Sea creatures in Chinese and French

(Mandarin Chinese Pinyin) French
whale 鯨魚 (jīngyú) la baleine
squid 魷魚 (yóuyú) le cal(a)mar
dolphin 海豚 (hǎitún) le dauphin
jellyfish 水母 (shuǐmǔ) la méduse
seahorse 海馬 (hǎimǎ) le hippocampe
shark 鯊魚 (shāyú) le requin
turtle 烏龜 (wūguī) la tortue marine
crab 螃蟹 (pángxiè) le crabe
skate 鰩 (yáo) la raie
octopus 章魚 (zhāngyú) la pieuvre

French porcupines and Porky Pig

After listening to my Larousse dictionary app pronounce porcupine in French (porc-épic), I could not help but think of Porky Pig, an American cartoon character.

That link can serve as a mnemonic for remembering the French word for porcupine, if nothing else. 

Same word in English and French: position of consonant sounds swapped

Recently, while listening in the background to a French podcast (http://www.dailyfrenchpod.com #1914, Villes anglaises (UK cities)), my mind partially registered the word for mosquito, a word I didn't recall ever having learned. Some time later, relying on my audial impression (mistaken, as it turned out) of how it "should" be spelled in French, I searched for "mousquite" in my Larousse English-French dictionary app, but couldn't find it. I went back to the podcast and discovered my spelling-impression error.

The positions of "qu" and "t" are swapped between English and French: mosquito / (le) moustique
I imagine it may be relatively rare that consonants are so transposed.

I also looked up la moustiquaire (mosquito net/screen), which, with respect to consonant sounds, has a similar transposed position relationship to le mousquetaire (musketeer), plus a mildly different middle vowel sound.

Usage of depuis to mean "from"

I suspect that when I first learned the French word depuis, the textbook, quite reasonably, listed only the word's first two, more common English meanings of "since" and "for", both of which relate to the passage of time. Someone learning basic vocabulary is less likely to be able to take in all possible meanings, so should be exposed to those that are most likely to be encountered. Podcasts, or similar sources of regular native usage of a language, can help fill out gaps in one's knowledge.

The parenthesized definitions below are from my Larousse French-English dictionary app, followed by my own comments:

• Since (depuis le 10 mars; since March 10th)
• For (depuis 10 ans; for 10 years)  Duration. I have long understood this meaning, but at a certain level I never thought specifically about an English translation for it. Internalizing the language this way would, however, be problematic if you aspire to be a translator.
• From ([dans l'espace, un ordre, une hiérarchie] (il lui a fait signe depuis sa fenêtre; he waved to him from his window))  English phrases where "from the vantage point of" or "originating from" sound natural are ones where depuis likely works well in French.  I heard such usage in episode 151 of News in Slow French (depuis Gaza), where it no longer surprised me, since, according to my memory, in some other podcast episode I had previously heard this usage. In that case, it was concerning a space exploration vehicle sending images from the vantage point of some other planet (depuis Saturne? I no longer remember.).

iOS keyboard shortcuts: leveraging repeated letters

iOS keyboard shortcuts, such as iOS 5's default example of "omw", which can expand to "On my way!", provide an option to save typing. They are however, only useful if you can get used to using them often enough to make the step of creating them worthwhile.

I do a fair amount of typing on my iPod (drafting blog entries like this one, among other things), and am generally interested in making that faster and more efficient. I frequently am only able to use a single thumb or a single finger on my iPod to type, which increases the value of keyboard shortcuts to me.

For some "extreme" keyboard shortcuts, I took a cue from Apple's time-saving option of converting two spaces into a period and a space (Settings > General > Keyboard > "." shortcut*). You can be more efficient any time you can tap a key twice and get the option of an alternate result which is more useful than the double characters actually typed. For instance, when I type "ff", a keyboard shortcut of mine, I can choose to get "from", which I use far more frequently than I need "ff" at the beginning of a word. The space bar being the largest key, it's typically easiest to tap, and is a fine activator of keyboard shortcut expansions, provided that you want to insert a space after the expansion (and usually continue writing more text). It is typically not necessary to use the space bar to get the expansion; you can usually tap near the offered expansion to get it. I've also observed that, in certain situations, expansions of keyboard shortcuts are not offered, sometimes clearly correctly, but other times less so.

I use many of the double letter possibilities for keyboard shortcuts. I skipped doubles that had a pre-existing use which was important to me and therefore should not be replaced, e.g.:

• "mm" for millimeters
• "cc" for carbon copy / cubic centimeters
• "ee" which prompts to see if you really meant to type "we"

For one particular sentence I use very often, I'm even using both "fff" and "ffff" as keyboard shortcuts. I try to tap f three times only, but If I inadvertently tap an extra f, the quadruple f accommodates my true intentions.

Since many words/phrases in Chinese (and their associated Pinyin spellings) or in French come easily to my mind, I sometimes leveraged personalized "codes" for them. Having multiple languages from which to draw such codes makes it easier to come up with a practical variety of doubled letter keyboard shortcuts for things, given that there are but 26 letters in the alphabet. Farther below are some of my shortcuts, which may provide ideas for anyone seeking to do something similar. I would change the expansion for any of them if I found a more useful one.

I'm usually typing general prose. If you regularly type specialized or technical prose (e.g., part numbers!), keyboard shortcuts similar to what I describe here may not work well for you. Owing to how often they are needed, prepositions are frequently useful keyboard shortcut expansion candidates. Some paired characters such as "()" are also useful to me.

A sample of my keyboard shortcuts which are, or are based on, letter tuples (repeated letters):

• aa: after. I accept a little inconvenience when typing AA for batteries or American Airlines.
• bb: before.
• ff: from.
• gg: change. From the Chinese 改變 gǎibiàn. As mentioned above, I didn't want to make "cc" a keyboard shortcut even though "change" starts with the letter c. For verbs, I often find it very useful to append the letter d for the past tense, the letter g for the -ing form, and the letter s for third person singular verb present tense conjugation OR noun plural. I use ggd, ggg, and ggs for changed, changing, and changes, respectively.
• ii: iOS. I type iOS often, and want to bypass the occasionally offered "ups" correction which is seemingly built into iOS, or at least iOS 5.
• jj: just.
• nn: agaiN.
• oo: only.
• qq: when. From the French quand.
• tt: (). From the French parenThèses, which has a t sound for the th; I'm using pp for something else.
• uu: you.
• ww: with. I also use the natural "wo" keyboard shortcut for "without".
• xx: rest. From the Chinese verb 休息 xiūxi, although it is both noun/verb in English. believe; from the Chinese verb 相信 xiāngxìn.
• zz: sleep. Even if three or more z's might be more common usage having an informal association with sleep.

For my usage, these tuple keyboard shortcuts can't be separated from non-tuples. That is, I have keyboard shortcuts whose expansions are somehow related to each other, but some of them are tuples and some are not (like "ww" and "wo" above). I have many more keyboard shortcuts based on non-tuples. Examples include:

• amt: amount.
• wx: I think. First two letters of wǒ xiǎng Pinyin syllables for an equivalent 我想 Chinese expression.
• ya: there is. y a is short for il y a in French, which means "there is/are".

SERIOUS WARNING:
In iOS 5, there is inadequate protection against mapping the same shortcut twice. You can avoid doing that by first checking to see if you already have a keyboard shortcut with the name you are seeking to save (which might be new, or a [potentially dangerous] renaming of an existing one). If the expansion phrases differ, the last one assigned apparently trumps the other. If the expansion phrases are the same, your ability to access Settings > General > Keyboard > Shortcuts probably broke, and you will may need to restore your device from a backup to regain that, though existing keyboard shortcuts likely still work. On one occasion, after deleting an unintentionally duplicated keyboard shortcut (deleting one removed them both; they were adjacent to each other in the list) and experiencing the just-described breakage (keyboard shortcuts still worked), I ejected all apps from RAM, powered off and on my iPod, and was again able to access Settings > General > Keyboard > Shortcuts. Those are my recollections (probably reasonably accurate) of my own troublesome experiences; I did not test to verify them for this blog entry.
6/17/14: The unexpected duplication occurs if you have an extant Phrase without a keyboard shortcut, then edit it to make a keyboard shortcut. Delete it and recreate it to avoid the problem (which, as I described, is still fixable). I consider this an iOS 5 bug.

Soir, rasoir

This time around (see here for last time), soir is the French combination of letters not necessarily pronounced the same way in all words.

I discovered this difference in an old http://www.dailyfrenchpod.com video podcast episode (one of my favored French podcasts). Being familiar with the sound of the commonly used word soir (evening), in which the s is pronounced like the English s, I was surprised to discover that in rasoir (razor), the s is pronounced more like an English z, which I confirmed with my Larousse English/French dictionary app.

Not that my having pronounced it incorrectly in Paris over 30 years ago prevented the saleswoman from understanding my request:

Vendez-vous les rasoirs jetables?
(Do you sell disposable razors?)

4/1/14: I had forgotten the word besoin (need), whose s is also pronounced more like an English z than an English s! The s in soin (care) is, just like the s in soir, pronounced like the English s.

Origin of the Chinese word for "organic" for produce, etc.?

Ever since learning that the word 有機 (yǒujī) means "organic" with respect to produce, I had difficulty coming up with a satisfactory reason why it should.  The two characters just don't make any sense (well, to me, anyway) for such a meaning, and multiple native Chinese speakers have not been able to explain the origin of / rationale behind 有機 to me, either.

I finally came up with a possible reason: the French word for organic is biologique, the middle part of which bears a decent phonetic similarity to 有機.

This may not be as far-fetched as it might initially seem. The Chinese word for latte is 拿鐵 (nátiě), which is a purely phonetic conversion. Perhaps something similar occurred for "organic", from the French word for it?

Update 1:

Alternately, the definition of 機關 (jīguān) is "organ",  but that is in the sense of an organization/office, so it's not related to this meaning of organic, but perhaps whoever came up with 有機 mistakenly thought it did?

Update 2:
A native Cantonese speaker suggested that 有機 in Cantonese was chosen as being a decent phonetic match with "organic", further pointing out that Hong Kong would have been a natural place where Chinese language equivalents were created for foreign words. This idea seems to be the most reasonable explanation.

Tutoyer, vouvoyer

In the late 1980's, I had a French conversation with an American friend who had a wonderful French accent (she had married a Frenchman and had lived in France for some time). At one point she cut in to tell me, "Tu peux me tutoyer." ("You can use tu with me."), introducing me to an infrequently used, but still quite useful verb.

Tu is the familiar form of "you", while vous is the formal form. My belief is that it is fairly natural in an initial French conversation between two speakers, at least one of whom is an adult, that the younger (or perhaps somehow "newer") person would use vous to address the other person. I hadn't previously imagined that there were verbs dedicated to usage of tu (tutoyer) and vous (vouvoyer [not "vousvoyer"]; subsequently realized this sounds the same as Vous voyez ["You see"]).

More than a decade later, I was giving a 2-hour ride to a polite young Frenchwoman (from Martinique, actually), who began by using vous to address me, and switched to tu after I took what may be my only opportunity in this lifetime to legitimately remark "Tu peux me tutoyer.". That car ride was a wonderful, unexpected chance for me to have some French conversation practice.

I suspect tutoyer is used rather more commonly in spoken conversation than vouvoyer, since it strikes me that one would more commonly tell another person that "You don't have to be so formal with me." than the reverse.

Vocabulary investigations, starting from the French verb noyer

I periodically browse the Europe Échecs website, combining my love of chess with my love of the French language. A while ago I read some unfortunate French chess news which led me to look up the verb noyer (to drown [transitive]) in my Larousse French dictionary app. As I often enough do, I then looked up some "peripheral" words.

(Le) Noyer as a noun means walnut (the tree, or its wood), while (la) noix is used for walnut the nut. Larousse also mentions noix de cajou (cashew) and noix de coco (coconut), and has this comment about the English word nut:

terme générique pour les amandes, noisettes, noix etc.

(generic term for almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts, etc.), which made me wonder, "Is there no generic word for nut in French?"

Given the usage of noix as a component of other nut names, I had some suspicion that it might fill the bill. A native French speaker, a retired French professor (Merci, Mme J.), confirmed that noix could be so used, despite / beyond its primary meaning of walnut.

I also looked up se noyer, which means to drown (intransitive), potentially including the reflexive use of intentionally committing suicide that way. Just as in English, without adequate context (e.g., additional verbiage), it would not necessarily be clear which usage is meant.

Soon thereafter, I came across the word noyé (a drowned person) in Port Coton, a French pop song by Zaz, which I mentioned in this other blog entry. You never know where you'll come across new vocabulary words again, so grab as many as you can hang on to!

French pop songs, iTunes, and iPod speaker limitations

I recently saw the movie Hugo, at the end of which is a very nice French song called Cœur Volant by the new-to-me French singer Zaz. I found that she released an eponymous (man, I never thought I'd ever use that word) album in 2010, which was for sale on iTunes.

Gone are the days when you had to buy an entire album to find out which songs you like. I listened to snippets of each track on iTunes, targeting two that seemed to my taste (Le long de la route, La fée). Then I was fortunate enough to borrow both the Hugo and Zaz CDs from the library, and listened to them on two different boomboxes, discovering another Zaz track that I liked (Port Coton). So iTunes snippets aren't necessarily enough to find all the tracks you'd like.

I bought Cœur Volant from Hugo, plus the 3 Zaz tracks, from iTunes, and returned the CD. Zaz also released her own version of Cœur Volant, but PC iTunes showed that that shorter version had been purchased far less often than the longer version from the Hugo movie, whose additional time is probably all instrumental.

One thing that surprised me was that when listening to Port Coton at a normal volume on a boombox, I couldn't hear the guitar(?) squeaking sound that precedes and follows her singing. That squeaking is annoyingly audible when listening to the song on an iPod speaker, which admittedly is far from a superb audio experience, but is still good enough for me most of the time.

As a language exercise, I typed out all the words I could make out while listening to Port Coton, then compared them with the actual lyrics. Clearly I have more work to do, but I like to think I've improved from 10 or so years ago. Back then I went to an all-day advanced French course, and was horribly, disappointingly inaccurate while filling in just the last word(!) of several lines in French singer Pauline Ester's Une Fenêtre ouverte song, which the instructor played several times for us. That's from a decent album (Le Monde est fou), but if I was introduced to it today I probably would similarly only buy several of its tracks. Hmm, maybe not -- one of the songs I like, La mer, isn't available on iTunes, even if my other favorites from that album are. Digital downloads don't necessarily completely mirror CD material.

Moving on to the same language exercise with La fée....


2/13/15: Well, I guess due to life realities I'll never get around to finishing the above language exercises, but I did buy Zaz's newer (though not newest) album Recto Verso, and I like it better than her debut album. Check it out!

Egg(s), ox, and oxen in French

Long ago I learned the French word for egg (œuf) and for ox (boeuf). The pronunciation of each of those French words includes the sound of the letter f at the end. I don't specifically recall ever using the plural of either word in French.

Recently, when listening to episode 1474 (Allergies) from Dailyfrenchpod.com, I heard the host Louis, a native French speaker, pronounce eggs (œufs). I was shocked to discover that the f is not sounded at the end for the plural! Indeed, no consonant is sounded at the end.

My Larousse dictionary app confirmed this surprising (to me) pronunciation, and that the same pattern is true for ox (bœuf) and oxen (bœufs). Larousse indicates that the sound of œu changes as well, but that difference is not easy for me to distinguish. Perhaps that change is almost an unavoidable side-effect of losing the terminal f sound?

French podcasts continue to be great for improving my knowledge of the language.

Merci, Louis!

Guillaume, aiguille; fille, ville

One of the challenges in learning French (or, probably even worse, English) is that the same combination of letters aren't necessarily pronounced the same way in all words. Spanish, thankfully, is a regular language in that respect, although I think I didn't realized that until several years ago.

The latest inconsistency I stumbled across, in a http://www.dailyfrenchpod.com podcast episode (one of my favored French podcasts), was aiguille (needle). Being already familiar with the sound of the name Guillaume (William) in which the gui portion sounds generally like the English "gee" in "geese", I was surprised that in aiguille it is pronounced "gwee", which I also confirmed with my Larousse English/French dictionary app.

Some words having a similar inconsistency, but which would typically be encountered rather earlier by French learners, are fille (girl), whose ille portion sounds roughly like English "ee", while the ille portion of ville (city) sounds roughly like English "eel".

Pâte, pâté; meunier, meunière

I was recently in a store selling chocolate covered goodies labeled "pâte de fruits". I imagined the word pâte may have been an error, and that the goodies should have been labeled "pâté de fruits" because I didn't remember ever having seen the French word pâte.

However, given the pedigree of the store, I later had second thoughts, and suspected pâte was indeed correct. Checking the Larousse English / French dictionary app confirmed that suspicion:

• la pâte: pastry
• le pâté: paste (or even pâté, as adopted for use in English)

Interestingly, when looking up the French word for paste, depending on the context it can be translated as either of those:

• pâte (substance - generally)
• pâté (mashed meat, fish)

On the same visit, I had sole meunière at the affiliated restaurant. Although I think I once learned the meaning of meunier, I couldn't remember it, so I asked for the dish's description (in English). The sole would be covered in flour and then cooked, and I came to the conclusion (later verified in Larousse) that meunier (the masculine form of meunière) means miller (of flour).

Interestingly, the definition of meunière is not a female miller, but a miller's wife. That is a surprising difference from what I imagine is the more common pattern of:

• le boucher (a [male] butcher)
• la bouchère (a female butcher)

Borrowing written shortcuts from other languages

If you are familiar with a foreign language, you may find a word or abbreviation therein that takes less time to write than its equivalent in your native language. It may be expedient to use that foreign word or abbreviation in notes to yourself, or perhaps even in notes to others if exposure to that foreign word or abbreviation is widespread.


Many years ago I received an incorrectly routed e-mail message which was for someone else. The short message was in French, and contained an abbreviation (pb) which I had not seen previously. I asked a native French speaker what that was, and after looking at it for a short time he realized it was an abbreviation for problème (problem).

Okay, the typical English abbreviation of problem is "prob", which is a mere two letters longer, but I've probably been using "pb" in English notes to myself for more than a couple of decades.


In Taiwan, I once noticed my Taiwanese cousin had used the Japanese character の in place of the Chinese character 的 (Pinyin: de; of) in a note whose other characters were all Chinese. I am quite confident that given Taiwan's proximity/exposure to Japan, a typical Taiwanese would neither be surprised nor confused to see such usage of the の character, which can be written in a single stroke, unlike 的.

Correcting my faulty pronunciation of école (& agricole)

I think it was about 20 years ago, when I was speaking French with a Frenchwoman (who was actually in my Mandarin Chinese class at that time), that she made a comment about my improper pronunciation of école (school).

Well, better 20 years late than never. I checked my Larousse dictionary app's audio pronunciation of both école and agricole (agricultural; another word having the same ending that came to mind), finally understood my longstanding error, and am trying to break my bad habit.

I think that I must never have realized that the circumflex accent in words like drôle (funny) and rôle (role) was changing the sound of the o, and was wrongly using that ô sound in école and agricole as well. Not surprisingly, that ô sound is more like the "long" o sound in English. I think it is common enough that, when learning new sounds in foreign languages, people mistakenly equate a sound from their native language with a foreign sound. After that, they may never notice the difference between the sounds, particularly if no one points it out to them. Even after having such pointed out to them, it may still take them 20 years to correct it....

The o sound in école is rather more like the sound of "ull" in English.


7/26/12: Today I realized that the o sound that I should have been making all these years in école is the same one I had already been used to making for the word folle (crazy; feminine form).

Podcasts app

7/10/12: It's possible there is some issue with my particular iPod usage (iOS 5.1.1), but in any case the Podcasts app performance is dreadful and I have deleted it. Today I observed that within the Music app, Apple has rerouted the Get More Episodes... link to the Podcasts app, away from the much-smoother-to-get-podcast-episodes-from iTunes app. The Podcasts app works okay from an iPad 2 running iOS 5.1.1, though.

On 6/26/12, Apple released the Podcasts app (version 1.0), which may eventually manage all podcast functionality in iOS 6. The Podcasts app requires iOS 5.1 or higher; I am using iOS 5.1.1.

On my iPod, I use podcasts almost exclusively for French language practice, which I wrote about here. My use of the Podcasts app is similarly focused on enhancing that, and I don't expect to write about much beyond that. On the Internet, other folks have already written broader commentary on the Podcasts app, and it is not my intent to duplicate their efforts.

The Podcasts and Music apps share much of the same local podcast episode data. A podcast episode downloaded by one app is accessible by the other app. However, each app maintains its own data about which episodes have been played, and about how much of each episode has been played.

PROS:

• The Podcasts app allows mass marking of all episodes of a podcast series as played or unplayed. That capability is not present in the Music app. I often enough skip around among episodes and stop listening partway through various of them. Within the Music app, that means that when I listen continuously to episodes in a podcast series, when one episode finishes playing, the next one might (annoyingly) start partway through, instead of at the beginning. Unfortunately, as noted above, the effect of this mass marking is not accessible within the Music app.
• The Podcasts app allows subscription to podcasts, so that when you run the app it will download all new episodes for you. This capability doesn't exist in the Music app.
• Properly sorts podcast episodes by date (so far!). On multiple occasions, I observed improper sorting of such within the Music app, although it was always improper inter-group (not intra-group) sorting, where there were mistakenly two groups of episodes for a single podcast series. That is, episodes might have been ordered as D-E-F A-B-C, but not D-F-E B-A-C; an example from News in Slow French:
  
  
  

CONS:

• The Podcasts app cannot play continuously multiple episodes of a podcast, unlike the Music app, preventing taking greater advantage of its ability (a PRO point listed above) to mass mark all episodes of a podcast series as unplayed.
  
• Only one screen worth of text included with a podcast can be viewed within the Podcasts app, whereas all such screens can be viewed within the Music app. While it's probably only practical for relatively short duration podcasts to include all of their text, the much-favored-by-me One Thing in a French Day is one of them. The following images of the same podcast episode in the different apps show this limitation.
  
  Podcasts app, where the "[...]" indicates that there is more text, but it cannot be accessed:
  
  
  
  
  Music app, where you can scroll down 3 more screens (not included here) beyond this one to see all the accompanying text:
  
  
  
  
  
• The Podcasts app is horribly "laggy" (slow response), and frequently crashes on my iPod (although it does not seem to have these problems on my iPad 2). Indeed, while using the app on my iPod to play a podcast episode as I worked on this blog entry, I turned Airplane Mode on, and the Podcasts app crashed soon afterward.
  

OTHER COMMENTS:

• Organizational idea: Like many people, I have more apps than will fit on a single Home Screen. I keep the Music app on my first Home Screen, and, before deleting it, had put the Podcasts app in the same row and column position, but on my second Home screen. That allowed my mind and my fingers to easily switch between the two strongly-related apps.
• Apple was apparently quietly testing various aspects of the Podcasts app transition prior to its 6/26/12 release. Here is an image from the Music app showing how the icon for the News in Slow French podcast oddly changed less than a month prior to that date:
  
  
  
  
  
• Within the Music app, I historically used the Get More Episodes... link to directly switch to the iTunes app, but that now invokes the Podcasts app. If you don't have the Podcasts app installed, that link will (pointlessly, from my perspective) invoke Safari momentarily before switching to the iTunes app; I'm pretty certain that that intermediate Safari invocation started shortly prior to the 6/26/12 release of the Podcasts app.
  

French to English automated translation issues

For the French sentence:

Les pièces sont, sinon moins froides, du moins plus tranquilles.

Google Translate returns:

The parts are, if not warmer, at least quieter.

A more natural, and in this case correct, translation is:

The rooms are, if not warmer, at least quieter.

as I theorized that it ought to be, and which I subsequently confirmed with a native French speaker.  Of course, having translated the original French sentence (which did involve checking a dictionary) from my own original thought in English, I can be certain of what the translation (back) into English should be.  I was simply curious about an automated translation result.


Google Translate is likely hampered by the fact that "piece" (Google Translate used "part", which has an equivalent meaning) is the first definition of "pièce" in a dictionary.  At least that is the case in the Larousse French/English dictionary app, wherein "room" ranks fourth in the eleven definition possibilities for "pièce".

Beyond "The parts are", Google Translate offers the following additional translation options of the first clause ("Les pièces sont"), but those minor variations are wrong for this particular sentence as well:

• The pieces are
• Pieces are
• Parts are
• The coins are

Looking up "room" in French, the Larousse dictionary app gives different definitions depending on the context:

• in building or public place:  salle
• in house:  pièce
• in hotel:  chambre

Even those rules are not cast in stone, in my experience, but they're probably reasonable general rules.

In any case, the above peripheral perspective is not so easily incorporated into automated translation.  However, my French sentence's reference to "rooms" would seem to be relatively easily inferred from the rest of the content by a native or reasonably experienced (human!) French speaker.

Radio apps for French and Spanish

The free Radio Française (version 2.4) and Radio Española (version 1.2) apps allow you to listen to a selection of radio stations (some Internet-only) from France and Spain, respectively. They are from the same developer, and share the same interface. The version differences between apps for different countries appear to at least partly be related to changes the developer makes to add or fix radio streams for a given country.

Since I am generally looking for conversation as opposed to music, I "favorite" suitable stations so I can easily find them in the future.

Under Channels, you can select by Name, Location, or Genre. I looked for "News" under Genre to find useful stations. Scrolling down that far lost the Name/Location/Genre headings at the top, so the image below is from the top (where the musical group "Abba" gets its own genre!).

Below are quick favorites I chose for these two apps:

This developer, Fredo, also has similar radio apps for other countries. Below is a sample listing:

Larousse English / French dictionary app

6/12/12: Apple's 6/11/12 keynote address at their World Wide Developer Conference indicates that French, German, and Spanish dictionaries will be built into iOS 6 (on the screen at the 107:05 [minutes:seconds] mark). I imagine those will be more basic dictionaries, and I will continue to prefer using this Larousse dictionary app, but time will tell.
6/15/12: Some embedded single language (e.g., French-only) dictionaries can also be freely downloaded in the free Amazon Kindle app, which I mentioned previously here. Despite having written about them, I still sometimes forget they are there.

Several weeks ago I finally bought myself a combined French-English & English-French dictionary app. I am now no longer surviving on a hodgepodge of free apps which cover an assortment of much more limited/specific aspects of the French language; those apps still have their uses, so perhaps later I will write up a blog entry for them.

Anyway, I chose the Larousse English / French dictionary app (version 2.0.1) because:

• I had some trust in the Larousse brand, having been pleased with their printed French-French nouveau dictionnaire du français contemporain illustré (new illustrated dictionary of contemporary French) which I bought years ago, and still use on occasion.
• It was significantly cheaper than my other main candidate app, which I think was Ultralingua Robert.
• My other main candidate app had some limit (50?) on the number of words it would keep in its history (before it started bouncing out the older ones), a limit which I felt was unreasonably low. However, to be honest, I don't actually know what Larousse's limit is. 8/24/14: Larousse app 2.2.0 history limit is 100.

I have found the app to be a pleasure to use (although I could do without the animation when switching between direction of language translation), when looking up words while listening to various French podcasts, or when, rather less often, writing French text.  Below is an example where you can see their useful added detail for an entry:

Two inconveniences I hope the developers fix in a future version:

• Direction of translation always starts English to French; better would be to stay in the direction last used. I more frequently want French to English.
• The History entries change their chronological order from descending to ascending, or vice versa, each time the list of entries is viewed (including if, within History, you look for a word's detail, then go back to History). I have difficulty imagining a reason why it would be helpful for it to work this way. (2/26/13: This is fixed in version 2.2.0, such that the History entries now consistently appear top to bottom in the order in which they were searched for. Personally I would have used reverse chronological search order, since I'm usually more interested in quickly seeing the words which I looked up most recently, but at least the order is no longer flipping back and forth.
  
  By the way, the Delete button immediately deletes all History entries. To my regret and contrary to my expectations, it doesn't offer the choice of deleting selected entries, nor does it prompt for confirmation. It would be more helpfully labeled "Delete all" or "Clear history", and it really ought to prompt for confirmation. To delete an individual entry, swipe on it from left to right, and the typical red Delete button appears, which is effectively prompting for confirmation.)

Some language errors and/or app oddities/bugs:

1) In this French definition, "it's" should be "its":

2) If you look up "program" in English, you get triple entries for it both as a noun and as a verb:

3) When looking up a phrase in French, if you enter the first word you will be presented by entries for it by itself, plus a limited number of entries of phrases that begin with it. If the number of possible entries is large, you will not see them all, and you will unfortunately have to cycle through all the remaining letters of the alphabet to see all the possibilities. See the following example.

I was trying to find the phrase au dessous (in fact, the phrase is au-dessous with a dash between the two words, but I didn't know/remember that).

Entering "au" gives this list:

That list can be scrolled down only until this point, which has not exhausted all phrase possibilities beginning with "au":

Entering "au d" gives this list:

That list can be scrolled down until this point, which presumably is the last phrase in the dictionary that begins with "au d":

The pronunciation of jaune (yellow) in French

A Frenchman mentioned to me today that the au vowel sound in jaune (yellow) is often mispronounced, even by native French speakers, like an English "aw" sound (as in awning), when it should be pronounced like an English long o sound (as in lone).  I realized that I have been making this same mistake for years, possibly influenced by a misplaced expectation for the sound to be like the one in the English word jaundice, which shares the same first four letters.

However, there are many French words wherein the au vowel sound is pronounced like an English long o sound, e.g.:

• au (to the)
• chaud (hot)
• gaufre (waffle)
• haut (high)

so it seems clear to me that the vowel sound in jaune should be pronounced similarly.

This Frenchman said that many people from the Marseille region in France use this "mistaken" pronunciation, although he would classify it more as a regional variant.  Personally, I will try to break my longstanding "mistake", since I prefer to emulate standard Parisian French, and I will make enough other mistakes trying to do so!