Quick points about French and how to learn it:
~French is a Romance language, meaning it's based on Latin roots, including such languages as Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, and Romanian. If you already speak one of these, you will find many words and the grammar are similar (or the same) in orthography, pronunciation and rules.
~Despite its origins, French has been borrowing more English words and expressions. Moreover, the Académie Française is beginning to accept "franglish" words as legit French words. Case in point: le show, meaning television show, le shampooing, meaning shampoo, and Cool! meaning "Cool!" smile
~Infinitives in English are "to (verb)," while infinitives in French are all one word. There are three types of regular verbs (-er, -ir, -re), and many irregular verbs, which are used in dictionaries. They conjugate differently, and French language lessons expect students to figure out which type a verb is.
~French vocabulary takes articles in front of it, to mean either "the" or "a/an." In addition, French nouns have gender inflectional morphology, which influences the article it takes. Masculine nouns take un or le, while feminine nouns take une or la in the singular. Again, don't worry, I'll help you out with this.
~French culture is very present in the language. Where pertinent in language lessons, I will be injecting a little bit of culture lesson as well. If you ever want to know more, message me and I'll be happy to tell you more!
~Don't worry if you don't pick it up right away. We'll start simple, and get tougher as you start to get the hang of it. I'm almost always online if you ever want to practice with me outside of the guild. Send me a message and I will be more than happy to help you with whatever you're having trouble with.
~Above all, do not let the language scare you! Be the boss! I will help you! It's not so scary once you get to know it, and it doesn't bite at all, I promise!
All right, first cursory lesson to look over is about...
FRENCH ACCENTS:
I don't mean spoken accents! I mean diacritics, like these things:
é è ê ë ç
The little things above/below the letters are accents, and they all have their own names and functions.
é <--- This e has an accent aigu over it. This accent is ONLY used on the letter e. It changes the pronunciation of the letter and, depending on where it's used, can change the tense of the word.
è <---- This e has an accent grave over it. This accent is used on only three letters, a, e, and u, but only changes the pronunciation when over an e. We'll get to all this later!
ê <--- This e has a circonflex over it. This accent can be used on a, e, i, o, and u, but only affects the pronunciation of a, e, and o. Historically, this accent was used to mark a deleted s in the word, as well as a long vowel. Example: The word forêt means forest.
ë <--- This e has an accent tréma over it, more commonly called an umlaut. It can be used over e, i, and u, and sometimes over y. It is used when two adjacent vowels are pronounced separately ("vowels in hiatus"), as opposed to being a diphthong or representing a monophthong (
ç <--- This c has a cedilla (cédille) underneath it. The cédille is ONLY used on c. It is pronounced as , whereas the regular
i.e.
Je commence [ʒə kɔ.mɑ̃s] - I start
Je commençais [ʒə kɔ.mɑ̃.sɛ] - I was starting
Un camion [œ̃ ka.mjɔ̃] - A truck
Stay tuned for vocabulary and verbs, coming soon!
