These dialogs aim to supplement a dance student's knowledge of elementary French. It is not a complete, beginning, French course because you can already find many good ones on the Web. Nor does it try to define ballet steps or positions because, again, there are many excellent Websites which do this. Instead, the objective is to: 1. improve the student's pronunciation of ballet terms and; 2. increase the student's usable French vocabulary by integrating these words into everyday speech.. As you might expect, ballet vocabulary contains many adjectives and adverbs describing positioning and motion, including many past participles of action verbs. Therefore, I have not limited myself exclusively to the present tense but have used the simple past tense (using helping verbs). I plan to add a quick review of this grammar for those who have not yet studied it in their beginning classes or who are trying to recall the French they studied years ago.
As you might guess, writing a script using only beginning vocabulary plus specialized ballet terms results in very odd speech. Therefore, I decided to set these scenes in a rather odd kingdom.
This is a work in progress. Please note that the sound is still relatively crude because at present I am using all the free or inexpensive text-to-speech "voices" an sound effects I can find. The main voices are French but for the "supporting cast" I used voices in other languages generating the French words by spelling them phonetically. Therefore, you will notice that the royal horses are Andalusians with Spanish accents, the butler has been hired from England, the orchestra conductor is from Italy, and the mechanic sounds like Steven Hawking speaking French if his native language were German.
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If you have any comments or suggestions, or if you speak French and run into any spelling, grammar or other errors, please email me at toroandbruin@gmail.com. Note that the email address which launches, here, is a temporary, disposable one which will change as soon as spam engines get ahold of it. So if you want to email me again you will need to come back to this site in order to send to whatever new, disposable address I'm currently using.
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