"How to" Digital Distribution: Understand French Like a Native

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French native Angelique Glennon came to the U.S. several years ago already fluent in English. The only problem was that she was fluent in what she calls "school knowledge" English.

Watching American television, she thought American newscasters were very rude because they kept saying "asshole." Finally Angelique realized the newscasters were saying "hassle." But because the "h" is not pronounced in French her ear was not attuned to hearing the "h" at the front of the word "hassle."

While teaching basic French to Americans, Angelique set out to find a program that would teach English-speakers who were advanced beginners in French how to understand everyday French spoken in France, which is not the "school knowledge" French learned in American schools.

When Angelique discovered there was no such program, she created one herself and taught it to her students in Los Angeles. But Angelique wanted to bring her program to a wider audience.

Then Angelique met me through a women's networking group. Although I had been a mediocre high school and college French student, I love the language. What is more, I thought Angelique's program extremely innovative.

The result is that Miller Mosaic collaborated with Angelique to create a digital delivery system for her unique program.



Our brainstorming took some time and eventually produced this working arrangement:

Angelique would write the examples in English, French and a phonetic system. Then Angelique and I would go over these examples and explanations to ensure that what she meant in English was what English-speakers could understand.

(There are concepts in the French language that are not easily translatable to English language concepts. We had to find a bridge over these differences.)

I also created separate modules of the material and practiced with Angelique her English pronunciation of the explanations.

Then Yael recorded Angelique for the separate modules. We did have microphone issues so there were re-recordings and much editing on Yael's part.

(Yael used Gotowebinar plus Camtasia Studio to create these digital recordings.)

Next Yael put the edited modules on our Miller Mosaic Amazon S3 account (the modules live in the cloud so the downloads do not slow down our MillerMosaicLLC.com website, where we put the information for this French language program).

Meanwhile, together Yael and I created on our website a differently formatted page for "Understand French Like a Native" and redirected the URL www.UnderstandFrenchLikeANative.com to that page. We also made sample recordings of the program and a recording of Angelique talking about the program that we added to this website page.

We set up our shopping cart vendor to automatically take credit card payment for the program (we have a 30-day money-back guarantee) with an introductory price.



When people buy the program, they have 24/7 access to all the modules. They can watch the videos online or they can download both the audio part of the videos as MP3s and the written part of the videos as handouts.

In conclusion, while now the "Understand French Like a Native" digital program is very professional, there was much trial and error until we got all the digital pieces to work well together.

(c) 2012 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter and @ZimblerMiller on Pinterest) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the co-founder of the WBENC certified online marketing company www.MillerMosaicLLC.com, which has just launched the innovative online program www.UnderstandFrenchLikeANative.com