French Language Learning Resources

                            by John Walker
                       http://www.fourmilab.ch/

This directory includes:

    lfrench.doc     "Resources  for  Learning  French"--a  summary  of
                    resources useful to English mother-tongue speakers
                    who wish to learn conversational French.

    lfrench.html    On-line World-Wide Web version of the above.

    gender.doc      A  set  of rules which allow you, by learning only
                    40 word endings, to predict,  with  95%  accuracy,
                    the gender of 75% of French nouns.

    gender.html     On-line World-Wide Web version of the above.

    glue.html       Reference card for French  "glue words",  HTML you
                    can read on-line.

    glue.ps.gz      Reference card for French "glue words", PostScript
                    format, ready to print.

    glue.tex.gz     Reference card  for  French  "glue  words",  LaTeX
                    source code.

In  learning  French,  I found that the most difficult words to master
were what I came to call "linguistic glue," the  adjectives,  adverbs,
prepositions, and conjunctions that link verbs and nouns into complete
sentences.

Unlike verbs and nouns, which are frequently similar  in  English  and
French,  these  "glue  words"  tend to be unique in each language.  In
addition, they are often used in idiomatic ways which are difficult to
find, even in a dictionary.

The   file  glue.ps.gz  is  a  gzipped  PostScript  file  which,  when
uncompressed and printed on a PostScript printer, produces a  one-page
reference card that lists more than 230 French "glue words" along with
their English translation.  I've found that keeping this card at  hand
while  reading  French  documents  saves  an  enormous  amount of time
compared to flipping through a dictionary, and is an excellent way  to
commit these words and their usage to memory.

Included  on  the  reference  card  is  "the  gender  trick".  English
speakers learning French often struggle to memorise the gender of each
noun.   Yet  simply  learning  40  word  endings that reliably predict
gender allows you to determine the gender of  three  quarters  of  all
French  nouns  with an accuracy of approximately 95%.  For example, of
the 1976 nouns that end with the letter "t", all but 5 are  masculine.
A  companion  gender  reference  card lists each ending, the number of
nouns with that ending, the accuracy of gender prediction  it  yields,
and  principal  exceptions  to the rule.  I developed the rules in the
gender trick based on analysis of more than 18,000 nouns.

These  reference  cards  are  delivered  as  PostScript files, and are
formatted to print correctly on either A4 (metric letter  size  paper)
or  U.S. A size (8 1/2 x 11 inch) paper.  A Web version may be read on
line from  http://www.fourmilab.ch/francais/glue.html.   It's  not  as
convenient  as  a  printed  card,  but  it  allows  people  without  a
PostScript printer or viewer access to the information.

Here is a brief sample of words from the "glue" reference  card.   For
compatibility of this introduction across different computers, accents
have been deleted from this sample; they are  present  in  the  actual
documents.

  ainsi                           thus, so
  ainsi que                       as well as
  alentour                        around, round about
  alors                           then, so
  alors que                       when, while, whereas
  ancien                          old, former, ex-
  assez                           enough
  ne ... aucun (aucune)           no, not one, not any
  auparavant                      before(hand)
  aupres de                       next to, compared with
  auquel (a laquelle)             to which (one)
  aussi                           also
  aussi bien que                  as well as
  aussitot                        immediately
  aussitot que                    as soon as

Also included in this directory is lfrench.doc, a  list  of  resources
I've  found to be useful in acquiring initial competence in French and
building  one's  fluency  thereafter,  and  gender.doc,   a   separate
reference  card  for  the "Gender Trick".  These documents use the ISO
8859/1 Latin-1 character set for accented characters, compatible  with
the World-Wide Web, most X Window Unix systems, and Microsoft Windows.

A bientot!