Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Bonjour :) Welcome to French language

Training had never been so much fun for me. Thanks to Satyam SLC for conducting the French language course. It is said that French decended from Latin, but for us it resembled English. Although spellings and meaning of many words remain same in French, prononciation was different, so it was little bit of un-learning english.

étudiants de française
French students group photo - Click to enlarge
From Left to Right : Me,Dinesh Thyagaraju, Sreeranjini, Amitha, Kruthika, Soumya, Sandhya(Our Teacher),Sarath, Aman, Rohit, Shridhar, Shambhu, Kripal, Srinivas, Divya prasan,Bindu , Shilpa, Venugopal, Jyothi, Shweta.

Facts related to French
  • French is one the second most influential language next to English.
  • Spoken as a native language in 5 continents.
  • Official language of about 60% of African countries.
  • More than 40 countries use French either as first language or second language.
  • Most people in Canada and Europe speak French.
  • More than 250 million people speak French as their first language.
    Le cháteau de Chamboard and Monalisa (La Joconde) - a famous french picture
    Some resources
  • Why should we learn French
  • http://www.bonjour.com/- An excellent resource for every beginner or traveller planning to visit any French spoken country. This website has audio clips in a very easy to use interface with categories like greetings, numbers, asking for help, finding your way etc.
  • http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/french/lj/challenge Very good fast track tutorial by BBC. Checkout other detailed topics too.
  • http://french.about.com/library/weekly/aa020901a.htm Detailed tutorial at about.com
  • http://www.frenchassistant.com Another good tutorial with audio clips and lot of stuff on grammer.

    A Song.
    Alouette is a very interesting nursery song of french language. A link to Alouette song

    And finally Translators are invaluable resources to Translate your words/sentenses from/to any of the popular languages. You can even translate a website.
  • http://www.worldlingo.com
  • http://www.appliedlanguage.com/free_translation.shtml

    If you have gone through enough resources and prepared for a test, www.French-Chat.com lets you apply your learnings and chat with people in french. Most of these people are also fluent in english.

    I have tried all above resources and I am sure they will be useful for you too. Suggestions?.. Any useful resources that can be added here..? shoot me a mail.