a free grammar checker that was developed by French professors
not extremely sophisticated and won’t catch all of your errors
but WILL prevent you from making dumb conjugation or agreement mistakes.
MUCH BETTER THAN MICROSOFT WORD
What does it look like?
What’s it do?
it marks what mistakes you made (writes them out and you can also hover over them - I couldn’t screenshot the entire list because it is VERY THOROUGH)
(I feel like I need to mention this is an automatically generated example, I’m bad at french but I’m not that bad)
says what type of mistake it is
and what you can do to fix them.
What do I do with it?
Obviously don’t rely on it 100%, but if you’ve been staring at an essay for five hours it’s so nice to be able to run it through and have it catch the article you misused in the middle of the fourth paragraph.
make sure you check again after correcting the errors because sometimes new ones will be flagged
double check your work, sometimes it suggests corrections that you don’t need to make (since it’s a computer program and you’re a person)
BUT GO FORTH AND IMPROVE YOUR FRENCH GRADES (& share the good news)
Charlie and Lola is an actually very nice British kids program, with a unique art style and use of language. It has also been dubbed into several languages, some of which are available on YouTube, and it’s around A2 - B1 level.
Note: in some languages there are very few episodes available, unfortunately
An anon asked me for french beginners books, which I’m assuming meant children’s books. If not, just let me know what you did mean, nonny.
1. Le Petit Nicolas- these are adorable short stories that are about a little french boy in the 60s. I’ve read a few, and they were all pretty simple to read, plus the pictures were cute.
2. Le Petit Prince- this is a story about the little prince and those that he meets. Though it’s super famous, I actually haven’t read it yet because it’s said to be pretty hard for a “children’s” book.
3. Max and Lili- this is a series about Max and Lili, 2 siblings. It talks about everyday life and seems really cute.
4. Madeleine- stories about a little girl and her 12 classmates.
5. Mr. Leon’s Paris/ Le Paris de Leon- a book about the adventures of a taxi driver in Paris.
There are also some great sites where you can find children’s books:
1. The French Experiment- a site with a few famous stories like the 3 little pigs and goldilocks and the 3 bears translated into french. This site is great because it has the English translation along with the french.
2. Children’s Books Forever- they have a ton of children’s books. There are a lot of languages other than french too.
3. Jeunesse- this site has stories for ages 0 to 12, and it separates it’s stories by time it should take to read them (less than 5 mins to over 20 mins). The stories are all pretty cute and fun to read.
I hope this list was helpful, nonny! Good luck with your reading!
I loathe French. I loathe it so much, because I’ve been trying to conquer it for five years, over five separate attempts [2014, 2015 in HS, 2016 preparing for CLEPs, late 2016 in class, 2018 over summer], and coming up empty every time. So, I decided to have a personal challenge, and reach B1 over 100 hours of quality studying, by May 1st.
Initially:
My CEFR level according to just an online test on Kwiziq:
… was a very low A2. nothing to write home about!
my passive grammar knowledge wasn’t much better:
What did I do?
As some of you already know, I had a system for getting my vocabulary back up to snuff, and its detailed methodology post can be found: right here. I started doing this a few weeks before I decided to shoot for 100 hours, and finished about three weeks before I hit 100 hours.
However, this isn’t all I did. Here’s how my study time broke down:
Listening comprehension: Around 50% of the 6000 minutes I spent studying [50 hours], were spent on listening comprehension. This was very important to me, because I had never been able to watch anything in French, or listen to anything, and understand it. I knew I was going to have spend a lot of time on pronunciation and French media. I still can’t watch a French movie without subtitles [obviously!], but I can listen to News in Slow French and understand around 80%? So that’s pretty cool.
Movies + shows: I spent 25 hours watching stuff in French, and learning a lot of colloquial language and specialized vocabulary that I wouldn’t have stumbled upon myself! 90% of these, I also have vocabulary lists for [those helped me pay attention, pausing and writing down vocab to look up later].
things I watched:
French movies on Netflix: The African Doctor, Il A Tes Yeux
French series on Netflix: A Very Secret Service
Netflix Originals with French Audio and Subtitles: e.g. Watership Down, The Unicorn Store, How It Ends
Writing/grammar:
Most of my writing was covered with my vocabulary system. After that ended, I kept a language journal for the next month, with the starter post detailing what I would write about. Most of those posts can be found in my #language journal tag. Sometime in March, I also borrowed Teach Yourself: French Grammar from my library, because of all the resources I own myself… I have zero French stuff. I posted some notes from that book, and made a lot of reference posts in my language journal.
Français Avec Pierre [Youtube channel, he also has a blog and courses–i think those are paid–to see, 7-10 minute videos he does with his wife, all captioned!]
Laddering ! [for one week, I studied Japanese via a French course, so I got a lot of practice with that]
Discord server [Putting this here because I often posted questions and received help from my friends, so definitely have some way to check yourself!]
a lot of other things, but this was the majority of my grammar study..
When did I do this?
An unspoken rule for myself was that I didn’t want to actively study French past 8 pm. I usually studied from 9-11 am on weekdays. Some days I would keep going until 2 pm, but usually I had work. Occasionally, I’d study for half an hour or so on my lunch break. Then, another hour as I listened to podcasts on my commute.
In total, the challenge took 72 days, 11 of which I actually didn’t do anything, so more like 61. This means I averaged 1 hour and 38 minutes of French studying per day. I had zero desire to max myself out. I just wanted to make sure whatever I studied, I was paying attention! Plus, I needed time to prepare for work and keep up with my students in other languages, so having French on the brain all the time would’ve hindered me.
So, what about now?
Now, I test as this on the CEFR level:
and this is my grammar ranking:
Can we say, success?! I got back to B1, and not a LOW B1, but actually fairly decent ! I’m at the point now where I can write in French pretty quickly and, I’m right on the cusp of being able to explain my way around concepts that I don’t yet have the vocabulary for.
So yeah, challenge over! Now, I’m back to studying Japanese via French so that I can retain that knowledge, and I’ve switched my phone over to French. I need to get back to writing letters in French to keep up with that, but overall I’m very happy with my B1 again, and feel more confident in my skills.
If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me an ask!
You like the music? Go for it! Enjoy the books? Sure, do it! Heard someone speak it in a café one time and loved the sound of it? Get yourself some paper and start practicing!!! Don’t let anything deter you from learning something new 🌱🐝
tomorrow starts a new week - get your focus, visualize your goals. You can do it, you can achieve, you can do it while staying calm. And if you’ve read this far : take care of yourself, eat healthy, breath. i care about all of you so stay hydrated and get your sleep 🧠💕
