Tag Archives: French

An extract of my French comic book is now available

I have finally produced an extract of the comic book for people to look at.  It contains 12 of the 28 pages, with images reduced to readable low resolution.

The extract contains all the text that explains the rationale for the approach, as well as showing a summary of the language covered in the first episode.  There are 3 pages of the Gnomeville story in the extract.  The first two show how the story begins with no prior French knowledge, and how the language is introduced.  The third page shows how the text increases in complexity and length later in the story, with a very short word definition on the page, so that the person reading is not slowed down too much in their reading in French.

Note that the extract doesn’t show the true page format, as it is an ordinary A4 pdf file, whereas normally the pages are processed into book form, re-numbered appropriately and trimmed to size.  The story pages are colour right to the edge of the paper in the physical copies.

Top French Movies

One of the ways that I pick up foreign language listening skills is watching movies and TV series in the language.  For Italian I took it one step further in that I made bingo sheets of common expressions to encourage listening instead of just reading subtitles.

I will probably do the same for French at some point.  Here is a list from 2011 that I found, of the top 10 French films.

  1. Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis
  2. La Grande vadrouille
  3. Astérix et Obélix : Mission Cléopâtre
  4. Les Visiteurs
  5. Le Petit monde de Don Camillo
  6. Corniaud
  7. Taxi 2
  8. 3 hommes et un couffin
  9. Les Bronzés 3 amis pour la vie

Oops, one missing from the top 10.  Maybe I misunderstood the last paragraph of the article.

Pronunciation songs

While preparing my choir for a concert of French music I have been inspired to write some rounds and short songs in French to help choristers to produce the correct vowel sounds, and to have a bit of an idea about how to pronounce French.  I’ve written one round for each vowel so far, and am now writing songs for various consonants.  Today I finished a song for the letter G.  I’ll probably publish these as a booklet for choirs and classes.

Language Qualifications

As I write a comic book in French for language learners I thought it would be a good idea to update my qualifications.  A long time ago I did senior high school French and the corresponding Alliance Française exams.  A few years ago I did a few courses at the Alliance Française.  This year I sat the (CEFR) A2 exam – a fairly low level exam just so I could see how it all works, and because I haven’t done an exam for a few years. 

Europe has a set of standards for language skill, known in English as the “Common European Framework of Reference” (CEFR).  The 6 levels go from A1 to C2, and reflect practical skills in listening, speaking, reading and writing, rather than just grammatical skills.  I hope to do the B1 exam soon, which is still a lower level than expected by international students entering TAFE in Australia, so I have a bit of a way to go.  B2/C1 is needed for tertiary study.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages