SaySomethingin French (Beta)

Seems like we had a similar impression, and the comments at the link makes sense.

It’s actually similar in Italian (praticare can’t be followed by a verb, and we use “esercitarmi a” for “m’entraîner à”). But that often makes me doubt that something in French or Spanish doesn’t sound right to me just because it’s unusually very different from Italian!

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Just as a quick update, I couldn’t get back to where I was after being put right to the start despite trying logging out etc. Just in case this is a fault that might happen again to someone else. It served to be a nice bit of revision over the holidays as I fast forwarded/practiced the semi forgotten patterns. I eventually got back to where I was and have had no further problems.

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DeepL gives “Je voudrais m’entraîner à parler français” for “I would like to practise speaking French” which also concurs with the comments from that link and sounds better to my very basic French ear :slight_smile:

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French v.1.2.0 is live! You should see:

-Some fixed audios (there will definitely be many more to fix)
-a decrease in weird phrases (there’ll still be some, but this should help)
-hopefully a complete fix for the course going out of sync

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Hello,
On my commute to work last week, I was logged in to SSI French and as usual at a certain point I lost signal and when I got the signal back SSI had advanced me considerably in the course to a point where I had no understanding. When I returned home, I tried revisiting but could not find my original place. I’ve now messed things about so much with Automagic and SSI that I don’t know what to do!!! I’ve shut down and restarted my phone. I’ve deleted and restarted the apps all to no avail.
SSI French is working fine
On another tack, I’m regularly asked to have five minute conversations with myself in my new language, but I can’t for the life of me remember all the topics that I have ‘learnt’. I would find it very helpful if there was somewhere where I could look at the points and vocabulary that I had covered, just as there was in the old SSI Welsh.
I look forward to hearing from you,
David

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Hi @david-durrant

Ok that sounds very interesting - we are looking at another situation where a user says they went forward. We will have a look at your account if that is OK?

You say that French is now working fine?

Thanks for your help.

Rich :slightly_smiling_face:

Hello
Maybe it is due to the updates you made, but since yesterday I have to start again from the scratch in French, and today I had to start from the beginning in Italian, but after Aran’s explanation the course ( Italian !) started with : The French for I want is je veux. This happens only on the App for the phone.
On the Web App French, Italian and Finnish work fine, only in Welsh North I have to start every day with: That sounds as if the second day of the show was slow. If I skip, I get after every skip another senctences with " fel bod " and the next sentence is always : you’d help the children if you could.
Oh, and I couldn’t resist to sneak into Japanese, I only listened 10 minutes or so, but I really like it.
Thank you for your hard work
I’m looking forward to hearing from you.
Brigitte

Diolch as always @brigitte! Just a note to @rich - the updates all came this afternoon (we didn’t touch anything before that), so I don’t think the new versions had anything to do with the progress loss. But let me know if I can help look into anything

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.

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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

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Hi @ianblandford

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 :slightly_smiling_face:

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.

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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.

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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.

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It’s not too easy to take note of sentences if you’re not fast enough to reach the pause button :sweat_smile: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. :smile:

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 :slight_smile:

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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! :smiley:

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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.

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