@kimojima
Can you maybe write a link to this course ‘French in action.’?
I’ve heard a lot of it, but I don’t find the link.
Just a quick comment. I just started my first lesson in the French library. It seems like a lot of the obviously correct hints have been flagged. For example, the most popular hint for ‘bonjour’, which is ‘hello’ of course, has been LingQed 2540 times, and has been flagged three times now despite being correct. The hint ‘night’ for ‘nuit’ has been flagged. So has ‘thank you’ for ‘merci’, ‘very’ for ‘très’, ‘what’ for ‘quel’, and ‘of’ for ‘des’. Strange.
@evgueny40 Can you maybe write a link to this course ‘French in action.’?
Forgive me for jumping in here, but I know of this link to “French in Action” (but apparently only connections in the USA and Canada can access it):
http://www.learner.org/resources/series83.html
I also found episodes by going to Youtube and searching for French in Action. Here, for example, is episode 1: - YouTube
Although maybe only viewers in the USA and Canada can access it?
A latter day review of the series from the Los Angeles Times November 23, 2011, is here:
This is the first paragraph of that review:
“‘French in Action,’ a 1987 public-television, total-immersion language course in the form of an annotated romance – there are fellow fans, I know, already shaking in excitement from these few words – is now available online in its 52-episode entirety, for free. (You can also buy it on DVD, if you are rich, and it is bootlegged higgledy-piggledy on YouTube.) Produced by Annenberg/CPB (whose Annenberg Learner site hosts the series) along with Boston’s WGBH and Yale and Wellesley universities, it is a pedagogical romcom whose secret weapon is a cast so incredibly good-looking that you really, really want to be able to talk to them. It is learning by desire.”
I have personally watched a few of the episodes. In my opinion they were well produced, directed and acted, and they were even to a certain extent effective. They would be a decent choice for learning French without going to France, or for learning French in a world without LingQ. But IMHO, LingQ is a far more effective way to learn French. For me, anyway. Of course, one could use an episode from “French in Action” as a lesson in LingQ.
@donhamiltontx
It´s available in Germany (and Germany is a leading country in the field of blocking youtube videos…^^)
“LingQ is a far more effective way to learn French. For me, anyway.”
How much time do you spend on LingQ each day?
@Paule89 “How much time do you spend on LingQ each day?”
When I study a language on LingQ, I spend an hour a day, seven days a week. I stick to that schedule at least 95% of the time.
To give you some idea of how that schedule works, it took me two years on that schedule to get where I wanted to be for reading French. Note that I had had 4 mostly useless semesters of French in college. (And my last French teacher took me aside the last day of class and advised me not to take any more French classes (that still brings a smile to my face)). I would call myself fluent in reading French. Some audio texts I can listen to and understand, some not. I’m not much of a talker in any language, including English, and I won’t be going to any francophone countries, so speaking and writing are not important to me. So I’m done with French (though not with reading it: currently, La condition humaine by André Malraux; so far, terrific).
Two years as well with Spanish. My reading level in Spanish is a bit lower than my reading level in French. The main cause of that is that there are far fewer Spanish texts than French texts that (1) interest me and that (2) can be imported into LingQ; so I have spent a bit less time reading Spanish texts on LingQ. I’m done, too, I think, with Spanish (though not with reading it: currently, Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros; so far, terrific).
On that schedule, I would have finished “French in Action” in about a month. Yes, I would have repeated it several times, but even if I had mastered the whole series, I would not have gotten very far with French. That is the problem with all courses that are not LingQ. They are a bit like booking a flight from Berlin to New York, only to have the plane stop in Baden-Baden. As you get off the plane, the pilot tells you, “Goodbye, my friends. Good luck getting to New York.”
@ColinJohnstone - Can you send a link to the lesson you are finding all the flagged hints in?
Watching of FiA is going to be my new daily routine. I am downloading it, and I sense it will be interesting to watch it.
@ Mark - I found them in the first lesson I opened, which was this one.
I went through another 17 lessons last night, and found a few other obviously correct hints for important words flagged.
If you are going to use brackets ( ) you need to make sure the sentence makes sense if you exclude everything in the brackets.
e.g. I am looking forward to enjoying my holiday (without my mother-in-law) on the beaches of the Whitsundays.
Thank you for this detailed explanation.
I study french for at least 3 hours a day (I´ll move there in a few months) so using -only- LingQ doesn´t work out for me. I spend 30-60 on LingQ and 1-2 on playing video games, watching movies/youtube videos and it seems to work 
So I said on this thread a week ago that I would start doing a bit of French for a trip to the beautiful Biarritz at the end of the month. This have I been doing. I have had no experience learning French in the past, and what I find amazing is how much easier it is to start learning French for me than Russian was (which I also started this year on LingQ), and even somewhat easier than German. I have listened to 8.4 hours, made over 1000 LingQs, and added over 600 known words, and I understand French much better than I understand Russian after many months. I can already work my way through intermediate courses, with difficulty of course, which I could not even touch in Russian. I don’t really know why I find French so much easier, but here are my suspicions:
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This is the main one. I know lots of French vocabulary from English.
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I know almost all of the French alphabet, whereas the Russian alphabet is a big hurdle for me. It cannot be learned in any meaningful way in a matter of hours. It takes months to overcome the problem of the unfamiliar alphabet.
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I have had quite a lot of exposure to French in the past, having been to France seven or eight times, even if it was mostly just noise or individual words that I heard from time to time.
Anyway, I will still be at a low beginner level when I go to France, but if I am still interested after my trip, I will continue to learn at the same time as Russian and German. I know people say you should not study more than one language at a time when you are at low levels in both, but I find this advice too inconvenient to bother listening to.
@Colin
I’d reccomend downloading a torrent of either Michel Thomas or Paul Noble French, which is pretty easy to find on whatever torrent site. Keep doing what you’re doing, then activate it all using one of these systems. They don’t work for everybody, but if it does for you, you’ll find yourself with a pretty solid base for constructing sentences, and even paragraphs, on your own.
It makes sense that French seems easy to you. For anglophones, it’s pretty easy to learn to a high passive level. Activating it is the worry.
Thanks for the recommendation. I don’t think that French seems easy, just much easier than Russian. I think I understood more French after an hour of studying than I do Russian now. Of course I have not tried talking yet, which of course will be much more difficult.
Earworms French isn’t bad either - and unlike MT you could listen to that quite easily while you’re working out, etc…
(And it might also be floating around somewhere on isohunt dot com…if you’re into piracy!)
I generally prefer to just pay and get a better copy of the product with less hassle.
Moi aussi!
I honestly find pirating to be less hassle than buying. With utorrent and the like you can easily find yourself with a harddrive of 750 hours of TV in your target language, most of which you really doubt you will ever get around to watching. It’s just good to know how to keep your computer clean.
The guys at lingq sure made a good decision in having their product be an online client with payment that is subscription based. If it was a downloaded program that was payed for once, I’d have torrented it ages ago.
@djvlbass
Well hey, you’re a student - different rules apply to you dudes!
(But for those who can afford to pay, it is a little shady to pirate stuff, IMO.)
I don’t mind torrenting things I don’t have access to otherwise, so I might go for some French TV in the future. For now, I am drowning it excellent stuff at LingQ. Just completed my first intermediate 1 course.
I am not a linguist, but I can easily suppose that any language can be viewed from several perspectives. It is commonly believed that English grammar is relatively easy and that there is an immense amount of vocabulary, a large part of which comes from other languages. The writing system is simple but the pronunciation is complicated, and so on. I can only say that easy English is easy.