How to immerse yourself in the French Language and Culture without leaving home!
This was the topic of the Alliance Française du Nord Ouest de la Tasmanie meeting at Penguin on 2 August. As promised I have cobbled some notes together to assist members gain access to some of the useful French resources available now today via your home PC and internet connection. I hope that you find at least some of the information to be useful and if anyone has any queries/problems/comment on the notes you can email me at phild707@hotmail.com
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The WordReference online dictionary How to use Microsoft Word to correct your French spelling and grammar How to set up your keyboard to enable you to type French accents How to download iTunes and access Sebastian’s FrenchPodClass All about Apple iTunes, iPods and Podcasts How to choose from the top 100 French Podcasts
1. The WordReference online dictionary
This is a great French language resource which in many ways it is better than a traditional dictionary. (It also contains Italian and Spanish dictionaries) To access it make sure you are online then either Ctrl Click on the link below, or highlight the text and copy and paste it in to your browser (Ctrl C and Ctrl V are the useful shortcuts for this) http://www.wordreference.com/ Don‟t forget to add it to your bookmarks. In addition to being a dictionary this site also contains a French-English forum where you can find the meanings of just about every French expression that exists and explanations of grammatical structures and nuances. If you want to ask question/s yourself on the forum you just need to register and by the way, it‟s free To give you an idea of how useful this site can be, I have always had problems with the usage of the verb “douter” (to doubt) which crops up in expressions like je doute que, ou je me doute que, je m’en doutais, all of which have very different meanings so I entered “douter” in the Look up and got the information shown under.
So now I could see the difference between douter and se douter but to see how it works with “en” I just needed to go to one of the Forum links at the bottom of the image above. Remember also that there is a conjugateur for all the verbs on the page and probably the most useful thing of all is that you can use the dictionary in conjunction with the French Forum to find a translation for almost any French expression that you might come across. The example that I used was “Je me sens come une poisson dans l‟eau” - I feel like a fish in the water – but what exactly does it mean? I looked up the word Poisson on the WordReference dictionary which gives a page containing a long list of meanings and usages for the word. Then I used a Find (from the Edit menu or just Ctrl F) on this results page for the word Eau and after hitting the next button a couple of times found what I was looking for right at the bottom of the page (below)
This is a link to a thread in the French-English vocabulary section of the WordReference site and there I found an explanation of the term as “I am in my element” or “I am really happy in my current environment”.
Top 2. How to use Microsoft Word to correct your French spelling and grammar.
Word can check (and correct) your spelling in French just as easily as it does in English but before you start you must tell Word that you are about to type in French as shown below but first we discussed whether or not French comes as a default language in Word with Grammar check, Spell check (and dictionary) built in? After some investigation I am pleased to say that the answer is yes! I went to the WordReference Forum on this one and was pointed in the right direction by another forum member which you can read if interested at http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?p=3352321&posted=1#post3352321 The bottom line is that both French and Spanish come bundled in both Word 2002 and Office 2003, (which contains Word 2003), so grammar and spell check should be possible in both as outlined below. For other languages, (eg Italian), purchase of a special “Office Proofing Tools” CD is required ($100US approx)
Now that Word knows that you are typing French it will underline your spelling errors in red and grammatical errors in green. Tip: If you have a problem with this try just typing in a few words then select,( ie highlight), them and then follow the steps above again to set the language.
A simple example
The spelling typo is underlined and when you right click on it you get spelling suggestions to choose from
The spelling typo is now corrected but a green underline shows there is a grammatical error.
Again a right mouse click allows you to correct the grammar.
Top 3 How to set up your keyboard to enable you to type French accents
(The instructions below apply to Word 2002 and Word 2003 but similar steps should be possible in other late versions of word.) This can be set up in Control panel and is independent of software – ie accented letters can be typed not just in Word but any other program that you can type words into such as eg Excel or Hotmail.
The languages English and French are now installed and in the case of the French language the keyboard layout is US International which allows us to type in accented characters. When you click OK to “Text Services and Input Languages” Once you have added a French keyboard, as above, you can now easily enter French accents. 1st make sure that you have set the language to French in the language bar. This should be located at the bottom right corner of the screen as shown on the right (but it may be placed somewhere else on the desktop) In Word or other programs make the most common accents as follows:
Characters you type Single quote + e Single quote + c Apostrophe (near top left of keyboard) + e Tophat + u Double quote + i
Characters you type
Result
„ e „ c ` e ^ u “ i
é ç è û ï
If you actually want to type a single, (or double), quote then just do so but enter a space immediately after it. EG. Elle m’attend. If I didn‟t type in a space after the single quote I would get Elle máttend which should be, quite correctly, underlined in red! We discovered that for those curious words like cœur and bœuf, (where the o and e collide), you just type in the letters and Word will either auto correct or let you do so with a right mouse click on the word.
Top 4 How to download iTunes and access Sebastian’s FrenchPodClass
The French Pod Class – this is absolutely the best podcast resource for learning French that I have come across. It‟s be going for over two years now with a new episode produced each fortnight. All the episodes are there from the very 1st one and may be selectively downloaded. It‟s free but if you want extra written transcripts of the classes there is a subscription fee though I personally find that I can manage without these.
Each episode lasts about ½ hour and is a mix of French music and dialogue which Sebastian explains both in French and English. I am not sure if the sound quality in the older podcasts is as good as that of the later ones. To download iTunes and to add the FrenchPodClass into your iTunes library just click on the link below http://frenchieproductions.com/forum/index.php?topic=570.0 and follow the steps there. The FrenchPodClass web site is at http://www.frenchpodclass.com/
Top 5 All about Apple iTunes, iPods and Podcasts
We had a session on this where I showed how there is a wide range of French language resources that are available to be freely downloaded to your home PC. I played excerpts from some audio podcasts and also a couple of video podcasts and I‟ll show to subscribe to these below but first a quick overview of podcasts in general.
Podcasts, (which means web broadcasts), offer a way for those who want to make video and/or audio information available on the web to do so in a way that anyone with a computer and an internet connection can access it. It is quite amazing how many people, from single individuals to news corporations, TV and Radio stations, wish to do this and there are literally thousands of podcasts available in a wide variety of languages and an equally wide variety of topics. Most of the podcasts are free to download so cost is generally not an issue but you do need to look at your internet supplier arrangement and check the cost of downloads as these can soon mushroom. The concept of podcasting was invented by the Apple computer corporation and has become a very popular world wide phenomenon with millions of users listening to podcasts on PCs and iPods daily. Originally the idea was to provide a way to purchase music online, (hence iTunes), but others soon got on the bandwagon. Since you can view and/or listen to podcasts on your PC you don‟t necessarily need to purchase an Apple iPod however I find my iPod to be really useful as I can listen to French and Italian podcasts when walking or working around the house or even driving. There are some logistical requirements: 1. Internet connection: ADSL or some other high speed connection is probably a must. Most podcasts are quite big and downloading via a dial-up would be very slow indeed. 2. PC hardware and software: As always the later and more powerful your PC is the better it will support iTunes and podcasts. Most relatively new PCs should be OK and they will have the USB port that you will need. You should be running Windows XP/2000/Vista. If you would like to watch video podcasts on your PC you will find that cheap/basic graphics card will not give good results. At the soirée I ran video podcasts on a 3 year old laptop with a basic graphics card and the result was a little bit sticky and tended to jump a bit. 3. iTunes software: You need this software to manage your podcast “subscriptions”. It‟s a free download a from the apple (Australia) store at http://www.apple.com/au/iTunes/ On this page you‟ll find the download button for version 7 of iTunes in there amongst the many icons. Choose Save (not Run). The software is free but it will take some time to download as it‟s large. When you have it safely on you PC desktop or in a folder just click on the downloaded file and run it. 4. An iPod is not essential but if your budget runs to it they are terrific little accessory. Full details and prices are all on the Apple store site. The smallest version (iPod shuffle) is around $80AU. Mine which is intermediate in size cost $160 (on special). The bigger more expensive ones can show video podcasts as well as audio.
Top 6 How to choose from the top 100 French Podcasts
Just start iTunes and select the iTunes Store (on the left menu). The iTunes store takes a while to open up but when it does you should scroll to the bottom and change your store from Australia to France.
At the bottom right you can see the 1st 5 of the current top 100 French podcasts. Click on the little arrow to the left of PODCASTS LES PLUS… above to open up the full list (takes a few minutes).
If you see anything that like you press the “Subscribe” (S‟abonner‟ on my interface) button. Remember it‟s free and also my interface is set to French. I found that the best video news program is I> TELE. There are 3 episodes per day but I just take the édition du soir. On a good ADSL line it takes around 45 minutes to download and when viewing it that news segment lasts for around 15 minutes.
I also like “Deux mille ans d‟histoire” from Radio France Inter. This an audio only podcast which runs for about a half hour with a new episode every few days with discussion on seemingly randomly chosen moments in History.