I have started topping up my School French (which I was quite good at) but I have found the Official Courses difficult.
I have encountered a lot of new words and expressions, occasionally the phrase was spoken too quickly or too quietly and often in an unusual accent etc. (I’ve found this travelling round different regions of France too.)
The oddest thing is where the speaker actually leaves out a word - ie we know what they mean but when typing or tapping the answer, I get it wrong.
I found the Official Italian courses excellent and having supported many Italian courses, so I am turning to the Community to ask for some recommendations of supported French Courses with audio.
As we all know, numbers doing a course or even currently using the course may not be a good indication of a currently supported course which has been well maintained.
Hi @DW7, I haven’t studied French using Memrise, but I’m planning to do so sometime soon. I’m planning to use the following 5000 word course first, ignoring out words that I already know.
Also, I’m probably going to make a copy of this course, and re-create it as a multiple choice course (both directions, EN → FR and FR → EN). I can do this in less than an hour by including computer-generated French audio clips. If this is of interest, let me know and I’ll make an MCQ version available in the next week or so.
Edit: The multiple-choice version of the course is here:
I second @ian_mn’s recommendation, that course is just awesome (next to no mistakes, good audio, almost no “not this and not that”).
If you’re interested in a bit colloquial French I can also recommend this course:
I completely revised the course a few years ago. However, I would say it does contain quite a few items that I think are pretty useless (i. e. I’d never use them) and/or dubious, but since I’m not the creator, I opted to leave them there (and of course you can always ignore them).
Still, this course was a true game-changer for me!
I really have nothing else to add, except to support Ian_nm in his reference to the 5000 word French course (which I’m currently still doing). Best wishes.
Not sure exactly what you’re after. I’ve edited Ian’s post where he posted a link to the original course (further up, above my posting with the link to “Dirty French Slang” so that the link stands out. Is that what you meant?
Because Ian posted a link to his own course as well (see his last post above).
What I meant was could someone who looks after Ciccero’s » original course « post “MCQ version Course 6324770” in the course description (hopefully they can add that in to the limited characters) as that is enough for people to find it.
I just went ahead and re-read some of the older posts. Back in 2019 I offered to contribute to the course.
Back then, @chartalegna (who seems to be the same person as Ciccero) was still active and obviously didn’t want to add me as a contributor.
I’d suggest you tag her/him in → the course’s original thread. If she/he doesn’t reply there, you and/or I can again refresh my contributor-request from back then (see → this thread).
Hi, Thanks for thinking about that but I’m not sure it would do much good.
A few weeks ago, I made an MCQ version of a very popular Spanish course that I look after, and I included details of the new MCQ version in the original course’s homepage. The original course has about 122,000 subscribers but the MCQ version currently has only 10, including me!
I think the quickest way to find these MCQ courses is to search for “MCQs” on Web Memrise. But it seems unlikely that anyone will think of doing that.
Actually, a top level, general Memrise web search for “MCQ” currently generates a list of only 16 courses, of which 6 are mine, so there’s no need to work out of a particular category. But someone would have to know to search for “MCQ” to find my MCQ courses - which would probably only work for someone who has read this thread.
Here’s a tip for anyone creating language courses.
Memrise automatically and randomly adds audio to about 10% of items in a course and fair proportion of these clips sound very bad. To delete all of the Memrise generated audio clips, simply delete the audio column then add a new column (specifying ‘audio’).
Adding a new column involves clicking on, for example
“Edit_Course/databases/French”,
(e.g. when creating a French course.)
I think only a course creator can delete or add columns.
After that, fresh audio clips can be added and, for many common languages, computer-generated audio clips can (if desired) be bulk added using the free Google Chrome Memrise Audio Uploader add-on: Memrise Audio Uploader - Chrome Web Store
That might simply be due to the fact that most such courses have “no typing” instead of “MCQ” in their description.
I’d recommend to put that in your courses’ description (instead) to make sure people will find them.
Hi, I just tried a “no typing” search, and it seems to list mainly Norwegian and Japanese courses (and none of the results are “no typing” courses). So I don’t think I’ll spend time making this change.
Thanks for the suggestion, but “NT” seems to be the current abbreviation for New Testament, at least in the unofficial Memrise courses. I don’t think I’m going to spend any time on this.
