French Language Home

Quickly learn essential French phrases for traveling, in easy single-serving doses! Great for beginners!

Each "serving" is composed of:

wallet-sized phrase guides

Free Printable Booklets

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4 sections in one printable booklet, with over 100 words and phrases total.

Web Pages w/clickable Audio

View each page on your computer. Click each word or phrase to hear it!
All audio is from native speakers.

Each page of the printed booklet corresponds to one web page

portable audio phrase guides

Full page Audio Files with English and French

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Each file corresponds to one page of the booklet. 2-3 minute long mp3 audio file of each page/section that you can listen to anywhere.
About 30 phrases per section - includes the English.

French is spoken throughout France, parts of Canada and Belgium, a large portion of Switzerland, in most of the former French colonies as either a first or second language and by people the world over as a second language.

My goal is for single-serving to be a one-stop shop for French foreign language needs for tourists, travelers, business, self-learners, or anyone with an interest in languages. When you are done looking at the site, download the MP3 Audio file and print the Acrobat Booklet. You can use them together anywhere: at work or home on your computer or on the road with a portable mp3 player. You can even copy the audio to CD or tape and take it with you on your travels. Practice the pronunciation before you travel and then just carry the booklet with you. Look at what's here and use it for travel or learning.

One of the reasons that I began doing this site, was the difficulty I had using the phonetic pronunciations given in most phrase guides. The problem is that either one has to learn the international phonetic alphabet, or guess how the author thinks that someone would pronounce certain letter combinations. I avoid phonetics and use audio from real native speakers. There is no mistaking how a word should be pronounced. Only knowing a word or phrase is half the battle; you must be able to be understood. Hearing a native pronounce the words is the greatest aid to pronunciation. Practice is the key to learning (as if your parents haven't been telling you that all along). Go to France, Belgium, Canada, or Switzerland, and speak! Don't let them speak English with you!

French Language Links

pull these old links: https://web.archive.org/web/20011117020838/http://babel.uoregon.edu/yamada/guides/french.html

The website of the National Library of France is an impressive project to digitize all public domain French works. The site is in French, so is more of a resource for someone who already speaks French at a decent level.

French Conjugation
You insert the infinitive and select the verbal tense, voice, and mood, and the INFL analyzer will give you the conjugation. The INFL analyzer is a licensed product of the MultiLingual Theory and Technology team at the Rank Xerox Research Center, in Grenoble, France made available to ARTFL through a technology exchange agreement. The principal developers of INFL are Lauri Karttunen and Annie Zaenen.

French Lessons from Everywhere is a huge list of online French lessons

Fluent French - Experiences of an English speaker

French Language Lessons

French Assistant

The French Tutorial

About: French Language

RealFrench

WordProf French Lessons

French For Beginners

ZUT - Interactive Activities for French

French Revision

French Flashcards from flash card exchange

Free downloads of French Audio books (the site is completely in French.)

World Language.com's French Products

Introduction à la linguistique française well organized lessons completely in French

www.french4u.com is a translation service that specializes in real estate transactions of all types.

French Travel Links:

Check out Time-Out's online guide to Paris. You can order one from the site, or just buy one from a kiosk or bookstore once you get there. They are very complete, but in Time Out's mission to cater to all, they lose the personal touch.

Fredlet's "Things to do in Paris when you are not dead" is a quick fun list of recommendations.

Words you'll need to take trains in France and the rest of Europe. (available as .pdf only)

Look into the weak beginnings of my own guide to my own France.

Online dictionaries:

Neil Coffey's French Dictionary two-way dictionary.

WordReference English-French Dictionary Online dictionary and free browser tools; based on the Collins Paperback French Dictionary.

ARTFL French-English Dictionaries

If you can't cuss and swear in French, you ain't merde! (The Alternative Dictionaries project) You can also buy the book Merde! from Amazon, for more colorful language.

French bad words from insultmonger.com (warning: porn ads on some pages)

The following are links from TennesseeBob's Famous French Links

Language


CIVILISATION & CULTURE


READING, LITTERATURE & CINEMA


Special Section on Business French


Lessons on Individual Topics

Here I have included lessons on a wide range of individual topics, a number of which are traditional for language and culture classes, and some of which belong more in the category now tagged "content" oriented (computer science, music, etc.). I may eventually move these to a page linked to this one to join the component breakdown of the whole courses listed above.


Tests, Quizzes and Questionnaires


Multi-functional Educational Sites in French