Learning french

Honestly though, why French though?

Other languages are more worthy.

Pitoyable...

My pronunciation is OK but that's a total fluke.

But yeah, like the other guy said, I can't speak or write it, and I have trouble understanding it spoken unless it's slow. I should have admitted that right off the bat, my bad. I assumed too quickly that if you're on Veeky Forums your main interest is just reading French literature and scholarship, which was 98% of my reason for learning the language. Same with German, Latin, Greek. I think learning to pronounce them well is important, but only because you want phonetic consistency so that you aren't tripping up over it.

I will say though, getting up to this level of understanding was on the one hand really satisfying, which keeps you motivated and engaged with the language, and on the other hand a good base for understanding. I post in /fr/ on /int/ all the time for fun and can read along and chat with Frenchfags. But if you want to be seriously fluent you'll need to take a course.

For what it's worth, most of my friends learned German or French the same way I'm describing here, and THEN went on exchange trips for intensive speaking+composition training after they had been confidently reading the language for a long time.

I could never do it the other way around. Even when I took classes I got bored too quickly with spending 5 weeks learning how to have conversation about the weather in German. I passed whole courses without feeling like I knew the language any better than a fucking tourist. Then Sandberg had me reading real German (he has a book on that too) in a few weeks, and writing it on /int/. But hey, everyone's different.

> Duolingo
> Grammar
Don't do this, get a book

How can you read it but not write it? When I learn a language, the 2 go hand in hand.

J'ai trouve que la meilleure methode pour apprendre la prononciation est de lire la poesie a haute voix. Te bats ligne a ligne.

Commence avec l'alexandrin, confie les regles a la memoire.

like what

Just not really all that well. I can write about as well as the average East Euro fag writes English on /int/. Occasional mistakes, intentionally limited vocab because I just don't know how to say certain things idiomatically and I'll probably sound weird.

I feel like German's a lot easier to write but maybe that's just me. French just has so many idiomatic quirks, man.

I like french culture and literature. I've only been there three times but I'll probably ending up moving there later in my life.

Like German and Spanish, even Italian to some extent.

This is if we're talking about Roman alphabets

I'm no in any way dismissing that, but learning a language seriously is very committing.

You might be missing other things. I'm fluent in 3 languages and I'll probably lear another in the coming years.

start with the greeks, friendo

Learning how to read in french should be pretty easy if your first language is english.

Learning how to speak and write in french is another ballpark entirely. Long story short: french spelling is as bad as english when it comes to the link between spelling and sound. In the alphabet, there are only 5-6 vowels (depending on how you consider the letter y), but phonetically, there are around 16 vowels in french (more or less depending on geography). And the same goes for consonants.

Take for example the word "oiseau". How do you pronounce that? Unlike spanish or other languages where you pronounce every letter of a word, french likes to put 2 or 3 vowels together to represent a different vowel. In this case, every letter in the word "oiseau" is pronounced differently than their usual pronounciation: [wazo]. There is no logic behind it, and what's worse, a spoken vowel won't always have the same spelling in every word (the [o] sound can be written as "o", "au", "eau", and that's not counting the mute letters like "aut", "ault", "aux", and so on), and vice versa (the letters "ai" can be pronounced [é], like in the english word "say", or it can be pronounced [è] like in the english word "get").

And that's just spelling. As for writing, I'm in uni right now, studying translation, and I've had three courses focused on french writing and grammar. Three fucking courses, and I still make grammar mistakes. Most french speakers can't write a text without spelling errors (just like english speakers), but french grammar is way worse than english grammar, which is why most linguists say that english is easier to learn than french.

English is Latins bastard son.

how difficult is it to read proust in french?

First language is swedish

But it's as you said, I'm not worried about being able to read french which shouldn't be too hard, but speaking it. I know how idiomatic the french language is, and considering the difficulty of pronunciation and everything else it'd require me to actually take courses/move to france/take private lessons or something.

also interested

seconded, it's a great book.

>Step 1: learn major rules of grammar (shouldn't take more than a week)

lol

bump

You don't have to choose one or the other autist, books aren't good for practical practice

I like your method though, obviously learning to read it well and then actually going to france for a couple of weeks/month would be more useful then slowly progressing in a classroom, probably.

Nique ta mère!

Here boy:

learn.lingvist.com/#signin

french is hard to learn and is ultimately only learnable by practicing with other francophones. the language is so finicky and the rules so seldom followed that it's better to just pick them up by practice and than by trying to learn the logic behind them.

of course, learning to read french itself isn't that hard. it's the writing and speaking that'll get you (particularly writing)

t. 5 years in france

>the language is so finicky and the rules so seldom followed
Could you give an example

not him but for example using the subjunctive with certain phrases in the negative
je trouve qu'il est
je ne trouve pas qu'il soit

and using ne without pas for others
etc.

Follow any of the above methods that takes

can someone pls post pdf-link to "French for Reading" by Sandberg pls

I've ordered "French for Reading" but until then I'll toil away at Duolingo.

Thanks for the help senpaitachi..

the subjunctive is hardly an issue though, the rules are straightforward and follow a very distinguishable pattern. There are a handful of verbs which you'd have to learn by heart ( like esperer ).

French isn't a hard language to learn at all, the one thing that could pose problems is knowing whether or not to inflect a past participle.

>Step 1: learn major rules of grammar (shouldn't take more than a week)
Haaha stopped reading there

Dont waste your time with french. Learn spanish, italian or german.

youtube.com/watch?v=oD15qLaV-bs

wtf i love french literature now ???

>Step 1: learn major rules of grammar (shouldn't take more than a week)
fucking kys

Grab yourself some grammar books (the ones you should have been using in school on the curriculum are fine, preferably monolingual french books).
You need to find a qt French chick to talk to. It's the only thing that will give you the courage to continue right until the end.
Watch fucking shit youtube videos in French by popular vloggers and stuff that would normally give you cancer - push through it because this shit will help you enormously.
Learn the vocab little by little, looking up words as you come across them and using whatever method you like to memorise them.
Read poetry and books out loud when you get to that level.

For reading:
After a few months of hardcore learning - once you get to around b1-b2 level - you should read "L'Étranger" by Camus.
This will be followed by anything from Maupassant, his short stories are good.
find some short books like "La Place" by Annie Ernaux (who cares if you don't like the book just read it because it's short)
Smash out Tintin and Asterix whenever you like
Then go on to stuff like Zola and Balzac
After that you should have a pretty godlike reading ability

Bon courage mec

>Not having French as your natal language

>Duolingo
>grammar

>duolingo
>for learning a language

pls guys dont get memed

Are you seriously putting German in front of Italian?

That makes no sense. German has Goethe and a few great authors who wrote in minor, inferior, joke-like forms, such as Mann (novel) and Nietzsche (philosophy).

Italy has Guido, Dante (himself worth all of German literature), Tasso, Ariosto, Michelangelo, and Leopardi. End of discussion.

Not op but why is this controversial? Ive learned french, german and italian that way. I know attic greek and latin aswell and ive done the same, obviously in the case of greek it took much longer than a week, but still this is quite basic.

>french is hard to learn and is ultimately only learnable by practicing with other francophones
This is completely untrue. French is grammatically very simple, the only thing an English speaker will initially have trouble with are verbs and conjunctions. French is one of the easiest languages for an English speaker to learn. Very, very similar grammar and an expansive shared vocabulary can have you reading the news in just a couple of months if you aren't lazy and have a learning routine.

>the language is so finicky
This just isn't true.

>and the rules so seldom followed that it's better to just pick them up by practice and than by trying to learn the logic behind them.
The way people used to write and currently write in formal settings is different from the way people talk casually but if you learn the former you can already understand the latter 100%.

To understand grammar requires a vocabulary of at least 200, probably a bit more. Even when you are at the stage of learning a language where you a pretty much just cramming nouns with flashcards it takes reasonable effort to learn just 100 words in a week. That isn't even counting the fact that it takes time and study to learn what a number of these early words actually do because of the nature of the grammar of the language in addition to learning all the rules of the grammar.
You can learn grammar fast if you are language inclined and work hard but to say that you can learn all of the grammar rules: all of the rote memorisation of things like noun declensions of verb conjugation tables, the sentence order, the the particular functions of conjunctions that don't seem to correspond to the ones you know from other languages, the little inconsistencies that arise in every language that have to be learned by heart, learn at least 200 words, and to know that all well enough that you don't have to reference any of it but the more obscure stuff, I would call you a liar or someone with a very disingenuous use of the word 'know'.

>Italian

Nice bait

>you need to find a qt French chick to talk to.
I will make an attempt

This fella knows what he's on about

French is a nice, easy, rewarding language that English speakers can learn particularly quickly.

Since you seem like you have your shit together, what's your opinion on duolingo?

wtf stop putting him down man, he's got a goal and he wants to work towards it

reeee etc

Can anyone suggest a succint online grammar guide for French, similar to Tae Kim for Japanese? Thanks.

French is pretty tough. I was making mad progress in Spanish in no time, but I find French idiosyncratic and inconsistent. I thought I knew enough to read Vol de nuit (with dictionary, of course) but I couldn't even understand the first page properly lol. I think I'll try with Petit Nicolas next.

frènche fague

What's wrong with it?

I've used it for German when I was starting out to get a feel for the language, but it is incredbly inefficient and repeats itself ad nauseam. You'd learn a lot more and a hell of a lot faster with a traditional grammar and textboook, plus anki if that's you thing (personally I can't stand grinding vocab with lists so I just read on my kindle or try and find native speakers to converse).

Source: trilingual since childhood, currently on my 5th language.