[Course Forum] 5000 most common French words by Ciccero aka Chartalegna

I’ll look into it @Maxine_Downunder. French has both «second» and «deuxième» for the English word «second,» and both are used in the course. So I’ll make sure that the cardinals and ordinals are correct. But I’m am going to be extremely busy tomorrow, and this weekend is Christmas so I won’t be able to check it until next week.

No problem at all - it’s not urgent. Best wishes to you and yours for Christmas and New Year’s.

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Merry Christmas to you as well @Maxine_Downunder! Hey, so I’ve been looking up the question you raised. The short answer is that the word you brought up is used correctly in the course. But that’s not very enlightening, I’ll try to give a bit of an explanation also.

There are three different French words in question here. They are «seconde», «second», and «deuxième.»

  • Seconde is a unit of time or an instant, such as “I’ll see you in a moment.” It can also be the feminine form of seconde.

  • Second is an ordinal number, meaning that it tells the position in a list. It is used when there is only a first and a second of something.

  • Deuxième is also an ordinal number. However, unlike second, it is used when there are more than two items in the list or series.

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Thank you for your explanation @JoThelan. I never knew that ‘second’ was an ordinal number at all. Your above explanation makes this clear now (for me). I thought all ordinal numbers ended in “…ième”. I’ve learnt something new! Merci beaucoup.

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Thanks @JoThelan for che changes :slight_smile: Another suggestions below.

only (level 2)
seulement --> + [not “uniquement”]

only (level 14)
uniquement --> + [not “seulement”]

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@michael_z Nice catch! :smiley_cat: They’ve been changed now.

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Thanks @JoThelan. I think the below are also kind of confusing?

une centaine (level 15)
hundred

un cent (level 8)
one hundred, cent

Un cent, in the meaning of “one hundred”, is rarely used nowadays and it only applies to goods or cattle; you can say un cent d’œufs, un cent de moutons, but you must say cent personnes. Une centaine is more imprecise than “one hundred”, it means “about one hundred”. In the translation should it not be “a hundred” rather than “hundred”?

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Thanks @michael_z. That one has bothered me as well, but I haven’t been able to think of any good solutions that don’t completely give away the answer at the same time they make it less confusing. Unfortunately, my mind is a little foggy now. :crying_cat_face: I’m going to keep thinking about this one for the time being.

Ok @michael_z, I decided it would be best to change it for clarity’s sake. Also updated “Second [ordinal]” for clarification.

Here are the changes that I made:
Une centaine/ hundred --> [not "cent’]
Un cent/ one hundred/cent --> [not “centaine”]

Second [ordinal]
Second --> [not “deuxième”]

Second [ordinal]
Deuxième --> [not “second”]

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Thanks @JoThelan, that’s good! :slight_smile: Other ones with the same translation:

un dirigeant (level 14)
leader

un leader (level 15)
leader

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PS Are you able to export everything at once into Excel / Google Sheet? With a simple formula we’d be able to quickly search for same-definition words without this manual work.

@michael_z Fixed! I have no idea about exporting the course. Is that the same as downloading it? Because from what I’ve read in other discussions here in the forums, it’s no longer possible to download the courses.

No worries @JoThelan, I found something here (Export lists from databases / courses I have created?) but not sure if this isn’t too much hassle as you’d have to go through all 50 levels I guess? The advantage being once that done, we could have a openly shared Google Sheet where we could sync and manage all the definitions in one place, and it’d be much easier to spot and fix the errors.

Anyway, below some words I noticed:

augmenter (level 9)
to increase, raise

accroître (level 16)
to increase

grandir (level 20)
to grow, increase, expand

croître (level 22)
to grow, increase

une augmentation (level 13)
increase, rise

un accroissement (level 28)
increase

un sol (level 15)
floor, ground, soil

un plancher (level 38)
floor

edit (17/1)

un soir (level 4)
evening

une soirée (level 16)
evening

un matin (level 5)
morning

une matinée (level 31)
morning

Maybe for soir/soirée and matin/matinée we can add in the definition “moment of the day” for soir/matin and “duration of the evening/morning” for soirée/matinée? We can of course add the usual [not “soir”] but then we spoil it a bit or don’t we?

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Haha, wow, you found some tricky ones this time @michael_z! That does seem to be the difficulty with such a big course. Of course, as always, I’m only the editor, not the creator of the course, and since some of these have definitions that although very similar, are not exact, it is possible that Ciccero might not agree and as course creator, it is her right to change them back

  • sol/plancher/étage Un plancher and un étage both have the same English definition of “floor,” so I’ve added [not “étage”] and [ not “plancher”] respectively. I think that change and the fact that un sol includes ground and soil in its definition will be enough to differentiate the three of them.

  • soir/soirée Exactly. [not “soir”] is just too obvious for something like this. I’ve added [duration] to soirée. I think moment or moment of the day might be somewhat confusing in a vocabulary list, so for now, I’m not doing to make any changes to soir. But, given some time, if it seems like it’s not working as a solution, I can always make other changes.

  • matin/matinée Same as soir/soirée.

  • augmentation/accroissement Added [not “accroissement”] and [not “augmentation”] respectively.

  • grandir/croître Added [not “croître”] and [not “grandir”] respectively.

  • augmenter/accroître Added [not “accroître”] and [not “augmenter”] respectively.

Thanks for the link! :smiley_cat: I’m about to go into a time of major transition soon, so I’m not sure that it would be wise for me to try the idea, especially since my Excel skills are limited. This course does have a data base (how I discovered that un étage had the same definition as un plancher), so fixing the errors isn’t too difficult. For now, the hard part is finding the errors. I think maybe this summer once my life is a little more settled that I could look into figuring out how to do that using Excel, but for now with my life in flux, I think that might be best to just carry on with making corrections this way.

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On Level 11, rencontre is given as a masculine noun (“un rencontre”) - should this be feminine (“une rencontre”)?

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Fixed! Thanks for the heads up! @deiseabu

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I just found this pair and made the following changes:
une union (level 8)
union --> + [not “syndicat”]

un syndicat (level 16)
union --> + [not “union”]

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21 January 2017 update:
un retard (level 13)
delay --> + [not “délai”]

un délai (level 16)
delay --> [not “retard”]

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New edit, 23 January 2017
troisième (level 6)
third --> + [ordinal]

tiers (level 16)
third --> + [fraction]

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