Long phrases need to be broken down into smaller phrases rather than individual words. Effectively they need to be treated rather like mini-dialogues.
For example "In order to facilitate the management of your call, thank you kindly prepare the name and date of birth of the person you wish to make an appointment", instead of breaking down word by word "Afin" + "de" + "faciliter" + "la" etc. the suggested breakdown is as follows:
- afin de faciliter
- la prise en charge de votre appel
- merci de bien vouloir préparer
- le nom et la date de naissance
- de la personne pour laquelle
- vous souhaitez prendre un rendez-vous
Why? Because otherwise the work on creating the phrase is almost entirely wasted! Students only learn phrases when they are presented with them in quizzes, and the phrases are presented to them in length order, starting with shorter phrases first. Hence, a phrase with, for example, 20 words would not be presented to the students until they have learnt everything else on the site of shorter length. Sure, the phrase is useful as an example of all the words which it contains, but it will almost never be practised. Instead, if it is broken down into smaller phrases, all of the smaller phrases will be frequently practised.
Consider the above example. When broken down into smaller phrases as shown, the student will gain many advantages:
- when studying any individual word, even with basic levels of the langauge, they will be able to have an easy-to-understand example sentence, e.g. "merci de bien vouloir préparer"
- for each word, they will get useful practise in the "Examples of [word] in use" quizzes, e.g. http://lingopolo.com/french/online-lessons/examples-of-thank-you-in-use… for "merci"
- they will learn useful sub-phrases, e.g. "le nom et la date de naissance" which have a value outside of the context of the super-long phrase
- even for the most advanced students, to check whether the super long phrase was right, is virtually impossible when the sentence is so long, but when broken down into smaller phrases, they can more easily check if they were correct
Example
As an example of the breakdown of long phrases, look at how the following has been broken down, and listen to each of the parts to understand better why the breaks have been chosen to be as shown.
Here, there are numerous leisures for young people: tennis, mini-golf, horse riding, and multiple sporting activities. broken down into:
- here, there are numerous leisure activities for young people broken down into individual words
- tennis, minigolf, horse riding, and multiple sporting activities broken down into: