Language Tutorial

I want to start learning myself French in the holidays so I can prepare to get taught after the holidays. How can I learn myself in the best way?

To be honest with you, if I weren't French, I wouldn't have had the courage to learn the language. It's very tough, and its pronunciation is very different from that of English. But don't be discouraged! Some of my students found that they weren't learning enough in the classroom, and they asked me this exact question.
Here are a few ways to do it:

- Get French movies and put the English subtitles on. You'll be listening to the words, and you'll be seeing what they mean. This is the best way I've found to teach yourself a language.
Not only will you not get bored or sleepy like you'd get by reading French grammar books, but you're hearing the correct pronunciation of the words. Plus, you can always go back to a sentence and hear it again.
Here are a few French movies I know for sure you can rent at Blockbuster:
- Le diner de con
- Amélie
- Paris, je t'aime
They're good movies. “Le dinner de con” is a very popular comedy. “Amélie” and “Paris, je t'aime” are filmed in Paris, which is nice because you get to see some of the city's beautiful places.

- Check out the newspapers or online if there are any groups of people who get together and speak French. I know a few in my city. They get together every other week and talk about stuff they don’t always understand in French. The group is mostly people trying to learn French, and there are at least 2 or more French native speakers there to help you.

- Don’t buy the super-expensive online $200+ “Learn how to speak a new language” stuff. You said you’d be learning French soon, so you’ll just be throwing your money away.

I want to learn french , one first then the other of course.
Please let me know if you have a good learning experience with an audiobook.

Rocket French have 31 complete audio track for learning french from home.
http://learnfrenchfromhome.blogspot.com/

I wanted to learn french online, for free. Does anyone know where is a good website for beginners and intermediate?

Livemocha has a good website for learning languages and French.

What is the best free way to learn french for FREE w/o sitting in a class room?

speak it in your ind. connect together hat you've learned. go to aboutfrench.com and francais facil.com

I have learnt some basic command line interpreters, and created a few scripts using them, so I am familiar with the protocols of creating programs, and required to know if there is a simple programming language, capable of developing minor applications, such as alarms, and auto clickers.

Not bothering with C++, too complicated currently.

Additionally, if you could post a link to x programming language's tutorial, that would be great.

Thanks in advance.

If you are a windows user get a few copies of Visual Studio Express Editions (Visual Basic.NET, C#), download Eclipse for Java programming. Google those for links. You can write javascript scripts and execute them right in your browser.

When our church first decided to venture into the world of podcasting last year, the process seemed daunting. We had only ventured into multimedia development a little bit – mostly in recording and burning our sermons to CD. The internet, however, and things such as podcasting, seemed completely foreign to us.

Our friends in other congregations who already had podcasts running kept extolling how wonderful the technology was, and how it enabled them to get the message out for a relatively low cost. When our daughter showed us that she was getting weekly updates from every church in the area apart from ours, we made the decision to make the leap as well (no, there isn’t any sense of competitiveness here. Certainly not!)

This article is the end result of the past year of our endeavors, and hopefully will serve as a primer for those that want to get their church podcasting as well. The hardest part of getting the podcast up and running was understanding exactly how a podcast works, and getting everything properly prepared. I hope to help you through that learning curve, by explaining everything in simple language. The concept isn’t difficult whatsoever!

First, let’s define what a podcast is.

A podcast is a text file located on the internet that points to a group of media files. This text file is called a newsfeed (or an RSS feed), and acts like a roadmap to media files that are also located on the internet. When someone views a podcast, what they are actually doing is reading this text file, and being pointed to the appropriate media files.

The program that reads the text file (newsfeed) is called an aggregator. The aggregator reads the text file, and grabs the media files that it is being pointed to. All of this is done in the background, giving you the illusion of “single” show that has multiple episodes. In reality, however, it’s just a bunch of files located on the internet tied together via this text file.

This text file must follow a certain format, in order to assure compatibility across the range of aggregators out there (e.g., iTunes). The structure of the text file defines the details of the show (the show’s title, description, etc), and where to find the show’s episodes. It’s done in a pretty straightforward manner.

For an example of how a newsfeed looks, check out Apple’s technical document on podcast structure. http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/podcaststechspecs.html#_Toc526931673 “Channel” defines the shows, and “item” defines the episodes. Once you have the file created, to add more episodes, you simply add another “item” pointing to a new file.

That’s how a podcast is structured.

Next, we’re going to tell you what you need to get your podcast up and running. There are two options. The first is what you will need if you want to do it all yourself. The second (and our preference) is the simpler route, which is to get a podcast host. These instructions presume that you already have your sermon, or other audio file, converted into MP3 format and ready to go.

To set up a podcast by yourself, you will need to do the following:

1: Find web space available for you to upload your media files to.

There are plenty of web hosts available for you to choose from. From Google, do a search for “Web Hosting”. I recommend getting a Linux/PHP based host – because they are simpler to configure than Microsoft based hosting. As a general rule, try to find the most web space available, with the greatest amount of traffic allotted for your site. As your podcast grows in popularity – you don’t want to get sacked with extra traffic fees.

Before settling for a host, it also is in your best interests to do a little research to make sure they have a decent reputation. Lots of hosts over-sell their plans in order to get more business. There are lots of horror stories I’ve read of people that found their websites censured for excessive traffic when they were nowhere near the limits their plan advertised. A little research can help you avoid falling victim to an unscrupulous host.

2: Upload your media files (mp3 files, pictures and video files) to your new host.

You will most likely transfer your media files to your host through what’s called FTP. FTP is “File Transfer Protocol”. On Windows, I like http://www.wise-ftp.com/ “Wise FTP” by AceBit the best. On Macintosh, my favorite is http://cyberduck.ch/ - Cyberduck.

One thing to keep in mind is whether or not your media files are supported by your web hosting company. If you’re simply podcasting your audio sermons, MP3 is pretty much universally supported. If you’re podcasting video files (M4V or MP4), you might need to configure your server to recognize those files. This is done via what’s called a “mime type” and is set up in a file called .htaccess on your web server.

To find out more information, if you need it, google “.htaccess mime types” for a detailed explanation.

3: Once you have uploaded the files, and thereby know where the files are located, it’s time to create the newsfeed.

Make sure that your newsfeed mimics the format we showed you earlier. If you follow that format, you should be good to go. Create your channel, and add all of your items.

Once you have created your newsfeed file, upload it to your server as well. Test it out by going to http://www.feedvalidator.org. If your feed comes back invalid, it will give suggestions as to how to fix your feed. If it comes back saying the feed is valid, then you’re good to go! Start submitting it to channels like yahoo, and the iTunes music store.

Those are all of the steps required to get a podcast up and running, if you wish to do it all yourself!

The other alternative is to get what is called a podcast host.

Podcast hosts take care of all of the hosting, newsfeed creation and testing for you. When you contract a podcast host, you don’t need to worry about file types, ensuring that your feed is valid, or finding web space. They take care of all of that for you. With a podcast host, you simply upload the media file, give it a name and a description, and you’re done.

After a few months of maintaining our podcast and constantly updating the feed to reflect new additions to our podcast, this is the direction we chose to go. It really simplified the production process, and actually ended up costing us less per month than what we were paying before.

There are a lot of podcast hosts out there offering different packages. When determining which one to contract – look at the following things:

1: How much do they charge vs. how much space do you get for your podcasts?

2: Do they limit your bandwidth? (This is particularly important. One host we went with charged for bandwidth beyond a certain point, and it cost us a pretty penny.) It’s best to get a podcast host with “unmetered bandwidth”. This means they don’t charge you extra if your podcast becomes popular.

3: Do they support transferring of the podcasts to another domain? This is also very important. If you, for whatever reason, become dis-satisfied with the service or want to transfer it to another location, will they facilitate this for you? We had to recreate two of our podcasts from scratch because one host wouldn’t give us the ability to redirect our existing podcast to our new host.

4: Do they have good technical support for questions you may have?

Our favorite podcast hosts are http://www.avmypodcast.com and http://www.libsyn.com (although Libsyn has some issues with downtime.) Both have unmetered bandwidth and great plans available for very reasonable charges. AvMyPodcast is especially great for it’s technical support, and includes automatic iTunes and Yahoo submissions. They even have an online tutorial to teach you how to podcast.

Whether you decide to go it yourself, or contract a podcast host, it’s definitely worth getting into podcasting. Our weekly subscribers have grown dramatically, and a good number of people have become aware of our little church as a result of our podcast. It also gives me joy that my daughter has ours FIRST on her list, too!

Good luck, and happy podcasting!

John Pritchard
http://www.articlesbase.com/presentation-articles/godcasting-uplifts-your-congregation-and-is-easier-than-you-think-138277.html

What is the average amount of years it take to learn french but not fluently.

depends on how much you actually invest into the learning process..

3hrs a day –> in 2 years and you will communicate extremely well

2-3 times a week for 1-2hrs —> 3 or more years to communicate well.

What I mean by "communicate well" is that the language will flow off the tongue with only minor hesitation…

I am trying to learn French for conversational and travel purposes. I'm not particularly interested in grammar and eccentricities, I merely wish to converse and participate in the joy of meeting new people through my travels and experiences. I am planning on traveling to Europe soon so if I could become fluent in 8 weeks, that would be ideal.

You cannot become fluent in french in 8 weeks, however you can learn a few sentences that will help you understand people better.
If you want someone to speak slowly, you can say:

"parler plus lentement, s'il vous plaît"
pronounced "pahle plu lenmen, si vu ple"

You could also try watching youtube videos in french, the ones that have subtitles in them, and you could preferably use the french news, since people tend to speak clearly in those. then go to the normal speaking videos. You'll be surprised at how many words you will already know in french, since some words in english are the same. There are some really good books that come with audio CDs or mp3s and you can read along while listening to it. They're very useful.

Try a few lessons in youtube, there are plenty of those.

Hope you have a great time in France!

youtube…search for c language

I need a programme that I can use to learn french. Which one do you think is the best and most accurate programme?

Rocket French can help you learn french from home.
http://learnfrenchfromhome.blogspot.com/