French Linguistics user survey

I'm conducting another survey on the site. This one's above user interests if you have a minute!

French learning podcasts

Dear all,

As those who read the French discussion forum will be aware, I'm opening up the floor for topic suggestions for a new series of French learning podcasts that I intend to put together over the coming weeks and months. If you have a suggestion, I invite you to add an entry to the "French audio podcasts" thread.

French learners' survey

Users of the French Linguistics site are invited to take part in a quick French learners' survey. The survey asks you about which aspects of learning French you find easy and difficult and will only take you a minute or two. The results of the survey will be used to improve the web site.

French wordsearches reinstated

Eagle-eyed users of the French Linguistics web site will have noticed that the French wordsearches were not working over this weekend. The problem appears to have been caused by an update performed on Friday evening and has now been fixed. Apologies for the inconvenience caused to our wordsearch addicts.

French/English dictionary update

Today's update adds various new entries to the French dictionary and follows in the wake of other recent updates by including various improvements to commonly consulted entries in the English-French side of the dictionary.

500th forum member; dictionary update

Good news, everybody.


The French language forum has reached its 500th member! Many thanks to all those who participate in the forum, be it to ask questions about French or to help learners. If you haven't discovered it yet, the forum is a great community for expanding your knowledge of French, even if you're just beginning, or simply for chatting to other French speakers and learners.

I'd like to take this opportunity to plug the on-line "chat" function. A few regulars are already using it, but it would be nice to see more users taking advantage.

On a smaller note, the English-French side of the dictionary has today seen a few more additions, as part of an ongoing effort to improve the entries to various commonly looked up words.

English-French dictionary update

Today's update focusses primarily on improvements to various entries in the English-French side of the dictionary. The entries to various commonly lookuped up words have been expanded and clarified.

This week on the forum

As usual, we've seen various interesting discussions this week on the French language forum. It's interesting to see how on various occasions, a simple, innocent query about the meaning of a word or phrase can spiral into a discussion of various grammar and vocabulary points.

Some threads not to miss:

• a discussion around expressing obligation in French, which ends up touching on the somewhat quirky behaviour of the French verb obliger, and some aspects of the use of à and de before verbs in French;
• an overview of the curious form l'on in French: a variant of on which occurs under certain circumstances, but not others;
• a look at the French negative with 'de': the general use of the determiner de instead of other indefinite determiners when the entire sentence is negated.

Various entries also centre on choices between sentences produced by machine translation systems. If you use such a system, it's important to understand some of the implications. Among other reading, I'd recommend an article I wrote recently on Machine Translation.

200th forum member

The French forum now counts over 200 members, with discussions ranging from simple homework help to details of French grammar to cultural issues. Thank you to everyone who participating in what are some very interesting and helpful discussions.

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!

Software review: Instant Immersion French

A new addition to the French reviews section of the web site looks at a piece of software called Instant Immersion French. The software provides a number of vocabulary and grammar-based exercises, some traditional, some less traditional. Generally, a good variety of types of exercise are provided.

One of the most interesting features of this software is its use of speech input as well as output. As well as listening to recordings of various French speakers, you are encouraged to take to the microphone and practise various dialogues, pronunciation exercises and other activities into which speech has been integrated.

The Deluxe version reviewed represents particularly good value as in addition to the program itself, some "bonus" CDs and DVD are included, along with a simple point-and-click French adventure.

Note that the program is primarily of interest to learners at lower levels, although, as discussed in the review, if you have various people in your household learning at a mixture of levels, there may be something in the product for more advanced speakers in the adventure game and in some of the more advanced information in the grammar section of the program.

Translation examples

The first version of an additional tool is now available for advanced language students and professional translators. At translationexamples.com, you'll now find a translation example search engine that lets you search for examples of translations between various languages and English. At the moment, you can search for translations from French, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Dutch.

When you look up a word, you are presented with a list of sentences containing that word, plus English translations of those sentences. At present, the example translations are drawn from a bank of around 1,000,000 translated sentences from the Europarl corpus (a set of proceedings from the Euopean Parliament that, along with their corresponding translations, have been placed in the public-domain). It is likely that other corpora will be added in the near future.

Note that this example translations database should be seen as a complement to, rather than replacement for, the regular French dictionary.

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!

GCSE French: Hints and Tips

If you're about to take your GCSEs (or just learning for next year), you might be interested in the following resources available on the French Linguistics web site.

• Firstly, some hints and tips for the French GCSE speaking test: we look at some very common words/phrases that will crop up, strategies for when you don't know a word, and how to avoid one or two grammatical difficulties (notably avoiding complications with asking questions) when speaking French;
• You sould also check out the page of essential GCSE vocab: this isn't all the vocab you need to get good marks at GCSE, but it's some of the vocab that comes up time and time again. Once you've got to grips with this vocab, if you have time, then try and learn some of the vocab from the basic French words and phrases section of the web site;
• Use the on-line French wordsearch and crossword games to reinforce your vocabulary;
• Consider printing some French flashcards (using the site's free flashcard tool) to help you learn.

New French vocab and grammar content

The following new pages have been added to the site:

• a basic introduction to French adjectives, which shows the basic rules for forming regular French adjectives, and includes an on-line exercise; it also includes an exercise on a basic class of "semi-regular" adjectives ending in -n, which double the -n in the feminine (italien -> italienne)
  
• in the basic French vocabulary section, a list of musical instruments in French, with some accompanying notes about how to say things such as I play the piano.

New worksheets: crosswords

In the French Worksheet PDF section of the web site, some new French crossword PDFs have been added. These crosswords are designed as a vocabulary aid to learners of French, and so are actually English-style crosswords. The words in the crossword are items of French vocabulary, but the clues are the English translations of those words. Each PDF file contains a variety of crosswords on a given theme (generally, different sizes of crossword, with 4 different crosswords at each size).

Feedback on these crosswords and indeed any of the French worksheets/exercises available available on the site is always welcome.

New crossword and wordsearch categories

Some new on-line crossword and wordsearch themes have been added:

• Computers and the Internet wordsearch includes vocabulary to do with files, documents, web pages and parts of the computer; a Computers and Internet crossword is also available on this theme;
• Jobs and Professions wordsearch includes names of various jobs and professions;
• The Around Town crossword features names of various buildings and basic words used in asking for directions;
• The Sport and the Olympic Games crossword features various vocabulary relating to sport generally, and includes French names of various events from the Olympic Games.

Note that to play these on-line word games, your browser must support Java. But in practice, most browsers already do.

DGT Glossary terms incorporated into text translator

When you use the French translator tool, appropriate results will now be displayed from the DGT glossaries. The DGT glossaries contain terms of translations from various technical fields.

French-English text translation tool

An initial version of this site's automatic French/English translation tool is available. The tool is designed to complement the site's dictionary as follows:

• The dictionary is intended for use by students, learners, translators etc who basically understand some French but need to find out about the translation or uses of an isolated word or phrase;
• The translation tool is aimed more at English speakers who need to get the gist of an entire French text (or vice versa for French speakers with an English text), typically when they understand very little of the target language.

In practice, initial tests show that learners and users of the language are also finding it useful to look up phrases using the translation tool. You should just be aware of limitations of the automatic translation, and may like to take a look at the accompanying tips on using machine translation.

About the translation system

Many of the text translations are produced by Google Translate, a statistical machine translation system developed by Google which allows sites such as this to query and build on the translation system. However, this site's tool also builds some additional features on top of the Google system:

• it is assumed that the language pair you are working with is French/English; the site will detect which of these two languages is being entered and translate to the other language;
• some orthographic corrections are made to the input text which help to get a better result from Google;
• in some cases, alternative inputs will be run simultaneously through the Google system when such inputs are known to improve the translation results (such alternatives and their translations are always listed alongside the original query);
• in some cases, instead of using the Google system, a translation is pulled directly from this site's dictionary data. Note that the source of the translation is always clearly indicated.

The above features are being actively improved on the basis of the typical use to which users are putting the system.

Known limitations

The system works best on texts that are similar to the types of text that the system has been trained on. Google Translate is a statistical system, trained on sets of existing translations. In practice, this means the system works well on "the types of text that people tend to translate". For example, whole sentences or passages from commercial or technical texts work quite well. Isolated words and phrases, particularly when they have a "dangling" word such as a preposition, sometimes don't work as well. You may also find what you consider to be quite a "basic" phrase or question doesn't translate so well, because a phrase used in everyday speech didn't crop up in the material that the translation system was trained on.

Dictionary update: DGT glossary beta

Along with its sister Spanish dictionary and language site, entries in this site's on-line French dictionary have now been augmented with terms from the EU DGT Multilingual Translation Memory. The latter is a set of translated terms, phrases and sentences extracted from translations of EU documents. It thus covers translation of various legal and technical domains. At present, approximately 30,000 terms and phrases are included on this site. (Some long or repetitious entries have been filtered out.)

The terms from the DGT glossary currently appear in a table below the regular dictionary entries. At present, they are included for French-English lookups only, but it is planned that terms for English-French lookups will be added over the next few days.