Kiitos @Novem for your fast reply.
I don’t know anything about the technic behind the App and the courses, so I don’t know where to look.
I think the problems have to do with my account.
I restarted my android phone after the app crashed and had to re-log in. Which I think may be the first time I’ve had to do that.
That’s not a problem, however I did notice after restarting and re logging in I was now getting a better and more balanced revision of older and new material, some of which I hadn’t reviewed in weeks.
Not sure if this had been mentioned before but thought it might be helpful
That is interesting to hear (and I understand why). There are a number of small improvements coming down the line related to revision / repetition.
We have a version in system test at the moment which will be released soon.
Rich
I’ve noticed the same thing. Feels like I’ve gone through a full review since the new version was uploaded, which had been hugely helpful as the previous version did not convert older material with the consistency that it seems to be doing now. All very helpful.
S’arreter is introduced as to stop and is eventually built up to use in the phrase ‘should we stop somewhere to eat’
But in the build up it’s put with a couple of phrases such as
Je veux s’arreter
But I think this should be je veux m’arreter when use in the 1st person singular?
It’s eventually used mainly in phrases with on doit s’arreter - which works for fine, it’s just the build up phrases.
As a side note - on and nous are pretty much introduced side by side without any explanation. I’ve come across both forms before so more than happy to go with the flow, but if this was someone’s first time learning any French it might be a bit confusing without at least a brief mention that there’s two possible forms for we.
Also pour manger is introduced as ‘to eat’ but one of the build up phrases is ‘I want to eat’ - je veux pour manger
Which I don’t think really makes sense.
The Italian does something similar with voglio sedersi (= je veux s’asseoir). I don’t know if there needs to be a tweak to Romance reflexive verbs in general, or, if so, how easy or difficult a tweak that would be.
It’s not too easy to take note of sentences if you’re not fast enough to reach the pause button but…I’m pretty sure that I’ve just heard “I think that you want a cup of coffee or tea” translated as “Je pense que voulez vous un tasse de café ou de thé” which wouldn’t sound right to me…
A few random impressions:
1
“on the red one” is translated as “sur le rouge” which seems to me as something you’re more likely to hear at the casino, more than while talking about Jane’s bag.
Or referring to the colour red (le rouge).
Celui/celle rouge would sound better to me. But I’m not sure, and also it may be also just because it’s more similar to how I’d say in Italian.
2
there’s quite a few exercises having “her” in the English sentence.
In the French version it’s always translated as “son”, and sometimes it’s a bit strange/confusing. For example in “where is her” (by itself) or even more, “it’s her” (also by itself).
Opinions, impressions anyone learning or speaking French?
Thanks everyone! Will be looking into all of these
I don’t have any issue with “where is her”, because it’s clearly a fragment in English - Where is her (bag)? = Où est son (sac)? It might be that there’s an underlying decision to use son for ‘her’ in order to stop English speakers thinking that the choice of son/sa goes with the natural gender of the possessor rather than the grammatical gender of the thing possessed - I don’t know how the course design works.
“It’s her” is a bit trickier, because we do use those object forms in informal English in the same way as the emphatic(?) pronouns in French - c’est moi, c’est lui = It’s me (It is I), it’s him (It is he); the versions in English with I/he sound stilted and super formal. But the translation of “it’s her” in that context would then be c’est elle rather than c’est son.
On the whole I think it’s best just to take them both as fragments, building up to a larger whole with ‘her’ as a possessive adjective in both; in which case I’d say that son is perfect in both, and only sounds weird because it’s a short fragment, lacking context.
ETA I think your celui rouge is probably interference from Italian - I kept wanting to say something like il rosso only for the voices to say quello rosso.
Sure, in the full sentence it has to be son/sa, and it’s important to practice that, especially for English-speaking learners - just like it took some time for us to remember that in English it’s the other way round!
My reflection was only about the small bits by themselves, exactly for the reason that you explained in your examples: could that be confusing for someone who has no previous knowledge of the French language?
Is it possible for someone to assume that also “it’s her” can always be translated as “c’est son” instead of “c’est elle” in some cases?
Would it maybe be more effective to just always include a noun in the prompt?
While for “le rouge”, yes there can be interference from Italian for me. So, good to hear that it sounds fine to you in French. And I’m sure you’ll get used to the Italian way at some point, too!
My partner was expressing the same concern about the Portuguese - “give me” was translated as me dar rather than me da, which I was OK with because I knew it was going to be part of a larger structure (‘Could you give me…’ Você poderia me dar). She worried that it might be confusing.
Yes, probably - but we think it’ll start making sense to the learner at some point later in the course! Always including the noun in the prompt is possible but when applied as a general rule it can make the chunks quite bulky and inflexible in some cases… Not to say that it’s impossible that we’ll go back to something like that, but it didn’t quite work out in our tests anyway
When it presents “faire” there’r a strange noise after the woman voice
More sentences that leave me a little puzzled:
1
Prompt:
I think that but I’m not sure if it’s true
I expected:
Je pense ça mais je ne suis pas sûre si c’est vrai
Actual translation:
Je pense que mais je ne suis pas sûre si c’est vrai
2
Prompt:
For that
I expected:
Pour ça
Actual translation:
Pendant ça
Opinions about it?
That sounds like it’s picked the wrong word for ‘that’ - starting it like it’s a chunk for “I think that (he will stay)” for example, instead of “I think that” - that’s the thing that I think.
To me, pendant ça is more like “during that”, but perhaps it makes sense in a future longer sentence.
Yes I’m sure *that’*s what happened with that “that”. It’s definitely a bit tricky in English, translated to/from other languages!
While I can’t remember exactly all the sentences where and how “pour” or “pendant” wer used before, right now.
(I enjoy practising pronunciation, becoming faster at saying the sentences and clearing doubts here and there about the language.
But there’s no new vocabulary for me in the course, and (unlike the German) I hear French from other sources as well, so can’t really remember if I heard something here or elsewhere!)
Just popping some comments about the French course here. They arrived by email, but this way @Kai has them in the same place, and if anyone else doing French has something to add, they can
A lot of the introductions to new words and phrases are gibberish. In reality, it doesn’t really matter because the follow up questions are always correct.
Part way though, I think somewhere around brown belt for me the male model speaker starts going off piste and says things that don’t tally with the script. Basically, he’s adding words that rhyme with ‘qu’elle ait’ that goes before ‘besoin de.’ At first I thought it might be another way to say the same thing, but that doesn’t appear to be the case because it sounds like a different word each time to me ie he may say ‘qu’elle ait belle ait’ this time then ‘qu’elle ait selle ait’ the next. I feel like you may have noticed it in some areas as some of the model lines seem to be said by the main English voice instead around the same time, but in other areas you’ve missed it (if it is what I think it is).
Occasionally the female model voice goes on too long and speaks a lot more than she should! The beginning is correct but it continues so I assume it simply hasn’t been edited correctly.
Just to let you know about a few things that have popped up in the French course:
- vous arreter is introduced as “to stop” and is fine in the main example given but in some of the shorter practice sentences it’s practiced as “i want to stop” → “je veux vous arreter”
- the pattern “je n’en veux meme pas une offre gratuite” is introduced but on some of the shorter practice sentences “I don’t even want any” is translated as “je ne veux pas en” - I might be wrong but I didn;t think that the “en” could go there
You’re right of course: je veux vous arrêter is “I want to stop you”.
And ‘en’ (in this sense) can’t follow ‘pas’. In fact that whole second bullet point is very strange.
‘En’ is what you use when you’re referring to an item that has already mentioned (but only when it’s ‘any/some of something’, rather than a specific item), and ‘en’ always precedes the verb.
So, "Do you want some/any/a coffee? “No, I don’t want any.” – > Veux tu du café? No, je n’en veux pas.
(In contrast, “Do you want the coffee?” would be Non, je ne le veux pas.)
So, Je n’en veux même pas une offre gratruite means “I don’t even want any (of something else entirely already mentioned), a free offer”, which doesn’t really make any sense.
Perhaps they meant Je n’en veux pas, même comme offre gratuite (“I don’t want any, even as a free gift”)?
(Sorry if you already knew this…)
I recently introduced my son’s friend to the new SSi app. He has been trying to learn French for about ten years, without much success, and has really taken to the SSi approach.
He asked me to pass on two comments to the team (both of which are general for the app, rather than specific to French, but I wasn’t sure where else to put them).
The first thing was to ask whether it would be possible to add a daily reminder on the app, to nudge you to use it. I reckon that would have to be something you would opt into because there are probably as many people (me!) who would hate yet another pop-up notification as would find it helpful, but I promised to pass it on regardless.
Secondly, this friend is a game designer and he tells us that the Catalan government is so keen to increase the use of the language that they are paying game designers to translate their games into Catalan. So he reckons that if you were to add Catalan to the list of languages on the app, there might well be grants and other support available to help with this.
Knowing you guys, you may be well aware of this already and even working on something behind the scenes, but I thought I would pass it on.