French For Football
French For Football: About This Book
An ongoing relationship with a society and its culture helps individual learners maintain and develop their foreign language skills. If the objective is to quickly get to grips with real-life vocabulary, then faster progress can be made by concentrating on a single leisure interest of the student.
Initiatives like the Arsenal "Double Club" and the Soccerlingua web site have shown the value of football-based modules and short courses for enthusing younger language students. However, the vocabulary presented in these activities is only a fraction of the vocabulary commonly found in the media and in real life.
A Wikibook for individual study is free to achieve a greater depth of specialisation than possible with books and courses aimed at a general audience. This book combines French language with the topic of football, but the techniques used here could be applied to any other combination of language and leisure activity.
A collection of French football phrases and a French football glossary are two early results of the work for this book. A large collection of words and phrases has already been assembled, but further contributions are always welcome.
The main method of vocabulary collection is reading match reports on French sports web sites, like those on the Resources page. Words and phrases are chosen if they often occur in match reports but are outside the basic French vocabulary generally taught in schools. The aim is for the learner to be able to read match reports without needing to refer to a dictionary too often.
As we progress, the vocabulary will be classified by topic, pronunciation, grammar, difficulty and frequency to help decide where each word could fit into an overall lesson plan. There are separate pages for this linguistic work, allowing the collection and analysis of vocabulary to progress independently.
The collection of French football phrases is probably the best one aimed at the general reader now available on-line. It is in an easily edited format so if you have something new, a correction or an improvement you can start right now! Remember, all earlier versions of the text are preserved in the Wikibooks page histories, so any mistakes can be easily put right.
Information for Authors & Other Contributors
(Listed in order of production)
- French football phrase book (phrases arranged by situations & topics, with translations)
- French football word list (vocabulary - alphabetical with examples)
- Analysis of Vocabulary (vocabulary - table sortable by grammar or pronunciation)
- Sorted Vocabulary (vocabulary sorted and grouped according to ease of pronunciation)
- Gender (nouns and adjectives - sorted by word endings)
- Pronunciation (examples of French phonetics with links to speech recordings)
- Introductory Material
- The National Leagues