learn a language « Pimsleur Method

Aside from France, French is the official language of 22 other countries and it is also the co-official language in countries including Haiti, Madagascar, Switzerland and Luxembourg. In addition to that, it is also the un-official second language of countries such as Canada, Belgium and Switzerland. It is also spoken in some parts of France’s former African colonies like Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Niger and Bénin. Over 75 million people use this language all over the world.

The standards for the French language including its correct pronunciation and language usage all over the world are set by its capital city, Paris. The French people are actually very protective about their language and they formed laws banning the use of non-French words even from official publications and websites.

The standard for French is based on the dialect known as Francien. It has been the official standard language since the mid-16th century. It has greatly replaced other regional dialects of French spoken in northern and central France. French dialects are further subdivided into 5 classifications namely, Central, Northern, Eastern, Western, Southwestern.

Like other languages, the French language also has its own characteristics. A lot of its letters are silent. As a result, pronunciation of the words can differ significantly from its spelling. Many people who try to learn French find that pronunciation is the hardest part to learn due to its new sounds, silent letters and liaisons. When all these factors come together as one, speaking French can be very tricky. Speaking French is more than just familiarization of the vocabulary and grammar rules because the letters need to also be pronounced correctly. Speakers who try to learn this language are not likely to sound like a native unless they learned the language as a child. However, learning how to speak French correctly is not impossible with enough practice and patience and using a good language course like Pimsleur. Some of the other important components of the language are inflection, declination and using grammatical gender. Also, in French, the forms of some words do vary as to how they are used in a sentence. It is quite different than English.

You really can use a second language when looking for jobs, business and travel purposes. French is one of the most useful languages and can be used throughout the world. When choosing a language to study, consider that French is one of the languages that will give you more in what ever you are planning to do.

Because you must walk before you can run, you cannot start right off thinking in a language, especially when you must proceed at the relatively slow pace of that of the typical foreign language college course. You must begin thinking in English and translating foreign words into and from English to your new language. Only gradually can you abandon translation and come to think in the language. But until you begin to think in your new language … you don’t really know it.

In the very first weeks of a course in a foreign language, students nearly always translate word for word. That is all right for the kind of elementary sentences you get in this stage, but it won’t do at all when the going gets tougher. Yet many students persist in this word-for-word translation throughout the entire study of a language. For a language like Spanish this is less likely to get you into trouble (because the grammar and word order are so much like English) but in other languages like Latin and German, it does not work so well because the word orders are quite different from the English ones. A second-year student in German can easily get lost trying to find his way word for word through the seemingly impenetrable thicket of a German sentence. For the German word order is so different that it makes little sense, you must learn to think in the German word order and get a sense of the sentence as a whole before you look up the specific words you do not know. And even when you are concentrating on specific words, you must keep in mind the relationship between words. The over-all meaning of the word is very important for you to be able to translate them properly.

You will discover yourself that this is the only way you can translate complicated sentences. If you are doing no better than word-for-word translation, you are in trouble and you will need a lot of help. We cannot tell you exactly what your difficulties will be since they will be different for different people. One frequent difficulty, however, is that the student who does not have the basic elements of the vocabulary, such as relative pronouns or irregular verbs, memorized, will find that it will be very difficult. It needs to be something that comes naturally and if it doesn’t, it will be very difficult. If you don’t know the syntax or word order well enough to be able to tell where they are in a sentence you have more problems. This is particular difficulty for students of German. Thus in a sentence like Haben Sie den Bauer gesehen, der auf dem Wagen sass? (“Have you seen the farmer who sat in the wagon?”), a badly confused student may try to translate der as a definite article rather than as a relative pronoun. An example of a parallel problem is in a French sentence like Elle a recu les fleurs que lui ont envoyees des amies (“She received the flowers that friends sent her”), where the unobservant student may read the objective pronoun que as the nominative pronoun qui thus making the sentence make no sense. By looking over the whole sentence structure and then by relating the words to one another, you would not make a mistake like this.

In your favor, a good language from PimsleurMethod will make it a much easier adventure and you will have success.

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