Im thinking of brushing up on my French (considering moving to Montreal, eventually), and I would like your help gathering online resources.

1. First thing I need to learn is how to make accents using a English Canadian keyboard. How do I do this, si vous plait?

2. Secondly, I suppose I need some good educational sites for learning french.

3. I would like some good, interesting reading material online in French. Can anyone recommend any good blogs or news sites (preferably Canadian)?

4. Finally, does anyone know if there are other messageboards or forums for dorks like me trying learn french??

"S'il vous plaît"

I'm working on a Greek European keyboard (as in, the hardware) so the layout of the non-alphabetic keys is likely to be different from yours (it's different from a British keyboard anyway). So this'll be hard to describe, but when I put my computer into Canadian French input mode, the following happens:

The two keys that lie to the right of P are ^ ç
The three keys that lie to the right of the L are ; è à
The three keys that lie to the right of M are , . é
The key to the left of Z is ù

Now the ^ key, when you hit that, you'll probably find that it is highlighted when it first appears on screen, and when you follow it up with a vowel, the mark goes over the vowel like âêîôû.

I know very little French (despite the impression my sig might give) so I can't help with anything else.

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Deux hommes font une promenade amicale. L'un des deux porte un parapluie à son bras.
Il se met à pleuvoir. L'homme n'ouvre pas son parapluie et l'autre lui demande pourquoi.
- Parce que ça ne servirait à rien, lui répond son ami. Il est plein de trous.
- Alors, pourquoi l'as-tu pris?
- Parce que je ne pensais pas qu'il pleuvrait.

i know very little about french (and probably won't ever learn it), but look at the links here. that site compiles free online language courses/resources and i've found a lot of good stuff through there.

i don't know about blogs or reading online, but you might try to find torrents of french audio books and read along to the english while you listen to the french.

have a look at the french forum here: UniLang • Index page

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Black Mambo do you speak Greek?if so how did you learn?

I can't do useful shortcuts on my keyboard now I run Linux
Luckily my writing prof. this year prefers everything to be handwritten (call it a fear of auto-spellcheck) so I don't need to spend years faffing around with Character Map.

Fuckaduck, try this one? Learn French - Online Free French Lessons to learn French
Though if you want to learn grammar and stuff, it's not too much help.

Or ask Eddie:

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Just promise me you'll read "The Little Prince" when you are able. It's like a coming-of-age rite for people learning to read basic French. Or it was when I was learning it, at any rate.

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Time is the distance that you can't return by miles.

I escaped somehow. Let's go

actualy [sic] I have quite a blessed life if I'm honest. I have many people to love, hate few and have few money problem's [sic].... What more does a person need? Oh yeah and I have some kind of humbleness unlike you of course ^_^ ~ CarefulCarpenter

Hahaha I read Le Petit Prince last summer. I read it in English years ago for the first time, but it just works better in French.

s'il vous plait, dessin-moi un mouton

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Moi, j'ai soif, je voudrais un Orangina
Moi, j'ai soif, je voudrais un cafe

can't make accent thingies work, dammit.

__________________
Time is the distance that you can't return by miles.

I escaped somehow. Let's go

actualy [sic] I have quite a blessed life if I'm honest. I have many people to love, hate few and have few money problem's [sic].... What more does a person need? Oh yeah and I have some kind of humbleness unlike you of course ^_^ ~ CarefulCarpenter

Are you using Windows? Alt Gr + the letter.

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Gr? I'm far too tardified to know what that means.

__________________
Time is the distance that you can't return by miles.

I escaped somehow. Let's go

actualy [sic] I have quite a blessed life if I'm honest. I have many people to love, hate few and have few money problem's [sic].... What more does a person need? Oh yeah and I have some kind of humbleness unlike you of course ^_^ ~ CarefulCarpenter

The key to the right of your space bar, darling.

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That's alt too!

__________________
Time is the distance that you can't return by miles.

I escaped somehow. Let's go

actualy [sic] I have quite a blessed life if I'm honest. I have many people to love, hate few and have few money problem's [sic].... What more does a person need? Oh yeah and I have some kind of humbleness unlike you of course ^_^ ~ CarefulCarpenter

Press the "e" key while holding that one down.

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Only pretty basic stuff. And I'm not trying to learn any more for now as I'm learning Classical Greek for uni and it'd only get messy. But I mean, I've been learning CG for 3 weeks and I already know more of that than the Modern Greek I've half-assedly/intermittently "learned" over the past four years, so I'd say it's good to go to classes and get a teacher's foot up your arse.

If you're gonna learn independently, definitely get to know the script and pronunciation before you touch anything, and I mean really master it.

I think I might try to use my lecturer's CG approach to tackle Modern Greek when I come back to it b/c we're basically hammering through the grammar before we get too much into vocabulary. It's good b/c what use is vocab if you don't know what to do with it? I realise I like this far better than just learning stock phrases and not really knowing much about why they're constructed the way they are.

Sorry that wasn't really much help was it?

For what I know so far, it has probably been 50% taught by/acquired from my bf and 50% out of a book. Being around native speakers is always valuable, but that goes for any language learning, I guess.

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Deux hommes font une promenade amicale. L'un des deux porte un parapluie à son bras.
Il se met à pleuvoir. L'homme n'ouvre pas son parapluie et l'autre lui demande pourquoi.
- Parce que ça ne servirait à rien, lui répond son ami. Il est plein de trous.
- Alors, pourquoi l'as-tu pris?
- Parce que je ne pensais pas qu'il pleuvrait.