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I'm learning A1 level French now and thought I would give this one a try. Put it on "novice" mode hoping to improve my vocabulary. The problem with it is that r

I'm learning A1 level French now and thought I would give this one a try. Put it on "novice" mode hoping to improve my vocabulary. The problem with it is that rather than translating nouns it ends up translating verbs. This is not really a good practice. For eg. "we will" gets translated to "nous allons". However, it's more important in this case to understand the verb conjugations of "aller"(to go) and how it is used in the future tense. Knowing that "we will" can be translated as "nous allons" is not useful - without the context. One thing my French teacher keeps telling us is to not use a dictionary. Why is that? Because then everytime I try to speak/write in French I end up constructing the sentence in English and then translating it. This is a bad way of using a language. If I were to learn a language from scratch and independently, I can use it much better. Even though I'm not a native English speaker I'm able to think, write and speak in English without too much effort because inside my head I don't translate it from my mother tongue. Putting the level of the extension on "fluent" seems to be useful. This translates entire sentences and thus gives me context. Even for an A1 level guy like me (novice) it's only useful on the "fluent" mode.

simias 14y ago
I'm a native french speaker and I tried the "intermediate" setting on a couple of english websites and was pleasantly surprised. I agree that most of the mistakes come from verbs, the times or person/gender are often wrong and sometimes the translation just doesn't make sense. For instance I saw "tomber en amour" for "to fall in love", which is a literal translation but somewhat awkward. Even worse was "était due à arriver" for "was due to arrive"; once a gain a literal translation but this time the french version doesn't make any kind of sense. So, definitely something to take with a grain of salt but still pretty useful IMO. Maybe a more fool-proof approach would be to do it the other way around: have an extension that would translate most of a foreign website except for some words/expressions. This way the foreign language would always be correct (given the source is reliable enough, of course) and having mistakes in the automatically translated native language wouldn't be a problem.

simias 14y ago

I'm a native french speaker and I tried the "intermediate" setting on a couple of english websites and was pleasantly surprised. I agree that most of the mistakes come from verbs, the times or person/gender are often wrong and sometimes the translation just doesn't make sense. For instance I saw "tomber en amour" for "to fall in love", which is a literal translation but somewhat awkward. Even worse was "était due à arriver" for "was due to arrive"; once a gain a literal translation but this time the french version doesn't make any kind of sense. So, definitely something to take with a grain of salt but still pretty useful IMO. Maybe a more fool-proof approach would be to do it the other way around: have an extension that would translate most of a foreign website except for some words/expressions. This way the foreign language would always be correct (given the source is reliable enough, of course) and having mistakes in the automatically translated native language wouldn't be a problem.