Bonjour! Je m'appelle Lisa, je suis Paramédical. J'habite à Charleville en Australie.
Hello! My name is Lisa, I am a Paramedic. I live in Charleville in Australia. --> Though I'm uncertain that the last is the correct way to double-whammy the city and country of residence, just tagging it on the end as I have.
First thought upon sharing the results of my first lesson: I really must find the keyboard shortcuts for all these crazy accented letters!
Well my first podcast lesson was short and easy, and kinda fun. I found a lot coming back very quickly from my days of staring in apathy through school windows, and in addition to the basics of introduction and self-description we also covered male, female, and collective verbs.
There was however an immediate problem that has taken a day to resolve, hence my tardiness with this first report post. Upon listening to the first Learn French By Podcast lesson it became immediately apparent that I would really benefit from having the guide there in front of me. As in REALLY benefit, to the point where I felt I shouldn't move onto the next lesson until I had properly completed the first with the assistance of the guide. This was because despite some familiarity with terms it was still difficult to discerne exactly what words were being said - with their fluid syllables and strange accents I found them hard to visualise - and so have found already that despite podcasts being 'free' each lesson does come at a cost. I expect too that for lessons concerning wholly new vocabulary and more complex syntax this would be even more the case. So over I trundles to the LFBP website to catch me a guide, and this was where the real fun started, as quite frankly I found their payment system an almighty pain in the arse, pardon my French.
The .pdf lesson guides at LFBP are US$1 each, and you may purchase credits through the site by paying either with Paypal or credit card. Quantity breaks are given for multiple purchases, ie. whilst 25 credits costs US$25, US$50 bought 70 credits. Easy, right? Except that upon clicking the link to pay by Paypal, nothing happened. The little dashy-wheel spun around a few times, then after several minutes ground to a halt, unable to link through to Paypal. Even worse, after I'd clicked upon the Paypal button once the whole site would now stop loading, leaving me unable to access any LFPB page or even able to refresh the purchase credits page. Switching browsers didn't help as this occurred in both Firefox and Safari, and I found the only way I could get anything to load again was to quit the programs and restart. Needless to say this rapidly grew tiresome, and when emailing them and leaving it for a day for them to fix up didn't work either I eventually admitted defeat and paid by credit card. Now once again the website is open to me and guides are mine, all mine! Perhaps they just don't like paying the Paypal fees?
During the downtime with LFBP I went over to Daily French Podcast to try and find their version of a first lesson. However I couldn't find one, and I guess this is because the Daily French Podcast is exactly that - daily podcasts in French on various topics, though they are rated as Beginner, Intermediate or Advanced. The podcasts therefore probably won't be of much use to me until I can at least string a few sentences together, as beginner level or not I've still barely begun! They do offer on their site a good deal of useful resources though, including vocabulary of over 6,000 words with audio files, grammar tutorials, and various interactive exercises and quizzes. Rather than being priced per unit, as with the LFBP lessons, the entire site and all resources become available upon site subscription with a monthly fee. I've taken up the one week free trial option + one month subscription so far, and pricing ranges from US$18 per month to $80 / 6 months and $140 a year.
So overall it seems I've picked a good setup here. The DFP site and resources seem the perfect adjunct to the LFBP structured lessons, and now that I'm started at least with my lessons and guides I'm going to gain a lot from finding related material on the other site to consolidate my learning with.
A la prochaine!
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