General Reference Sites
on French and Francophone Cultures and Literatures
compiled by C. Perry at the University of Notre Dame
(checked January 2007; updated April 2008)

• NEW: The Paris Gazette -- information website dedicated to the French-speaking community living teaching (if not studying) in the U.S.  
• NEW: French food and easy French recipes -- French recipes that are quickly and easily prepared
• A French Touch -- French food, cuisine and French recipes
• Études littéraires -- an exhaustive site on French literary studies
• A history of French feminism
• The importance of French in the world (site of L'Ordre des Palmes Académiques)
• Superlinks to French websites, provided by Jim Becker
• A pdf document explaining how to configure Windows for French accents
• Prof. Michel Hallot's PowerPoint step by step presentation on configuring Windows (2000 and XP) for foreign accents
• A page to help you type French accents with ease
• France Synergies at the University of Wisconsin Madison -- with multiple links to resources
• Skynet -- a site that posts interesting articles on all French and Francophone topics
• Book price comparison site -- search for the best prices on French books at online booksellers
• Phonétique -- hear the pronunciation of French words
• Peinture FLE -- improve your French through a discussion of paintings
• Le Net des études françaises -- with an online dictionary of electronic terms
  • Entretiens/Entreliens -- a page with links to the most useful online resources for French Studies
• First and foremost, why study French? Well, it's simply the most practical foreign language
• A list of resources in Romance Languages and Literatures at Notre Dame's library (compiled by L. Fuderer)
• Many useful links on ND's Romance Languages and Literatures site (French studies abroad, bilingual dictionaries...)
• French-at-a-touch.com -- for everything French in the U.S. and abroad
• Francopholistes -- a guide to the internet in France
• France-Link -- gateway to media in France (radio, tv, newspapers, magazines, etc.) [NB: separate page]
• Encyclopédie de l'Agora -- an encyclopedia in Québec, with numerous links
• Guide to France -- travel and cultural information

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French Dictionaries, Grammars, and Encyclopedias

• NEW: Atlas sémantique -- French dictionary, English dictionary, dictionary of synonyms, translation...
• NEW: Dictionnaire des synonymes -- some 300,000 synonyms et 50,000 antonyms
• Dictionnaire des synonymes (approximately 49,000 entries and 396,000 relations)
• Lexilogos, an online reference tool, with many great links
• Le Patron -- a grammar and vocabulary checker!
• A complete list of dictionaries available online
• TV5 multifunction dictionary (French-French, French-English, English-French, synonyms, and verb conjugations!)
• Dictionnaire international des termes littéraires -- an extraordinarily useful resource
• Look no further: Service des Bibliothèques at the University of Sherbrooke ists all dictionaries available
• What's that word? Try WordReference.com, a multilingual dictionary (also provides a downloadable toolbar)
• Trésor de la langue française -- FREE consultation of over 100,000 words with etymologies and literary examples
  • click here to go directly to the word search engine [NB: page designed for modem connections; click here for high speed connections ]
• Dictionnaire des synonymes by the Laboratoire CRISCO
• Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française (2 volumes online)
• Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française at the University of Chicago's ARTFL project
• Le Dicomoche -- a fun and instructive site with unusual definitions (for advanced speakers of French only!)
• About: French -- a site offering very useful information: vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, cultural facts, and more!
• Logos -- a rich and complex multilingual reference site
• A list of aids for French grammar, spelling, verb conjugations, etc., many of them free
• Le Devoir conjugal -- 7,913 French verbs with their conjugations
• Grammaire de l'absurde -- a fun and useful French grammar, with exercises
• Merriam-Webster's "word of the day" online (tip: subscribe to receive this daily word by email)
• NEW: Oxford Language Tools and Resources (life and culture, writing and word games, learning and teaching...)
• Wikipedia in French--the open-source reference tool when searching for obscure and not-so-obscure authors and facts
• WordNet -- an English dictionary with exhaustive synonyms and nuances (at Notre Dame Women's College of Kyoto)

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Search engines for French literary sites

• Finding information on the internet -- a tutorial from the University of California, Berkeley
• Evaluating Web Sites -- criteria and tools to help appraise web-based information (Cornell University)
• Astrolabe, répertoire des sites littéraires -- useful evaluations of literary sites
• Auteurs.net -- also provides evaluations of literary sites
• Biographies.net -- thousands of literary biographies (some more complete than others)
• Want to locate a quotation? Try All the Web
• You will find almost any author at La République des Lettres
• Yahoo in France's site on French literature, with multiple links
• Chronologie de l'édition française -- history of French publishing houses in the 20th century
• Francofil -- resources on French literature and culture
• KartOO -- a different search engine, colorful and fun as well as efficient

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Pedagogy

• NEW: Learn French - Learn French guide, all about how to learn French and how to speak French
• Web resource center for teachers and students of French
• MERLOT -- Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching
• Le Patron -- a grammar and vocabulary checker!
• France Synergies at the University of Wisconsin Madison -- a site with multiple links to resources
• Le Point du FLE -- a site on resources for teaching French
• Centre International d'Études Pédagogiques, offering a standardized French test