Improve your French: a guide for grad students and scholars

Reading knowledge of a language is a low standard to content oneself with. Furthermore, reading knowledge of a language is vastly improved if one is able to understand the same language when spoken. Where to begin? With audio recordings of the Bible, I suggest.

Perhaps you know passages of the Bible by heart, in Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek; if not, in your mother tongue. If so, a great way to work on comprehension of spoken French is to listen to an audio recording of a biblical passage you know well. For example, go here for chapter-by-chapter audio recordings of Le Sainte Bible, according to the version of Louis Segond (Old and New Testaments). It pays to listen to the tapes with and without accompanying written text, which one can open up in another window on one’s browser, from this site. One may also listen to an audio stream of a news flash while reading the equivalent in print on this site.

Sites I recommend to those who wish to keep their biblical and theological French alive in a non-francophone environment: Hokhma and Témoignage chrétien.

I am thankful that, while a theological student in Rome, I had the opportunity to hear the great New Testament scholar, François Vouga, lecture in French. I started out needing simultaneous translation in Italian. But, by the end of the lecture series, I could follow most of what he said in French. Practice makes perfect.

A full set of links for learning and keeping up one’s French is available here.

For a gushing review by Jim West of Vouga’s Une théologie du Nouveau Testament, I refer the reader here; for extensive excerpts, go here. For a Vouga bibliography, go here. 

Practice your languages series

Improve your Italian: a Guide for grad students and scholars
Improve your German: a Guide  for grad students and scholars
Improve your French: a Guide for grad students and scholars

Comments

[John]

Do you know of sites where this can be done with the New Testament and Greek, or OT and Hebrew? Thanks.

[JohnFH]

Hi John,

In the right hand sidebar way down, under links of interest, there is a link to audio recordings of the Hebrew Bible. I haven't researched the question as far as biblical Greek is concerned.

[Joshua Stewart]

Thanks for these resources I am close to working on Biblical French as a requirement for a second research language for PhD work. My German is fair, but do you know of some similar internet resources for Biblical German? If so I would love to see a post with all of them included.
Thanks

[JohnFH]

Hi Joshua,

Yeah, I'm working on a companion post for German.