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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5525 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 65 of 1317 18 April 2012 at 5:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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sctroyenne: Thank you for the pointers to the Buffy transcripts! I think that I'm going
to go ahead and order that box set ASAP. When I was in Montreal, I managed to find the issue of Canard enchaîné that you've been reading. Even though a lot of it was way over my head, I've been following the election pretty closely, and I had enough context to get a few of the jokes. There's a cartoon with Sarkozy and Guéant, where Sarko says: "Guéant, vous avez réapprovisioné votre stock de salafists ? ...faut tenir jusqu'au 6 mai !" Ouch. A wee bit cynical about Sarko, there. Thank you very much for the recommendation! ... I'm getting better at news radio. Increasingly, I expect to understand 75% of a radio documentary or a discussion between two people with standard accents and good sound quality, even if I don't have much context. But if somebody dials in from a cellphone somewhere in Africa, then I'm happy with whatever I can get. ... I spoke this morning with a very professional French tutor whom I found through Verbal Planet. She spent about 50 minutes assessing my skills, entirely in French, and proposed a (very intensive) plan of attack on the DELF B2. She has a degree in FLE, lots of experience with DELF prep, and a professionally clean accent. Understandably, she's also fairly expensive. She's also the second DELF teacher to assess me at B1, which suggests that I'm only a little bit delusional in my self-assessment. But this does confirm that B1 is a pretty substantial level. I think that "conversational" really starts somewhere down around A2 for people who actively try to speak. When you think about it, trying to reach B2 or C1 as an adult is actually a pretty ambitious goal—you're trying to compress years of schooling, reading and casual conversation into about 1,000 hours of very intensive work. Kids get conversational very quickly, but nobody expects them to write high-school book reports or earn a GED at age 9. Under the right circumstances, adults learn much faster than kids. Native speakers get 20 years of round-the-clock practice before anybody expects them to sound like educated adults. ...and there's nothing like an accelerated DELF syllabus to make you really feel that in your gut. :-/ 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4681 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 66 of 1317 18 April 2012 at 6:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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My rough estimate had been that if you could reasonably put your reading and speaking at a solid B1 you meet the minimum HTLAL standards for Basic Fluency, and advanced fluency is somewhere around C2.
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| dbag Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5015 days ago 605 posts - 1046 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 67 of 1317 18 April 2012 at 8:33pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm really enjoying this log, as I think it offers a realistic perspective on just how
much work one Really needs to put in to reach a genuine B2, or even a B1. Those are actually pretty respectable levels, and I reckon a lot of adult learners give up before reaching them. I also think a lot of people grossly overestimate their own level. Must say, I'm very impressed with the hard work you've been putting in. What kind of suggestions did your teacher have to help you prepare for the exam? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5525 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 68 of 1317 18 April 2012 at 10:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thank you! But even if the road to B2 is long and occasionally exhausting, it's OK if some people only go part way. :-) Anybody who spends 20 to 60 minutes a day on Assimil for 6 months will have a hugely rewarding new skill, especially if they're studying a Romance language. As the linguist McWhorter put it, "You will be talking like, roughly, an unusually cosmopolitan three-year-old." If you can have fun speaking like a toddler, and infect others with your enthusiasm, then the world's your oyster.
That's a great question! Let me translate and summarize her lesson plan. First of all, oral comprehension is my responsibility. I get to spend hours listening to RFI, watching TV shows with a rewind button, and all that good stuff. She wants to spend one lesson per week on each of the other 3 skills, with lots of outside homework. She says this is a very intensive pace, and she only recommends it because I have ambitious goals. Here's her proposed schedule for next week:
Basically, this is the same stuff that I've been doing on LingQ and lang-8, but she's going to push me out of my comfort zone and point me firmly in the direction of the B2 syllabus. Depending on my consulting schedule, her assignments and lessons would probably make up 10–30% of my French study time. Normally, I'm a very self-directed learner. But B2 skills, pretty much by definition, include typical high school homework. Plus, I get to spend several hours a week discussing semi-abstract topics with a patient and helpful native speaker, one who could probably give elocution lessons to radio announcers. After a week or two, I imagine that we can mix things up and figure out how to integrate them better with my self-study. I'll definitely write more about what works and what doesn't. Edited by emk on 18 April 2012 at 10:25pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5525 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 69 of 1317 19 April 2012 at 2:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I don't think I dream in French.
But went to bed around 9pm last night, and I woke up at 12:30am, 2ish, and shortly after 4. Each time, I was half asleep, and my brain was chugging along at a mile a minute in French. There's some miraculous and stubborn machinery somewhere deep in my brain, and it's assembling and reassembling sentences as fast as it can. This isn't the first night when this has happened, either. Each and every one of us was a bloody amazing language learner, once upon a time. We all learned to speak our mother tongue better than Garry Kasparov plays chess. Sure, some of that language-learning machinery may have gotten rusty. Sure, we're trying to run it at 7,000 RPM because we're squashing years of full-time immersion into a thousand hours. But when we really need it, all that machinery is still there. We need to oil it, and fix it, and push it along, and maybe replace some parts that were broken when our brain started pruning neural connections around 5th grade. But once that machinery is up and running, it's amazing stuff, part of our human birthright—we learn languages. It's who we are. To change metaphors, learning a language is like tending a garden. We plant the seeds, cull the weeds, and stake the tomatoes. We make sure the plants get plenty of water and sun. But all our efforts, no matter how necessary, pale before the miracle of the plants themselves: Intricate chemical factories, with billions of parts, following ancient programs that even the wisest of us grasp but dimly. So give your brain a chance to do its stuff today. Listen. Read. Talk. 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5525 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 70 of 1317 22 April 2012 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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We drove down to the French Consulate yesterday so my wife could vote in the first
round. We had an usually high-speed conversation all the way there. I blame it on her coffee, and my attempt to keep up! When we walked into the voting room, we were speaking French (of course). My wife took the ballot, and I sat down in a chair with the kids. The very nice poll-worker looked over at me and asked, "Are you voting today, too?" Whoo! Apparently, my French is no longer an automatic giveaway. There was also an exit poll by a young woman who wanted to know how closely overseas voters were following the election. She interviewed my wife, and I followed the entire conversation without any problems. Some other conversations gave me trouble. I'm still very sensitive to unfamiliar accents. ... And now for an interesting exercise from VDM:
I like the way that sctroyenne defines interesting vocabulary in his log, so I'll go ahead and copy him. :-) un point route: A traffic update. un radar flashe: A radar is taking pictures, so that tickets could be mailed to drivers. une voiture banalisée: An unmarked police car. The ultra-short stories on VDM are often packed full of day-to-day vocabulary and useful cultural details, such as how French speed traps work. Plus, they make great SRS cards. Edited by emk on 22 April 2012 at 3:57pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5384 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 71 of 1317 22 April 2012 at 7:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Up until this year it would take me some time to get used to each individual speaker I encountered. Not
so much an accent thing but each person's style of talking - some would speak more out of the front of their mouths or even nasaly while others would speak from deep in their throats and it took me some time to get used to. Teenagers who mumble are still hard. Downloaded the vdm app so I can check it out whenever I'm bored. It's better than Twitter I find as people tend to refer a lot to various internet "memes" on Twitter (and in shorthand) which makes comprehension difficult. Oh and thanks - good to know someone appreciates my vocab work. I'm a she BTW :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5525 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 72 of 1317 24 April 2012 at 8:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Désolé ! Je ferais une plaisanterie sur les fautes de genre (qui me sont souvent un problème), mais je pense qu'elle serait un peu lourde. :-) Merci de m'avoir corrigé. ... My intensive French study has begun! Last week, I wrapped up some consulting projects, and I cut my hours back to half-time, or less, for the 50 days between now and the DELF exams. So basically I get to spend several days a week indulging shamelessly in French. It feels really great, in fact, despite the occasional case of brain-fry. On Sunday evening I worked on a DELF B2 reading exercise while my wife was watching Engrenages. I took about twice as long as I would on the real exam, but I scored 9 out of 14 points. My DELF tutor told me which answers were wrong, and I managed to go back raise my score to 12.5 out of 14 before checking a dictionary. Given that the minimum passing score is only 50% and that this was my first try, I may actually have a shot at this. Monday morning took a turn for the worse, thanks to a sudden muscle spam in my jaw. For the next 3 hours, I could barely swallow, and speaking was physically painful. I told this to my tutor, and she worked with me to adjust the lesson plan. And during our lesson, I learned two things: (1) Although my tutor is indeed very good at teaching French, it's her people skills that are right off the charts. (2) Even when I'm in physical pain, I can still function in French. This represents an unpleasant but important milestone. I spent the afternoon watching Engrenages with and without French subtitles, rewinding whenever the mood struck me. Sometimes it's OK to just soak in French and take it easy. This morning, I spent 30 minutes preparing a DELF oral presentation on violent television and its effects on children. This is way, way out of my linguistic comfort zone, but I managed to throw together some notes and talk about the subject extemporaneously for about 5 minutes, followed by a Q&A session with my tutor where she pushed me to defend my ideas. I actually survived this, somehow, and I didn't sound like a complete idiot. Once again, I'm not really at B2 yet, but I may stand a chance. Of course, when I'm pushed that far out of my comfort zone, I tend to use a lot of unfortunate anglicisms. We also did a pronunciation exercise, which involved reading from a passage. This actually went quite well, aside from the fact that I still don't have a real French R. I've been instructed to work on my R some every day. After that, I did a short linguistic exchange with a friendly guy that I found on SharedTalk. I've discovered that I prefer either minimal corrections, or corrections typed into Skype as I speak, because that allows me to reach a decent level of fluency (in the technical sense of speaking smoothly, despite the presence of errors). Given a choice between fluent speech with errors, or halting-but-correct speech, I'll take the former any day, on either side of the conversation. This afternoon, I'm going to find my book of French connector phrases, and make a zillion Anki cards. Or maybe I'll spend some more time on LingQ. You know, I'm really having a surprising amount of fun with this. Edited by emk on 27 April 2012 at 12:10am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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