Hi @sue-harper
These new courses are, in general, a lot longer than our previous courses, with substantially more material than the three levels that have appeared in Welsh courses in the past, for example.
Rich 
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Oh, wow! Great! And merci for the reply!
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Excuse me if I’m sending this to the wrong person, but this is the first time I’ve tried to use this forum and I don’t know how it works!!!
I’m trying to use the French beta course and get very frustrated with it continually getting out of synch.
On several occasions, I’ve tried the ‘skip’ button only to find that it has jumped a lot of (too much) vocabulary and verbs. Then when I try to ‘revisit’, it goes back to quite random places and I don’t know how to get back to where I was.
Personally, I would appreciate a time or progress bar so that I know how far I’ve gone and how far to go.
I’m informed that I have five days to go before my next belt then three minutes later I’ve got it!
Despite all this, I do enjoy the SSI app and understand that you are still working on it.
No, what is a French for ‘gremlin’?
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Salut @david-durrant ! Yes, exactly the right place to post, but it helps to also put the @ before someone’s name as that alerts them to your message faster.
The Tech Team is working on an update to the French course which aims to fix the issue with the sync as well as a few other little things, such as the occasional pronunciation glitch. We’re also looking into the functionality of the Skip/Revisit design as it’s not really what we think will benefit users the most, but that will take a bit longer. Feedback such as yours helps us to know what needs to be changed.
Revisit doesn’t currently take you back in the course, but just gives you some practice of earlier material before continuing from your current position, so if you’ve skipped, you’ll stay where you’ve skipped to, but Revisit will give you extra practice.
The addition of some kind of timer is a feature that’s in the plans for a future update, so that’s definitely something that’s coming. And we’re looking into the way the app is currently recording the Stats, so I’ll mention your comment about the 5 days turning into 3 minutes to the team - I didn’t know the app had the power to alter time and space! (Where’s the Tardis emoji when you want one? 
)
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Both sounds are both velar fricatives: the first is voiceless, and the second is voiced. This means if you learn to produce one sound, it should be easier to produce the other.
Think of how “s” & “z” sounds are produced the same way. The only difference is that you vibrate your vocal cords pronouncing “z” but not “s.”
For example, if you can pronounce the German “ch” as in “Bach,” you can try to consciously produce the voiced version of that sound, that is, the French “r”.
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Hey all.
Loving going through the French course. Can already feel my accent modifying which is really positive, because otherwise I end up with the traditional Yorkshire French that madness statements such as ‘silver plate’ for please!
One query between the use of ‘Je voudrais’ and ‘J’aimerais’ for ‘I would like’.
I appreciate that both mean more or less the same, though I am guessing that the former has a slightly stronger emphasis on ‘want’ and the latter a slightly stronger emphasis on ‘like’. However, I wondered if there was a way to identify which will be used in any given context in the course, or whether it is one of those to use whichever I feel like using and to celebrate the differences and ability to use the interchangeably?
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The second of those options 
It will vary depending on context and personal preferences, so it’s one not to think twice about
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Couple of observations:
when the pattern some precious ideas is used - in the some of the phrases, the female say the French correctly but adds a load more of unintelligible stuff. (Not everytimes but quite a few times).
After this “elle peut” is reintroduced with some new phrases but in one of the examples it’s given after the negative “je pens pas que …” which I think should be the subjunctive.
Shortly after this the subjunctive is introduced for “qu’elle puisse”. Again this is generally used with phrases which would need to be followed by the subjunctive but there is a “je pens qu’elle puisse…” example given as well in amongst the correct ones.
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A tiny update to French has just come out, which should fix a few small sync issues! (bigger update to improve course content coming soon as well)
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When Bad in French is introduced “pauvre” is given as the French but then in all following examples ‘mal’ is used
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Just tried to listen to the course (after some time) and noticed that the male voice was missing in a few bits. The last was presenting/revising the word Français and there’s only the female voice twice.
There was one or two before this but can’t remember if it was the same word or another!
If it’s in the “presenting” bit, then that’s just how we used to do the presentations back when the French course was made - we generated just one clip and then played it twice. Nowadays we use the existing female and male voice clips (which is better because it’s easier to keep track of faulty recordings), but we just havent gotten round to redoing the French introductions yet 
I’m still adding it to my list to investigate! Diolch!
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I’m pretty sure I’ve just heard the female voice say “da” for “well” in a bit where it practises around parler Français très bien! 
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There seems to have been an update to the app, but I now have been put right to the start of the course.
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Hi @daiwilliams
We will take a look at your account in the morning - so far we have never had anyone’s progress lost - only funny effects which make it feel a bit like that.
In the few cases we have looked at like this it has been a failure to download progress due to signal loss at this critical point. The next version of the App will display a Try Again pop up/ not proceed if this happens.
In fact this next version has a few improvements in this area but we are waiting until after the Xmas period to release it (the last App update was a minor one in November).
Thanks for reporting it - we’ll take a look.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Rich
P.s. And in those situations logging off and on again enabled the progress to download successfully the second time.
Hi @daiwilliams
There were indeed several failed connection requests,
The ‘Try Again’ pop up will prevent this in future - whixh is already implemented and will be released in the New Year.
Did logging out/ in again work for.you?
Rich
No, but I’m having a nice revision session . No worries I 'm happy to plod / skip along until the update is it out in the new year .
Jouyeux Noel
Dai
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Having learnt French in school the traditional way (lots of grammar and writing, almost no speaking at all), and not using it often I find practising the Ssiw very useful for pronunciation and making speaking more “on automatic” rather than like a word by word translation!
I’d just like to check with you a sentence that sounded a bit odd to me:
“To practise speaking” is translated as “pratiquer la parole”.
I don’t remember ever hearing it, and from a Google search, almost all results are related to a religious context (like: pratiquer la Parole de Dieu" ).
Is it the correct translation that you meant to use or a sentence that just slipped through while doing tests?
P.s. I had posted the half finished draft by mistake without realising! That’s why I deleted my previous comment
I haven’t been doing the French, because it’s possibly the one language that I can switch into and out of more confidently than Welsh, but that phrase does sound a bit odd. Having got much the same search results as you did, I tried a search for “pratiquer parler” (which also turns out to be wrong) and came up with the following:
I did try searching the entries for pratiquer and parole in the Trésor de la langue française informatisé, but the entry for pratiquer doesn’t mention parole and the entry for parole doesn’t mention pratiquer, so it certainly doesn’t seem to be a common set phrase.
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