Answers
Jun 19, 2013 - 12:44 AM
I answered my own question. I watched the tutorial for lesson 3 on Level 5 and the light bulb totally went on. I have a good basic understanding of the imperfect now and can see the misconception I had before.
Jun 19, 2013 - 05:01 PM
On points of grammar, french.about.com is always a good place to look for an excellent explanation. I usually can clear up most any grammar point via her explanations (and the search feature is quite easy to find what you need with it).
Jun 19, 2013 - 07:20 PM
Hi Mitchell, I know that you have always been a big proponent of about.com, and I do use it quite a bit for the verb conjugation tool and I'll follow the links in a lot of the emails they send me to pick up little tidbits of information. But I've never found it to fit my learning style to be able to learn something in depth. I do appreciate the suggestion though and I always enjoy interacting with you in this forum. In my quest to learn more about the topic of the imperfect, I visited several sources about.com, tolearnfrench.com etc but nothing really clicked. Then when I watched the lesson on Level 5 I saw a great example of the Fluenz method genius. In five minutes time I had the OH! moment after struggling through it for the past couple of weeks lol
Jun 24, 2013 - 02:28 PM
It seems to me the question is always what should be taught before everything else. The imperfect takes up a good number of Fluenz sessions, and that would then have to replace something else. It is not easy to teach it because we really don't have it in English. I think the best solution is just to grind our way all the way through French 5. And even then, we will be missing several common tenses, for example, future. Note we are not really taught the past tense in Fluenz French, but rather what corresponds in English to the present perfect. There is a simple past tense, but Fluenz leaves it out, because it is not used as much in conversation, more in writing. If you try to read "Harry Potter" in French, you will find it used very often. Interestingly, in Spanish Fluenz does the opposite, opting to teach the simple past, not the present perfect. And there are complaints in that thread about that particular choice. I think it cannot be easy to choose what are the 5 x 30 most important things to teach.
Jun 25, 2013 - 02:59 AM
This is true, learning a language is a complex thing. If you think about the amount of time we have spent learning English and 5x30 becomes a small drop in the bucket. I will say however that Fluenz does seem to make effective use of that 5x30 despite not fulfilling all of our wishlists :)
Apr 13, 2014 - 09:51 PM
I suspect you need to study a French grammar to learn what the imperfect covers as opposed to the preterite past. If it is like Spanish the imperfect is normally descriptive and the preterite is normally narrative.