Prepositions
This is nothing to do with learning to listen to French. I decided to spend the summer of 2008 trying to master French prepositions. Because the easiest way to learn something is to write about it, the result is a little 76 page book, which you're welcome to download if you think it might be useful.
It's based on Lasserre's dictionary of prepositions 'Est-ce à ou de?', but because you can't learn from a dictionary, I decided to ignore all the examples which we don't get wrong - that is to say, where à = to and de = of. 'Je suis prêt à partir', gives no difficulty:
I kept all the cases which Anglophones tend to get wrong, like the infamous 'dépendre de' for 'depend on', and I tried to organise them into the groups you will find in the book.
Having done all that I thought I might as well write a touch of software, so you will also find on this page a program which uses the data I collected to offer (originally) 566 preposition tests.
I keep on adding preposition exercises all the time as I come across them. Version 1.0.3 and above counts the number automatically and displays it. All you need after that is to download the text file preplist.txt
Current preplist.txt at 19/11/08. Contains 701 exercises
| Word document 1.5 Mbytes | Learning Prepositions |
|
Software files as rar archive 300 kbytes |
Prepositions.rar V1.0.4 |
| Software files as zip archive 300 kbytes | Prepositions.zip V1.0.4 |
The software doesn't need to be installed. Just keep all the files in the same folder.
Along with the executable you get preplist.txt, which is a text file of all the examples of prepositions taken from the book.
Prepex.au3 is the source code, so you can change the program if you want. It is written in a very fully-featured scripting language called Autoit3
which you will find here. You will need to download and install the package if you want to amend the program. However, the main program
Prepex.exe is a standalone, you don't need to download anything to use it.
I'd be grateful for bug reports. The program is tested - but since when did Microsoft get it right first time?
And if you want to add preposition examples to preplist.txt, just put them at the end. Each line must have a French sentence, followed by the English translation, the two sentences separated by a TAB character
Hope you find it useful !