Sunday, August 1, 2021

Le premier blog article en Français / First blog post in French

On April 14, last year, I said, "Maybe one day, there will be a blog post in French!" I thought I shouldn't delay that début any longer.

But before that, there was a problem. Though the English and French alphabets are the same, French has five types of accents. The pronunciation of a letter with and without an accent is different. 

The five are:

L'accent aigu (é)

L'accent grave (è)

L'accent circonflexe or "chapeau" (â)

La cédille (ç)

Le tréma (ë)

I needed French a keyboard or some method by which I could get these accents.

Windows 10 has an option to have keyboards of different languages. I enabled the one for French. 

But the problem with that was that the keys aren't the same. Like for example, where we have 'a', it's 'q'. So, if I type out femme on a French keyboard, it'll turn out to be: fe,,e.

I went to Youtube and searched how I could get French accents on Windows English keyboard. I found that there are so many methods one could do that. But the one I liked, the simplest one, was this.

This is the keyboard shortcut. 

é = Cntr ' e 

è = Cntr ` e

ê = Cntr Shift ^ 

ë = Cntr Shift ;

ç = Cntr ,

But it works only on MS Word; not on Blogger Draft or Notepad. 

So, here I go. Needless to say, I typed this out on MS Word and then pasted it here. The translation is below that:


Bonjour! Comment ça va?

Je m’appelle Pradeep, et j’habite á Bengaluru en Inde.

J’apprends le Français alors j’essaye – pour la premier fois – écrire un article sur mon blog en Français.

S’il y a des erreurs, pardon, s’il vous plaît.

Aujourd’hui, c’est le premier jour d’août.

C’est dimanche.

C’est un jour férié donc je ne dois pas aller au bureau.

Hello! How are you?

My name is Pradeep, and I live in Bengaluru in India.

I am learning French, so I am trying -- for the first time -- to write a blog post in French.

Please excuse me if there are errors.

Today is the first day of August.

It's Sunday.

It's a public holiday and I don't have to go to office.


I am sure to get some usages / prepositions wrong, which I guess will get better with more exposure to the language.


  1. Hari Om
    bravo, Pradeep... Mon école française m'a aidé à traduire avant de lire l'anglais -... and now I am stuck to say practice makes perfect (...forgen>???) no I'd have to go to Translate. But hey, congrats! YAM xx

    1. Hi Yamini - Merci beaucoup! Ya, you are right; I hope to practise writing. The challenge though is to get thinking in French.

  2. Yay. Good job. My French is limited to what I learned in high school, so I can't tell you if it's right. I do know there's a code thing that you can use to get accents on the letters, but I think your solution is probably better.

    1. Thanks, Liz.
      Ya, this method is quite easy, except that it works only in MS Word.

  3. Ne vous inquiétez pas pour vos erreurs. Je ne comprends rien à ce que tu as écrit. Mais bel essai. Toutes nos félicitations. (Don't worry about your errors. I don't understand a thing of what you wrote. But nice try. Congratulations.) Thanks Google Translate

    1. How internet has broken down language barriers!
      Thanks a lot, Rajan.

  4. Félicitations pour ce blog en Français!

    The accents and keys is a big struggle for bilinguals like me :-) In Switzerland though we don't use the AZERTY keyboard but the "QUERTZ" so when I move to India I had to remember that the Y and Z on the keyboard where not in the same spot.

    I don't remember the shortcuts on Windows to type the accents, I remember it being complicated. On Mac it's a bit easier I just need to hold down the key and a menu appears for me to select the right accent for example the accent aigu is holding down "e" and then type "2" I don't even have to remember the cod for each accents because just holding the key down brings the menu up with the options.
    I wish autocorrect on my phone and iPad would switch a bit more seamlessly between the two languages though, I have both dictionaries enabled, but it tend to decide that I wanted to write in English and corrects the word automatically for at least 2-3 sentences before registering that I was indeed planning on writing in French all along.

    1. Hi Cynthia - Merci beaucoup pour votre réponse!

      I discovered AZERTY and QUERTZ when I downloaded the French keyboard on my mobile.

      This Windows keyboard shortcut is quite simple. Only issue is it works only in MS Word. Probably, there are easy ways to get the accents.

    2. I never heard of AZERTY or QUERTZ, only QUERTY. That makes sense. I never thought about it. ~shakes head~ And it's fascinating that so many languages are used in India. And good on you for learning a new one.

      I tried learning Spanish as a teenager in public school and Japanese in my forties. As for the latter, I'd hoped my bosses would take me to the Japanese corporate headquarters one day. ~sigh~ I prefer retirement though.


      In neither case did I have a hope of writing in those languages. So again, well done!

  5. Your skill at learning languages is impressive. I've never been good at it, so I'm all the more amazed :)

    1. Thanks, Jeanne. Actually, I am not very good with languages, meaning I don't pick them up very easily, unlike those who have an innate flair for it.

      In India, since there are many states (30 of them), each with its own local language, Indians who live in cities know English (because in schools/ colleges that's the medium of instruction), Hindi (because that's the most widely spoken language) and their own state language (if it's not Hindi), besides probably one or two other languages, if they have lived in some other state or states (where the state language is not Hindi). It's more by virtue of their exposure to the language than because of their liking for learning a new language.

  6. Hi Pradeep - I certainly admire you ... I've tried Latin, French, Italian, German, Afrikaans ... the only thing those helped with - is a better understanding when I see something written or hear it.

    But then English is such a mix of languages ... let alone all we have now via the internet ... squeak 'help' from here!

    Salute ... sorry can't be bothered to get the accent put on the 'e' ... but I always type my posts in Word and copy across - that might help with those Frenchie highlighter thingies!!

    Cheers Hilary

    1. Hi Hilary,
      Thank you, so much. I have always had a liking for French.
      One of the reasons for that is that English has a number of French words. That sort of attracted me to the language.
      Also, French is musical to the ears!

  7. Très bien écrit. Wishing you well on this French journey!

  8. Salut Pradeep. Je ne savais pas que tu parles français. Super! C'est un excellent départ. Bonne continuation!