French lessons for free? Sounds too good to be true!
When I initially found the site French Assistant I must admit that I thought I had found a one-stop free site where I could learn French online.
The site looks very colourful and exciting and seems to be bursting with activity so I was ready to dive in.
Registration
Like most online language-teaching sites with any serious ambitions, this one requires registration before you can make much use of it. However, the whole procedure was rather confusing, I could not quite figure out exactly WHY it was necessary to register, since there are some French learning materials available via the Lessons option in the left-hand menu, though these only seem to extend to four lessons at beginner-level French. I tried to select Intermediate, which is closer to my level of French, and a message dated to November 2005 told me that there were no French lessons at that level, but they were coming soon!
It was at that point I realized I was surfing a ‘ghost-site’. Although originally seemingly a thriving site for French learners, supposedly with hundreds of thousands of registered users (!) it appears that the whole project was abandoned in 2005 (the copyright message at the bottom suggests this too) and is left pretty much running itself! Even the sponsors’ banners do not lead anywhere! Rather spooky!
Nevertheless, I forged on to see if there was any substance to the materials on offer, as the site still seems to (basically) work.
Lessons
The beginner-level lessons that ARE available are reasonable enough, little bite-sized articles introducing the French language in quite a friendly and fun way. There are sound files available for almost everything, but like other older online language courses (e.g. see this course), the sounds are not embedded in the page but rather fall back on the outdated technique of serving up a WAV sound file, which seems positively prehistoric by the standards of today’s web. Also, it seems that the sound files (of which there are supposed to be 150,000!) are subject to an initial 14-day trial and are later restricted to paying users.
In the lessons provided we are introduced to some French sentences and words which are very similar to English in order to show the learner that French is not so ‘foreign’ as they may fear. Then we cover French pronunciation, are introduced to the verbs ‘to have’ and ‘to be’, and so on. Nothing out of the ordinary for an online French course, all in all.
Pop-ups
The key feature that was evidently supposed to distinguish this French learning site from others are the interesting language pop-up windows which you can either summon with a click on a button at the side (though this is not explained very well) or are supposed to appear automatically at an interval which you can set yourself, though this timed aspect did not seem to work very well, at least not in my browser, with some kind of warning appearing periodically.
The pop-up (which I ended up triggering manually) is meant to test you on some aspect of French that you have learned in the current lesson. However, something was amiss with this functionality – although the pop-up works fine, the test words and sentences which appeared were irrelevant to the current lesson and were actually rather random and quite difficult!
Typically you are asked to conjugate a French verb (complete with the pronoun) to write the French equivalent of a French word that frankly I would not expect ANY beginner to know, and to choose the correct translation of a particular sentence. A nice try at interactivity, but I am not sure I would have the patience. I think this was the main ‘selling-point’ of the site, but I am just not sure it works at the end of the day.
To be honest, at this point I rather lost interest. It seems that this online French learning site was a good idea that the makers just couldn’t put into practice and maintain.
Apart from being rather confusing and chaotic, the site now looks very old-fashioned, with an incredibly narrow screen display which was appropriate to the monitors and browsers of the day but which is just painfully cramped by today’s standards.
I think that if you are looking to learn French you should certainly give this site a chance. Maybe you will figure it out more easily than I did. Also, maybe someone will take over this site one day and give it a serious overhaul. But I think that if you want to really give learning French a serious attempt, you should probably consider other options.
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