How to Study French for Free

I want to be able to read and understand a bit of French.  So, I asked my enterprise language community which programs they have used and discovered Duolingo. 

So far, it appears to be a good return on my investment.  This free, interactive program lets me learn and practice vocabulary, sentence building, listening and writing skills in French.  It tracks my errors and reintroduces this material into future exercises until I have mastered the vocabulary or structure.

I am complementing my training with other activities to make my language training more robust.  Namely, Twitter for vocabulary building (@frenchToday

and @FrancaisToday) and MaFrance for grammar and comprehension.

Duolingo is great for a free program but not perfect.  It requires that the learner have a near-photographic memory for vocabulary and spelling.  So, for the memory-challenged, I send out these hints for each type of exercise so that you may learn French* more quickly.

Hints for Duolingo

Listen & Type

Listen several times and type out your answer.  Stop and listen again to see if you have understood what the speaker has said.  I am studying French and have to learn to listen better to the liaison to differentiate between the singular and the plural.  (Le garçon mange  OR  les garçones mangent?)

Translate this text to English

You can mouse over all the words to see their definitions but try to resist the temptation so that you can build up your vocabulary base.  When new words are  introduced, I write them out three times in the answer area and then erase before writing the translation.

Translate this text to French
Make sure that everything matches.  Today, I translated “A small dog” incorrectly.  Watch for this:

·        “A” is either UNE or UN depending on whether it is a girl or a boy dog.  Take your pick because the sentence does not specify.

·        “small”  PETITE for a girl and PETIT for a boy.

·        “ dog”  There is just one....CHIENNE or CHIEN (we still haven’t decided if it is a boy or a girl)

·        Let’s make it a girl which means we use UNE for the article, PETITE for the adjective and CHIENNE for the noun. 

·        Double check that you are using all feminine words for a single dog and you have checked that the article is indefinite = UNE PETITE CHIENNE.

Mark ALL correct translations

Usually there is just one but read them all.  As you learn more vocabulary it is easy to include more than one correct version.  Example:  "You are eating a light meal" can translate to “you” (singular) or “you” (plural) so that both TU MANGES and VOUS MANGEZ UN REPAS LÉGER are correct.

*This program also teaches English, German, Italian and Portuguese

Follow me on Twitter @sharonlinapearc