A great tool to learn French in real time is mDic, wherein one can (after enabling the free English to French and the other way around dictionary) get instant translations only by selecting words. The only sad thing is that they are planning to move completely to KDELibs in the next releases, so the Gnome people will be losing out.
Anyways, I hope to have outgrown that need (or find a similar tool elsewhere). Besides, I recently discovered the digraphs in Vim. They help you write out the accented words with accent aigu , accent grave , cédille , tréma , and circumflex without even leaving the insert mode. The usage is simple:
:digraphs
will give you a complete list of all the combinations you can make (most are very obvious and have a mnemonic like quality, like many other things in vi), and using them is equally simple:
Ctrl-K <letter> <accent-letter>
in the text mode itself. For example:
Quite a handy thing to have and goes to show no matter how much one knows Vim, there always are more tricks hidden somewhere. :)