Talk:French/Archive 3

What Needs to Be Done

• Lessons: see the planning page.
• Grammar: see the grammar main page.
• Appendices: see the appendices main page.
• PDF: see the About page.
• General: About page expanded.

--Hagindaz 03:53, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Can we get some pronunciations too? Shawnc 07:25, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

Almost all of the early lessons have audio. What do you think is the best way to learn pronunciation (audio, IPA, etc)? --Hagindaz 07:40, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

audio, supplemented by written approximations. I, for one, don't know IPA, and I imagine most others don't either.169.233.41.249 23:20, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

I would love to see IPA for my own purposes... would others be offended if I added IPA pronunciations to tables in lessons? would it clutter the interface? I, for one, find nothing more helpful... IPA tends to be, to me, even more helpful than audio samples...because it tends to cancel out a lot of ambiguity in the sound and readers' voices... also, the "english-equivalent" approximations are always confusing to me, especially in examples of /ʒ/, /ʃ/, /ø/, and vowel combinations. jxn (talk) 00:30, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

I agree with this. "English-equivalent" pronunciations are often inconsistent and in some cases they completely fail because there is no English equivalent to the sound (like [ø], [y], and [ʁ]). You can't write these in English, period. You can replace them with similar sounds, but you will come off with a rather bad accent. Learning the to read the IPA isn't that hard and it will help a lot in the future. -Alan Trick (talk) 23:51, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Lots of users can't listen to .ogg files. The audio files should be in a more standard format, such as .wav or .mp3 .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Creation_and_usage_of_media_files#Audio

Could someone please upload a page involving good sentence starters and fillers? When writing a story, for example, there are many alternatives to 'il y avait', and there are a great deal of linking words such as 'neanmoins' that aren't used enough in texts written by those learning french.

adopting template

Hi, i am adopting the template and structure of french language lessons for Indonesian. Thanks very much! Chaerani 13:14, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

Hi, is there are way to download all the aduio files so that I can use them on a pc without a net connection? (Thanks -Martin)

French Department at Wikiversity

The French Department at Wikiversity has been started and will likely be using many of the resources here. People completely unfamiliar with wikibooks might be looking at French articles here, so try to keep this in mind, particularly if you get some confused comments. I'm trying to direct the Department to lean heavily on the wonderful material you guys have put together here. Jade Knight 01:12, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

Two texts

There are two "Texts" sections here. One should be removed. Jade Knight 09:06, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

Sounds

I've just breezed through the introduction and first couple of lessons, and I'm finding a large number of the sounds files that give me errors, even though they're supposedly online. For example: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikibooks/en/4/4e/French_Grammar_-_Gender_of_Nouns.ogg

Because of the ambiguous (non-standard) pronunciation guides you've got lined up a lot of people will be relying on the clips so I hope that's fixed.

Also, I notice that someone else above insists that IPA isn't needed, because he can't read it, but I assure you that many people can, and especially with Wikipedia being so huge now there are a lot more amateur linguists that are breaking down and learning it for themselves. Sketchy pronunciation guides will always exist for those who aren't willing to learn the standards, but IPA will always be useful as a reliable standard that everyone can rely upon, and doesn't require learning a new transcription standard for every language -- every introductory book. Please reconsider leaving out the IPA. 218.229.72.141 15:39, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Then again all of the audio clips seem to be working now, so I guess it was just a problem with mediawiki. 210.229.27.167 09:33, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Transwikis

Transwiki:Passé composé may be useful material for you. – Mike.lifeguard | ^talk 18:43, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Vocabulary section

Hello. I would like to add a section on vocabulary. What do you think about it? Can someone help me ? I am not very good at templates. --Oualmakran Youssef 03:29, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Simpler contents page?

Salut! This front page seems to be a little bit "busy". Would it not be better to simplify it visually a bit? For example, by reducing our use of borders? -- Kowey 07:57, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

Capitals!

Attençion! There are an awful lot of capitals in subtitles, the Manual of Style advises that only the initial letter is capitalised; the rest being in lower case. CR7 21:59, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Some questions

Jaydev has nominated French for FA status. While this could be possible, I think that some pages need to enter the green rating zone and others need to be rated. Also, prepositions and pronouns are important parts of every language, so they need to get better. Also, what about interjections and conjunctions, or even declensions and conjugations? Seems some real work should be done. Laleena 18:29, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Picture Dictionary

Hi, I was thinking that it might be a good idea to make a complete picture dictionary, as I feel this is a great way to learn new vocabulary. I was looking on the internet and could not find any complete picture dictionaries for French. Maybe we could start with simple words like cat or dog, and use simple vector images that are easy to understand. Maybe even include audio for pronounciation... After the French section is done we could make a copy and translate it into other languages such as English and Spanish. Anyone else feel this would be helpful to those looking to learn a new language? Mason L. (talk) 03:53, 20 December 2007 (UTC)