Learning French
Here are a few interesting links I have found about French,
learning French and especially children's computer games for
teaching French.
Online French-Learning Sites
- LearnALanguage.com
has French word lists and online games to help learn nouns, verbs and
phrases.
- TennesseeBob's Famous French Links has 10,000 french links in categories!
- The American Association of Teachers
of French has a lot of online links and material.
-
www.languageguide.org/francais
has several French language resources. When you place your
cursor over an image, you see and hear the French word for it.
The French
grammar guide uses the same technology. This project is
collaborative. The voices you hear are from local volunteers and most
of the content has been developed and is being developed with the
help of volunteers contributing through the Internet. See
http://www.languageguide.org/eng/about.html.
- bab.la is a language portal offering free
online dictionaries, vocabulary trainers, quizzes, games and a
language forum.
It has a collaborative English-French dictionary.
- Translation
Services offer a range of language services including free online
English-French,
German-French word/phrase translation tool, French language
paraphrasing tool and a
collection of English-French useful phrases.
- The NetTVDB
France page has
an online database of over 20 online TV stations from France,
some of which provide live video feeds so that you can watch French
TV programmes over the internet. The main NetTVDB web site has
1000s of links to TV stations from over 100 countries, offering
live TV and pre recorded TV programmes on the Net.
- Frenchassistant.com,
by Mark Gibbons, is a site designed to help anyone learning French to
practice online free (if you want to use the French sound files,
there is a small charge after the trial period). The site can be
fully customised to your specific level, and data can be requested if
it's not already there.
- ELanguageSchool.net
is a website for people to learn French online for free. It has
topic-based sets of vocabulary, grammar examples, and guides to
pronunciation etc. Not very interactive, but good for printing
and reading off-line.
- The Language
Learning Library has summaries of common french nouns, phrases,
grammar rules, etc. and a list of online dictionaries.
Non-interactive, but useful summary information.
Computer Games for Learning French
- Reviews of lots of Kids Games (check the 'Foreign Languages' section).
- KidsSpeak French from Transparent.com gets a great
review.
US$20. (Or US$35 for 10 languages!) Does not run under Windows NT 4.0.
- Syracuse Language has several
learn-French computer games and programs, including "Smart Start
French" (was called "TriplePlay Plus") which looks good for children.
(NZ$89.95 at Noel Lemmings Computer City in Hamilton).
This uses the Dragon speach engine to check your
pronunciation. We are running this under Windows XP and my
children quite enjoy it.
Reference Sites on the Web
Sites about moving-to/living-in France
- Check out france.net.nz:
French culture online in NZ!
- www.lifeinfrance.free.fr
contains helpful information for people who are looking to move or
visit France.
- www.movingtofrance.com
is a site devoted to working and studying in France.
- www.francecontact.net
is a site for foreign researchers who are going to France.
Contains a GLossary list of relevant official documents,
a list of all the required documents you should take to France,
and links to all the Universities and research groups in France.
Writing French accents online
http://french.typeit.org
is an online text editor designed for typing French.
It lets your enter French characters easily without memorizing Alt codes or
installing keyboard layouts. You can cut and paste the resulting
text into any document.
Writing French in Emacs
Another thing I find useful is ways of entering french accents in
Emacs (where is this documented?). Typing C-X 8 before various
characters gives you accented characters (assuming that you are
using the ISO 8859 Latin-N character set, which is usually the default).
The ones that are useful for french are:
| Character after C-X 8 | Character inserted |
|---|
| < | Open quotation (<<) |
| > | Close quotation (>>) |
| 'a 'e 'i 'o 'u 'y | accent aigu above that character |
| `a `e `i `o `u | accent grave above that character |
| ^a ^e ^i ^o ^u | accent circonflexe above that character |
| "a "e "i "o "u "y | accent tréma (trema) above that character |
| ,c ,C | cédille (cedille) below that character |
These all work for uppercase characters too (except "y).
do M-x standard-display-european to display these accents nicely
on the screen (assuming you have the right font on your system).
Try M-x iso-transl-set-language if you type in french all the time
and want more convenient entry. (See the ios-transl Emacs macro package).
Or, if you use VIPER (VI-emulation), see M-x iso-accents-mode.
Information about Different kinds of French Companies
Consumer Offshore Site
LixFori site Excellent articles by French lawyer.
Explains SA, SARL companies mainly.
Doing
Business in France.
Nice table comparing SA, SARL, SAS. More recent (euros).
Some Internet Providers in France are:
- 'free' http://www.free.fr
- 9online http://www.neuf.fr/
- tele2 http://www.tele2.fr/
- Cable: http://www.noos.com/
- A comparison.
marku@cs.waikato.ac.nz
Last modified: Thu Jun 2 14:21:28 NZST 2011