Learning French by OS X?

[Durbrow]

French speakers: I want to improve my French and my daughter is learning French now. Is it silly to run OS X in French and use the Voice Over mode in Tiger to learn basic computer vocabulary? Has anyone (esp French speakers) tried Plaintalk/Voice Over in French mode? Do you think it would be helpful? Merci.

[ScottW]

There is a REALLY neat application called Rosetta Stone that I *HIGHLY* recommend for learning other languages. It teaches you in a way that is very natural. I am learning spanish this way... and hope to do it more as I have time, which I don't have much extra of it anymore these days. Well, I don't have any.

[thebiggedbig]

Well, I don't about Tiger and VoiceOver, but I am a native English speaker learning French and I have my Mac set to French. It's been really nice, and I think it helps beyond just computer vocabulary. I don't know if there is some grammar thing behind this, but all of the commands are given in the infinitive (Like Quit Safari or Hide Safari is said as Quitter Safari or Masquer Safari instead of the imperative, which is what I would expect (Quittez Safari or Masquez Safari). In my opinion, this makes it a lot easier to learn the verbs and compare them to the English equivalents. If it were in the imperative, one would have to unconjugate it, which could be difficult with irregular verbs.

I wouldn't know if they have a French voice in Tiger, but in 10.3 the computer speaks French text letter by letter, so it sounds like an American reading it from paper. As I was saying, I've learned much more than computer terms from it, and it definitely helps a lot.

[Qion]

I'm learning basic French in school right now. It seems that just by reading Apple's website, VoiceOver WILL NOT be programmed in French. Désolé...

EDIT: QUOTE: Mac OS X Tiger introduces VoiceOver, an accessibility interface that gives you magnification options, keyboard control and spoken English descriptions of what’s happening on screen. If you have a visual impairment, VoiceOver enables you to work collaboratively with other Mac users or work on their computers without assistance.