Until now, our French tests have all been multiple choice, but a few weeks ago (along with our new voiced French grammar examples feature), we quietly released Freeform Writing Questions for French Verb Conjugation.
French verb conjugation is often considered one of the most challenging aspects of learning French so we think you’ll love this feature, but you won’t see it straight away after joining. Kwiziq, our intelligent learning software, decides what to test you on based on what it knows about what you know. Kwiziq builds up a picture of how confident you are in different areas in French and will serve you lessons and questions (from our huge database) in a priority order that’s calculated to get the best results for you as an individual.
As you answer consistently correctly and your confidence grows, you’ll start to see questions like this:
Kwiziq starts you off with easier multiple choice questions for verb conjugations before graduating you on to the freeform writing questions. That way, if you already have a little confidence in this verb, you can boost it by choosing an answer you recognise before being given harder freeform challenges. Don’t worry if you get these wrong – if you do, Kwiziq will just gently drop you back down to multiple choice questions until your confidence increases.
Typing French Accents – Desktop Computer
Notice the little dropdown box to the right with the é in it. This is always present on desktop browsers to help you type accents. If you need a letter with an accent, you can click this to get a menu of accents to type, like this:
If you’re a Windows user and you’re going to be writing French accents a lot, I’d highly recommend you read this article on the Best Way to Type French Accents on Windows.
Typing French Accents – Mobile
If you prefer taking your French tests on your mobile device (iPhone, Android phone, tablet, etc.) then you won’t see this menu. The reason is, your mobile already lets you type accents easily. On both Android and iPhones, all you have to do is press the key and hold it for options with accents to appear.
Freeform French Questions and Your Kwiziq Score
Your Kwiziq Score is a measure of how confident you are in a given area based on your test history. This score rarely goes above 75% for multiple choice answers, but with correct freeform answers you can now get 100%. You don’t need to worry about how the score is calculated; generally you should just try and make it go up.
Author info
[Follow on Twitter: @gruffdavies] Despite the very Welsh name, Gruff is actually half French. Nowadays, he's a tech entrepreneur (and some-time novelist) but he used to be a physicist at Imperial College before getting hooked on inventing things. He has a special interest in language learning, speaks five languages to varying degrees of fluency and he often blogs about language learning, science, and technology. As well as co-founding Kwiziq, he is the author the Amazon best-selling SF thriller, The Looking Glass Club and the inventor of the Exertris gaming exercise-bike and Pidgin, a free online tool that makes drawing flow charts and relationship diagrams as quick and easy as describing them in pidgin English.