This week on the forum

This week has seen a few interesting discussions on the French language forum, which I'd urge you to take a look at if you've not already paid it a visit. Some of my own contributions come in the form of the French Word of the Day category: each day, I'll be posting a word that is "interesting" in some way-- for example because it illustrates a useful basic grammar point, or because it has some interesting history to it. The French slang system verlan also had a mention this week.

Other questions posted by members of the group (of which we now have nearly a hundred and this number is growing every day), hit on a range of topics such as the pronunciation of certain words, or various translation and grammar difficulties that cropped up in certain sentences.

I'd like to take this opportunity to mention a couple of tips on posting. The first is, if it's easy for you to do, please try and put accents on French words and sentences, although I appreciate that on some keyboards/setups, this is cumbersome. Windows users may be interested in the French Linguistics article on how to type accents in Windows-- if you're going to be dealing a lot with French, it is definitely worth finding out how to get the accents. The other tip is simply a reminder that the forums allow you to use formatting such as bold and italic if this makes you post clearer. A convention that I like to use, for example, is to put French words in bold and translations in italics.

Anyway, enjoy the forum, and I look forward to some interesting discussions over the next week!

New French Language forum

The French Linguistics site now has a new-look French Language forum. Come and be among the first to post new questions or have a discussion about anything French. The new forum is at:

http://www.forum.french-linguistics.co.uk/

The new forum offers better features, such as formatted text in entries. If you don't find the category you're looking for, let me know!

Note that the old forum will shortly be retired. A few recent posts will be migrated to the new forum.

Look forward to seeing you there!

French Discussion Forums

You can now discuss things French on the new forums section of the web site. A number of forums are currently proposed, but I'm open to suggestions for new forums as appropriate:

• The Dictionary Forum is intended for general discussion about the dictionary content that isn't focussed on one particular entry; for the latter type of suggestion, use the feedback option from individual entries as usual.
• The French Grammar Forum is intended to be a question-and-answer, or general discussion, about points of French grammar.
• The French Translation Forum is intended to cover issues relating to translation, although I appreciate there's some overlap with the previous two forums here. We'll see how things go...
• The Language Teaching and Learning forum is intended to cover pedagogical issues (e.g. "what's the most effective way to learn vocabulary", recommendations of resources), not necessarily just in French teaching.

To post to the forum, you'll need to register with the site, but registration is quick (no awkward marketing questions-- just pick a user name and password!), free and can be anonymous (you provide a user name rather than real name, so you can easily pick a pseudonym). Note that the actual content of messages posted to the forums is public.

And now it's over to you...! Several thousand people use the French Linguistics site daily, and it will be fantastic if we can start to create more of a "community".