John Galt wrote:For those of you currently learning Chinese (or those thinking about taking it up), I've just found an excellent site for reading practice. It has articles in beginner, intermediate and advance categories and all the text is interactive so if you don't know a word or character you can just scroll over it and find its meaning and pronunciation.
http://chinesereadingpractice.com/
Cheers.
Slowly but surely trying to reduce the amount of pinyin I use, so that looks superb.
Fade wrote:Anybody know some good websites for learning Francais? >_>
What level are you at currently? If you're a beginner, I've got a copy of Fluenz French 1 that's good, so I could send you that. The BBC website is also very helpful, and, especially for beginners, there are a load of podcasts freely available (Coffee Break French and frenchpod, for example). There is loads of software freely available (
) so you can easily find a program that suits you.
http://french.about.com/ is an excellent site too.
Lotus wrote:Does anyone having experience of learning French to a good level?
I did GCSE French, which taught me about as much as I'd need to know on holiday, but I want to get my French up to a decent standard.
I can still remember a lot of the basics, which I'm guessing will help, but the trick is finding the best way of continuing to learn and taking it to the next level. Any recommendations on courses/books/CDs/etc?
I found that, after stopping learning for a while, my vocab had essentially gone, and, I had to increase the speed of my speaking/listening, but the reading and writing remained pretty decent. I'd imagine that's the case for a lot of people, so I'd recommend more audio-based content.
In addition to what I've mentioned above, the BBC website is good for an intermediate learner, they have a course called Ma France which is for post-beginners, so it's worth trying that. You might want to check your level against the bitesize content, too. The podcasts I've mentioned above would be helpful (especially CBF, as that is freely available to a higher level). There are audio based courses as well (Michel Thomas and Paul Noble for example, again, easily found), and I can send you the first level of Fluenz (it only covers the basics, but I found it to be a nice little recap) if you want it.
For vocab, I'm currently using a site called memrise
http://www.memrise.com/home/ which is solid, but there are loads of flash card type apps for iphones etc. which can easily be acquired.