, they all refuse to speak english or whatever kind of language.....

Anyway, if you want to learn a language you have to take lessons and not just learn it from the internet, that doesn't make any progress in my opinion.
I took a self-study thing, which is not that expensive as taking lessons with teachers (which will probably be a lot better, but that's up to you)

And visit a country where you can practise it, the local people love that, even when you're full of mistakes...

This must be one of my longest posts

[VVVACCPLPNLY]

Ooh!
I want to say a few things. First, give you a bit of my French background. Well, first, I originally discovered French at the age of 8, when reading Harry Potter. In 6th grade, at like 11-12 years old, I took formal French classes in school. Then, for a while, I never spoke French (it's useless in Virginia, as well as very rare) but I'd always stop to read anything in french, usually warning and safety labels on thing. But ever was there enough to really practice. And then, in 2008, a good friend of my sister gave me an old French-English English-French dictionary he had:

That was published in 1991. Then, I started flipping through it a few times a week looking at random words. But I still didn't really learn. In late 2008, I started taking formal Latin classes in High School. These were simple for me, having the french background I did. So those two languages advanced each other. But I still didn't know anything of French modern culture. Until this year when I discovered Alizee. And then, I picked a lot of idioms, turns of phrase, and the like. So she helped me a bit too. And about two weeks ago, I met a guy named Riki Sanon from haiti. And he has ever increased my french skill.

Now, why does any of this matter to you? I can't really say, but I tend to rant. But anyways...
First, make sure French is what you want to learn. If it is, I highly recomend you sing along with Alizee WITHOUT looking up lyrics to her songs, french, or translated. That's what I did, I just memorised the sound patterns, and that is a much greater help to your pronunciation. It gets your mouth used to making the sounds. When I first decided to learn Korean, I just sang with the songs a lot. And it made my throat hurt a lot. But now, it's no problem. I can sing for days on end with SNSD, Kara, whoever, without any pain in my vocal cords. Then, of corse I had to learn the alphabet, which was easy since I knew how to make the sounds. You won't have to re-learn an alphabet, which the Korean alphabet is 1000000x easier than the two Japanese alphabets, but whatever. This means going against what Chuck said, I advise you learn the pronunciation first. Reading it in your head and not knowing how to pronounce it will just confuse and unnecesarily worry you. Then, work on the simplest vocab, like pronouns, a few simple verbs (I agree 'avoir' and 'etre' are good places to start), hello, goodbye, thanks, basic stuff. Then learn the grammar. Then, take the rest of your time to learn the vocab. there's a whole lot more vocab to learn than grammar. And as long as you know how to make sentences, then any new word you learn you will already know how to use.
But that's just my way, and it may not work for you. If it doesn't don't give up. And yes, scruffy, French may not be the most useful language there is. And no, I think it's a bad idea to focus on french just to learn her songs. But I have a true passion for French anyways. Before I learned of Alizee. So, dwightks, if you feel french is the language for you, learn it. More people should be interested in learning languages, it's sad they aren't; I commend you!