New survey-- using your iPad to learn French

I'm currently conducting a survey of people who have or are thinking of getting an iPad to see what kind of language-learning activities you would use it for. The plan is to use the results of the survey in considering the possibility of providing new iPad and iPhone applications for users of the French Lingusitics site.

The survey is extremely quick to fill out and is your chance to vote for the type of apps you'd like to see provided, potentially free of charge, on the French Linguistics site over the coming months!

Translation survey

In addition to the French learners' survey mentioned earlier this week in another blog posting, the French Linguistics is currently runnin a translation survey to find out more about the needs of those who contract translation services (or are looking to do so but have doubts about how such services work). The aim is to improve the French translation service offered by the French Lingusitics web site. As with other surveys, this one is completely anonymous.

New exercise on 'du', 'de la', 'des'

In the French grammar section of the web site, a new exercise has been added to the page on using du, de la and des: see the new exercises on saying some in French.

The exercises follow a similar pattern to others in the grammar section: you must complete a number of boxes in which you are asked to provide the French for a particular phrase or sentence. As with other exercises, full screen versions are available for playing on a whiteboard, and the exercise provides on-screen vocabulary.

Feedback on the exercises and suggestions for improvement are of course welcome.

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.

Site updates this week

A number of small updates will be applied to the site over the coming week (5th-9th July), including updates to some of the dictionary data plus modifications to the software that works "behind the scenes" to bring you the dictionary plus other parts of the site.

This means that if you're one of those fortunate to be spending their time this week using the web site rather than basking on a sun-swept beach, the site may occasionally be down for a minute or two. However, such outages are expected to be brief.

Translation mailing list

If you or your company has ongoing translation needs, you are encouraged to subscribe to this site's translation mailing list. To make things easier, the subscription tool is currently being displayed on the main dictionary page.

Those subscribed to the mailing list will receive periodic announcements about reductions and offers available from the site's translation service, along with other translation news.

Please note that translations are provided not only between French and English, but between various language pairs. In general, most translation requirements can be met; the best thing to do is contact the site's author for some no-strings advice.

Reminder about accents on the automatic French translation page

The automatic French translation system can be extremely useful in giving you the gist of a particular text. However, the system often does not give as good a result as it could because of missing accents on the text that uesrs enter into the system. When you are inputting a French text to be translated into English, it is important to try and enter the accents that appear on letters as accurately as possible.

If you are not using a French keyboard (or a keyboard designed for other languages that make regular use of accented letters), then typing accents can be tricky. To make life a bit easier, the translation system actually understands a few accent shortcuts, so that you can type the accents with an everyday UK or US keyboard. The shortcuts are as follows:

- to type an acute or grave accent (a slanting line above the letter), type either a slash (/) or backslash (\) after the vowel, to match the direction in which the accent slopes (i.e. slash for an acute, backslash for a grave)
- for a circumflex (a "hat" above the vowel), type a hat symbol (^) after the vowel
- for a diaeresis (the "two dots" that appear above a vowel letter, to indicate that it is pronounced as a separate vowel to the letter next to it), type a quote symbol (") after the vowel letter
- to type a cedilla (a line or hook appearing on the bottom of a letter "c", to indicate that it is pronounced as a [s] sound), put a comma after the c (c, or C,)