Missing W in French language

[Icarwiz]

In the French language training keys, there is no W although this letter is used in French (e.g. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/browse/french-english/w/w) Moreover, it's consequently impossible to use Ws in custom texts, that's a pity.

I took a look at the code and it seems to me it should be included on line 15 of file packages/keybr-phonetic-model/lib/generate/languages.ts

But thank you for this great website ! Love it !

[Icarwiz]

Same problem with K https://www.collinsdictionary.com/browse/french-english/k/k

[L2on1]

WOW ! That's right ! I hadn't noticed that as I'm looking to add the 'à' and 'ù'. #97

[aradzie]

As I don't speak French, please forgive me if I ruined your language. That being said, I examined a few French texts and I noticed, that these letters, W and K, are super rare, and they appear in the words "imported" from other languages.

Right at this moment I am rebuilding the French word frequency list by scanning movie subtitles from the Open Subtitles database. Here are my observations about the list of 10000 most frequent French words.

The only words with the letter "W" are "whisky", "clowns", "sandwiches", "wagons", "interviewer".

There are a few more words with letter "K", such us "whisky", "kilos", "bunker", "saké", "baskets", "cocktails", "ketchup", "karma", "bikini", etc. There are a couple of dozens such words, most of them borrowed from the English language.

So these two letters appear in a tiny, tiny fraction of all words. That is not enough to build a phonetic model, we need more diversity.

However, I agree that if these letters present on the keyboard, there must be a way to practice them. Maybe we should just add a hundred of most frequent English words with these letters to the list of French words?

[L2on1]

Obviously these letters k and w are not the most used and particularly the w.

I've added French words with k and w in my fork. I have used a French dictionary and my knowledge. Actually, I've missed some of them like "baskets", "sandwich", "bunker", "clown", etc...

I don't know how many words I should add.

The thing is : we want to write with AZERTY, and if Keybr doesn't teach us some letters, this is a shame.

I use Keybr to learn to use my keyboard and where the letters are. In French, we often use many imported English words like "Show", "Sneakers", "chewing-gum", "sweat", obviously "week-end", and so on. Additionally, we use k for a lot of slang expressions. This is a whole linguistic domain, and there are also debates with Québec, for example, where English "imported" words are changed, transforming "stop" to "arrêt" on road signs, for example. And these letters are used in science.

Add a hundred of most frequent English words with these letters and add french word may be a solution. I don't know how works phonetic models.

[aradzie]

By the way, French is not the only one language with such a property, that some Latin alphabet letters are not used or used very infrequently.

For example, there is no letter 'z' in Swedish, no letter 'q' in Czech, Polish and Slovak, no 'w' in Spanish, etc.

I am wondering whether there should be a consistent solution for these letters across all languages.

[Icarwiz]

@aradzie You haven't "ruined my language" 😆. I agree with everything that was said before by you and @L2on1 It's true K and W are quite rare in French, 10 points each when you play Scrabble is a sign...

But still they are used everyday, most of the "English words" you quoted are considered perfect French : "clown" or "chewing-gum" have absolutely no "Frenchier" form. I actually just realised clown came from English... And except in Quebec, "week-end" is the only word to designate the best days of the week, so... 😄 France and England History have been intimately bound for a thousand years, so yeah, many words have crossed the language borders... Same on the other side : there is a huge number of words in English that are "French"...

If I can help to find words, just tell me, I'm sure I'll find some more. Thanks again for this website !

[L2on1]

Something I do now is training in US language. It allows training letters w and k and also English words as I use English it every day.