Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Bonjour :) Welcome to French language

Training had never been so much fun for me. Thanks to Satyam SLC for conducting the French language course. It is said that French decended from Latin, but for us it resembled English. Although spellings and meaning of many words remain same in French, prononciation was different, so it was little bit of un-learning english.

étudiants de française
French students group photo - Click to enlarge
From Left to Right : Me,Dinesh Thyagaraju, Sreeranjini, Amitha, Kruthika, Soumya, Sandhya(Our Teacher),Sarath, Aman, Rohit, Shridhar, Shambhu, Kripal, Srinivas, Divya prasan,Bindu , Shilpa, Venugopal, Jyothi, Shweta.

Facts related to French
  • French is one the second most influential language next to English.
  • Spoken as a native language in 5 continents.
  • Official language of about 60% of African countries.
  • More than 40 countries use French either as first language or second language.
  • Most people in Canada and Europe speak French.
  • More than 250 million people speak French as their first language.
    Le cháteau de Chamboard and Monalisa (La Joconde) - a famous french picture
    Some resources
  • Why should we learn French
  • http://www.bonjour.com/- An excellent resource for every beginner or traveller planning to visit any French spoken country. This website has audio clips in a very easy to use interface with categories like greetings, numbers, asking for help, finding your way etc.
  • http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/french/lj/challenge Very good fast track tutorial by BBC. Checkout other detailed topics too.
  • http://french.about.com/library/weekly/aa020901a.htm Detailed tutorial at about.com
  • http://www.frenchassistant.com Another good tutorial with audio clips and lot of stuff on grammer.

    A Song.
    Alouette is a very interesting nursery song of french language. A link to Alouette song

    And finally Translators are invaluable resources to Translate your words/sentenses from/to any of the popular languages. You can even translate a website.
  • http://www.worldlingo.com
  • http://www.appliedlanguage.com/free_translation.shtml

    If you have gone through enough resources and prepared for a test, www.French-Chat.com lets you apply your learnings and chat with people in french. Most of these people are also fluent in english.

    I have tried all above resources and I am sure they will be useful for you too. Suggestions?.. Any useful resources that can be added here..? shoot me a mail.
  • 7 comments:

    Anonymous said...

    I am so happy to see our picture on this link. Indeed, the kind of fun and joy that we all shared within those four walls of training room within just 40 hours would take more than 40 pages to describe. I never knew that trainings could be so much fun, espesially when people were ready to unleash their Humour sense through this "magnifique" language.
    French is truly one of the most widely spoken languages. A "must learn" art to survive in most parts of the world.

    sanjaykattimani said...

    Interesting encounter with a french driver in paris.
    Remaining guys in our group use to push me forward when they encountered people who could only talk in french. I wanted to try out my french learning.. and tried to talk.. mixing some english with it. I am proud i could understand what that french driver said. "Je na comprends pas" meaning I dont understand :p

    Anonymous said...

    So tell me sanjay, is it true that Sanskrit is a language that is most fit as a computer language?
    Thats its structure and grammar is most akin to the language used in computers? And what about French? Would it fit the bill?

    sanjaykattimani said...

    Hi Donna,
    Yes, there was a paper presented to NASA (but ironically its not on NASA website) on Sanskrit & Artificial Intelligence by Rick Briggs Roacs, NASA Ames Research Center, Moffet Field, California. Reference to this article were also published on some popular sites like ZeeNews

    At the same time there is an interesting site that says its not true and shows the evidence that such an article does not exisit on NASA website.

    Also came accross American sanskrit Institute in New Jersey.

    The Bent Branch said...

    Two Comments: French is descended from Latin. http://latinum.mypodcast.com

    English has a large amount of Latin in it, a lot of it via the Norman French. English and French therefore have many similarities, which is why French seemed so familiar to you.

    Here is a useful resource for beginning students of French:
    http://fancyfrench.mypodcast.com

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