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Something new on Forvo for French and other languages

Something new on Forvo for French and other languages

Old Feb 9th, 2018, 07:12 AM
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Something new on Forvo for French and other languages

Forvo is the website where you can hear every word in the world, pronounced. They’re not all on the website yet, but if you sign up you can request pronunciation for any word that’s not there. I use the site a lot.

Anyway, they have something new. There’s now a section where they’ve collected useful phrases for travelers in 25 languages. You can hear the phrases in the target language as well as in English. In French, for example, you can choose greetings and apologies, places, drinks, fashion and accessories, means of transport, human body, days months and seasons, meteorology, and professions. Other section are banking, health care, flirting, shopping, getting around, drinking and dining, directions and locating. I assume it’s the same for the other 24 languages.

https://forvo.com/guides/
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Old Feb 9th, 2018, 07:21 AM
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I saw that yesterday. I only looked at one small section of the French, but I thought it was rather weird that they used vous about half the time, and tu the other half. Without any explanation that I could see as to what the difference was or why they chose to do that.
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Old Feb 9th, 2018, 09:56 AM
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Merçi, StCirq--very useful site. I don't imagine that I will use the Flirting section, however. Like you, I wondered about vous vs. tu--odd.
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Old Feb 11th, 2018, 09:16 AM
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The only place I saw them use the familiar was in the flirting section, which makes sense to me, although I didn't read a couple sections. It is true a couple times in that flirting section they used vous instead, who knows why, could be a mistake (you could argue the few times they did were when you didn't know someone yet, like what's your name, but some of the others are really about the same in that regard). I notice they didn't do that so much in the German section, they used the familiar for What do you prefer? (which actually makes sense, you probably wouldn't say that to a stranger) but the formal for Do you speak English? which you'd only say to someone you didn't know. I found it funny the phrases they thought were some of the most important everyday phrases, like "don't overthink it" and "the party's over". This website isn't teaching grammar, at least not in that part, there isn't any way they could explain it, it's just recorded phrases. They don't explain anything, like why in some questions they use inversion and in others they don't (eg, "Vous parlez anglais? vs "Que préférez-vous?").
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