Skip to main content

Neat ways of doing French accents

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/17762660/characters.exe

A former student sent me the above link to a piece of software which allows you do French accents more speedily than with ALT numbers. It's free download designed by a fellow student. One or two people I know thought it was very good, but I found the scrolling process a bit of a nuisance. Maybe a bit of practice is needed.

I'm doing this post on the ipad which has a handy system for accents which it shares with the iphone. You just slide away from the letter and you are offered all the possible accents. I used to occasionally use shortcuts on a traditional keyboard using CTRL ALT and punctuation marks, but now use ALT with code numbers.

Code numbers are a nuisance on notebooks, however, so the download I have linked to could be particularly useful for laptop users. Give it a try!

Alternatively, download Lexibar. This little dowload places an icon on your desktop. When you activate it a vertical, narrow and movable bar appears with all your French accented characters. You have to move the cursor to them, but it could suit some people.

In Word you can choose your language, type away ignoring accernts and then hover over words afterwards. Correct versions with accents will appear which you can then insert.

Laura Lawless on the About site recommends the International Keyboard. Haven't tried this, but you could look into it.

If you are really smart you can set up your own hot keys which are easier than thwe exisiting ones in Windows whereby you hold down two or three keys simultaneously to produce accented characters. Can't do this yet, but that would be a nifty solution.

We are all creatures of habit, so I may stick with ALT codes for the moment. They work fine on a desktop, but don't work for notebook users.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a langua...

Zaz - Si jamais j'oublie

My wife and I often listen to Radio Paradise, a listener-supported, ad-free radio station from California. They've been playing this song by Zaz recently. I like it and maybe your students would too. I shouldn't really  reproduce the lyrics here for copyright reasons, but I am going to translate them (with the help of another video). You could copy and paste this translation and set it for classwork (not homework, I suggest, since students could just go and find the lyrics online). The song was released in 2015 and gotr to number 11 in the French charts - only number 11! Here we go: Remind me of the day and the year Remind me of the weather And if I've forgotten, you can shake me And if I want to take myself away Lock me up and throw away the key With pricks of memory Tell me what my name is If I ever forget the nights I spent, the guitars, the cries Remind me who I am, why I am alive If I ever forget, if I ever take to my heels If one day I run away Remind me who I am, wha...

Longman's Audio-Visual French

I'm sitting here with my copies of Cours Illustré de Français Book 1 and Longman's Audio-Visual French Stage A1 . I have previously mentioned the former, published in 1966, with its use of pictures to exemplify grammar and vocabulary. In his preface Mark Gilbert says: "The pictures are not... a mere decoration but provide further foundation for the language work at this early stage." He talks of "fluency" and "flexibility": "In oral work it is advisable to persist with the practice of a particular pattern until the pupils can use it fluently and flexibly. Flexibility means, for example, the ability to switch from one person of the verb to another..." Ah! Now, the Longman offering, written by S. Moore and A.L. Antrobus, published in 1973, just seven years later, has a great deal in common with Gilbert's course. We now have three colours (green, black and white) rather than mere black and white. The layout is arguably more attrac...