(no subject)

[unbibium]

BTW, if you're a language geek like me, and want to learn a language as it's spoken rather than it's written, then television courses are really the way to go. Some of them may be airing regularly on a channel you already receive, like know99, MCTV the Annenberg/CPB channel, or your local PBS affiliate. Also, if you have broadband, you can view some series on-demand from anywhere in the world, through the Annenberg/CPB website.

Of these, my favorite is French in Action: This is probably the best way to learn French without growing up in Paris.
It is designed on the principle of immersion: conduct the course entirely in French, but make it easy for students to figure things out by context. But the real genius of it is how it makes even the beginner lessons interesting.

The first handful of lessons take place in a classroom setting where they set up the story that will take up the rest of the lesson, and the teacher matches wits with a smart-assed student who already speaks French. The rest of the series is a light-hearted story about a young American man who comes to Paris on walkabout, and meets a young Parisian woman, and they go have adventures while this creepy Man In Black follows them around. Most of these episodes are 15 minutes long, with an additional 15 minutes where Pierre Capretz clarifies some aspects of the language used, with the help of various movie and television clips, cartoons, mini-skits, and photographs.

Also, the textbook is still widely available, and it provides a grand feast of additional reading material, including everything from comics to classic poetry to famous quotes.

I've only watched half of the lessons myself, and read maybe a third of the textbook, but I found I could converse rather comfortably in French when I visited Paris and Strasbourg last year. In contrast, I took four years of Spanish in high school, and at the end of it, I could conjugate the hell out of an irregular verb, but I had no fluency. If I ever had to speak any Spanish, I'd freeze up, and run endless grammar checks in my head. You'd think in this town, I'd have ample opportunity to practice, but I'm too shy for that. With a TV course, one can see the language in use, and trust that anyone else could use it the same way. And, alone in my room, I could repeat stuff in front of my TV until I was blue in the face, and feel no embarrassment.

I could sing its praises for hours, but I suggest you see for yourself; the entire series is available for online viewing if you register with the Annenberg/CPB channel.

Comments

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Waah, ce n'est pas de ma faute!

[kimberlyonline.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's really great. My son and I both wanted to learn Japanese and this looks like a great way to get started. I would have never thought of this...:) thanks!

[vyus.livejournal.com]

Ever try the Spanish ones?

I think I've seen some of these early morning on PBS.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

Destinos: An Introduction to Spanish. That looks pretty good but somehow I have trouble staying involved. I think I started watching it about the time my attention span for such things started to dwindle.

[miwasatoshi.livejournal.com]

Heh heh, the French in Action chick is, like, EXACTLY the main character in Noir. :P

[cheryln.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I've never been able to learn languages purely by ear; I have to have some understanding of grammar, of how sentences are put together, and then practice conversation and get a handle on how it's really spoken. I guess I need to learn words, rather than just sounds, if that makes any sense.

In which case, though, I could probably learn well from French in Action if I can dust off the year of high-school French enough to remember any grammar and pronunciation principles.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

Well, like I said, there's a textbook and a fair amount of grammar explained, and you'd be surprised what a few well-designed examples can teach you.

Liaisons, for example, are briefly mentioned, though not named, near the end of Lesson 2 -- which is probably wise, since it's kind of a tricky and subtle facet of French pronunciation. Rather than list out a bunch of rules, as "French for Dummies" has, this series allows your brain to learn the nuances subconsciously as you go alone in the series. Sometime after I'd gotten through lesson, oh, twenty or so, I looked at some of the teaching materials, and realized that one of the lessons taught the three ways to pronounce "dix", and I thought about it and realized I'd picked that up, but never totally realized that I was pronouncing it differently before vowels, before consonants, and at the end of a sentence.

I've probably learned to use plenty of irregular verbs without even realizing they're irregular. They just seem right because the word was introduced in one episode, and I heard all the forms used then, and I know what it's supposed to sound like, and look like. Remember, you have the world's most sophisticated logic analyzer between your ears, and it'll work for you if you let it.

I started watching the series because I was in college and I was bored, and I didn't really care how much French I learned. I just wanted to see how much I could learn from it. Turned out, it was a lot. Especially when I taped it and watched it a few times.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

You're right about the irregular verbs-- it's ridiculous to make someone wait to learn the imparfait tense before they're allowed to say useful phrases like je voudrais, "I would like". It's also very useful to hear conjugated verbs in context, anyway-- when you're just conjugating verbs, you only get through a couple of tenses before seeing that, to the ear, some verbs sound the same as other verbs when conjugated-- Assayez sounds like asseyais, but of course A) asseyez applies to the second person, asseyais to the first, and B) you'll only ever hear the latter as "j'asseyais" in real life, and as the mere "asseyais" without J' only really when conjugating as you are in French class.

(Especially in French class with rowdy students, "Asseyez" is what your teacher is yelling without any spoken context. Now do as you're told and sit down.)

I should have picked the more obvious example, in that all regular -er verbs sound the same as their conjugations for vous, comma ca: Parler "to speak", parlez "[you] speak".

It's also fun to count how many forms of bread Robert eats for breakfast.

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

Yes, you've kind of articulated something I haven't really had to think out in words since I started learning. There was a point in the course where I realized that certain things sounded alike, but couldn't be treated the same, just like when you're a child and you don't remember the exact moment you realized people say "better" instead of "gooder".