Starting French from scratch

Libre Forum en français (Open Forum in French)
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Hi there,

I’d like to receive some suggestions on how to start learning French from scratch having in mind that my native language is Portuguese and I know some Spanish. I’ve seen some discussions on working with some other beginner’s material before starting with the lessons on LingQ. Do you guys know any good beginner’s book?
Thanks a lot.
Marcelo

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I’d suggest “Pronounce it Perfectly” if you run into any pronunciation issues, but I don’t think you’ll have much trouble because you already know Portuguese and Spanish.

You might check out the Amazon reviews for Living Language Ultimate French. Living Language Ultimate is different from the regular Living Language courses. I believe they are more complete. The nice thing is Living Language offers intermediate or advanced courses. At Alibris or Amazon, you can often get deep discounts on language books and recording. There is also the Frenchpodclass, and BBC French classes. BBC classes vary, but they’re free. They also have upper-beginner videos (or did). I haven’t checked the site for a few months. You also might ask at Frenchabout.com.

I wish you the best. You’re a smart guy, you’ll probably do well no matter what route you take.

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Sorry, that was the wrong address. The one below is the correct address to type. Laura Lawless is the lady associated with the site.

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language books and recordings…

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RQ ,

Thank you so much for your feedback

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Living Language Ultimate French is good.

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A lot of people recommend Assimil.
I bought some books coming with audio cds which contain a lot of dialogues and some short grammar explanation. At the beginning I find dialogues the most helpful. But I cannot recommend them to you because they are German-French. I found them searching at Amazon and reading the references.

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Yes, Assimil is enjoyable, we can enjoy listening to many funny dialogues with this material.

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You could try to build your own material to learn.

Get the french translation for something you like - google it - get french texts about it - put those texts in text to speach and make mp3 out of it

Of course if you can get mp3 from real people it is good too

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Thanks for all these suggestions. I will look into the Assimil material. Pierre, I find your idea interesting but will wait to test it until I have some bagage.

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