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Gary’s TAC 2013 - PAX | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5202 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 57 of 160 25 April 2013 at 7:02pm | IP Logged | ||
Bon courage, Garyb! You've been working steadily at this - I'm sure it'll get back on track once you catch up on your sleep. Re. the advanced speaker's questions: I don't know if you're familiar with "How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately", by Boris Shekhtman? Shekhtman suggests a number of strategies which may help, one of which is developing "conversational islands": small safe havens of topics for which you've developed a repertoire of things you want to say, e.g. about your work, reasons why you want to learn X language, and the like; another is that of deflection - moving the conversation back to areas you're more confident in. Splog had a good post on it #13, and also a briefer mention on the previous page. I myself have a copy of the book, based on his (and others') recommendation. Well worth it. Some of the advice may sound obvious in retrospect, but that's only in retrospect. Lots of useful, concrete strategies, sensibly presented, and backed by years of actual success in teaching. (Of course, knowing the advice and applying it are two different things - I'm still working on the latter...) Updated to add a link to the new edition from Amazon UK. http://tinyurl.com/shekhtman2013uk Edited by songlines on 25 April 2013 at 7:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5200 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 58 of 160 26 April 2013 at 11:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the encouragement, Songlines!
I do actually have that book: I picked up a copy after reading about it in the thread you linked to, as it sounded very useful to me. Some great ideas in there, but I've also not been very good at actually implementing them! I seem to have a bit of a pattern of this in my studies: I discover something that sounds great, get a bunch of enthusiasm for it, yet never really follow through with it. For example I've raved about self-talk a few times in my log yet I've been very inconsistent about actually doing it. I'll definitely read the book again at some point soon and try to come up with some "islands" based on the things I find myself talking about a lot. It's a good philosophy overall, of playing to your strengths as much as you can when you converse. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5200 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 59 of 160 29 April 2013 at 1:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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I had a bit of free time at the weekend so I managed to do some of the prosody training stuff that I've been talking about. I combined it with some "phonetic analysis" as described by Luca, a method that has the same goals, and I think they complement each other - I did the phonetic analysis for each sentence while listening to it on repeat.
The method in itself isn't really anything magical, it's just focused listening and repeating while trying to give yourself feedback, with the idea being that if you do it enough times it starts to work. The big question is of course whether the results will make their way into my spontaneous speech. I did record myself saying a few spontaneous sentences after having done a couple of half-hour sessions, and I was quite impressed: my accent seemed a lot more... French than usual. But obviously there's a big difference between that and an actual conversation that's not immediately after a "training session". I should be going to the Language Café this evening so I'll see, but of course it's early days yet, I'll see how it is after a month or two of this training. Films: in French I watched the first half of Les petits mouchoirs, a comedy/drama. It really doesn't seem like the most interesting film ever, but it's got enough good colloquial language to just about keep me watching. I'm just accepting that the whole comedy/drama thing isn't French cinema's strong point; the Italians do it much better. In Italian I watched Gli amici del bar Margherita, a nice film about a group of regulars at a bar in Bologna. That's the only Italian city I've actually been to, and most of the Italians I've met have been from around Emilia-Romagna, so it's nice seeing it and hearing the accent on film. Italian Super Challenge Films: 68 done, 32 to go. - Over two thirds done now! Conversation hours: 100 done. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5200 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 60 of 160 30 April 2013 at 2:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't usually do two updates in two days, but last night was too interesting not to.
First stop: Language café. I joined the French group as usual, but after having enough of the combination of the language being murdered and English conversations about things I don't know anything about and have little interest in, I went to chat with an Italian couple who I've met a couple of times before. After that I went back and got a bit more French in. For pronunciation, there was the usual effect of it getting worse as the environment got noisier and of it being decent only if I paid attention to it. I do think there were some slight improvements but still a long way to go as I suspected. Next stop: Italian meetup. It was strange: half the time I was speaking very fluently, more so than ever, but the other half of the time I was struggling and making some pretty basic mistakes. At one point I was telling an anecdote about a friend getting in trouble with the police a few weeks ago and I was pretty much going on autopilot, then at an important point of the story I got a verb form completely wrong ("we arrived" instead of "they arrived"), and realising it totally interrupted my flow. I suppose that's better than not realising I had made the mistake of course. I also messed up some gender and number agreement of adjectives - another thing that is far harder when speaking Italian than French. People complain about the differences between spoken and written French and how so many things are written differently but pronounced the same, but for someone whose main interest is speaking, this simplification of the spoken language is a blessing rather than a curse. It does feel a bit embarrassing making these sorts of mistakes in front of a group of several native or very fluent speakers, but the embarrassment only lasts a second or two and you have to make mistakes to learn as we all know. I'm very grateful that these people have the patience to help me learn by letting me speak and listening to me, especially since Italians are infamous for being very talkative and always interrupting people. Songlines, you were right: after having caught up on sleep I seem to be right back on form again :). Mistakes aside, my Italian seems to be going pretty well despite a big lack of practice recently. I'm starting to come around more and more to the idea that lots of input can improve output, something that I used to think was nonsense. The films seem to be helping a lot, although I think the mistakes are a symptom of not enough speaking practice. The obvious conclusion is that you need a healthy amount of both, which I doubt will be a surprise to anyone. I do think I'll need to do some work on my Italian accent at some point, but for now it's not a big priority; I want to do a proper trial of the French "accent addition" for a couple of months, and if the results are good I'll do it for Italian too. Also it's less than two months until I go to France, so I should really focus on French for the moment. I'll try to get through as much of Grammaire Progressive as I can before then, and watch a bunch of films. Alter Ego is definitely going to have to wait until afterwards though. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5200 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 61 of 160 03 May 2013 at 2:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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I spoke French for a good three hours last night, and I'd say that, by any but the most perfectionist standards, I did so pretty fluently. Yes, I made some mistakes, overused some expressions and didn't always use the best possible one for each situation, and had to stop and think a couple of times, but overall these are minor points. Unless of course you consider the enormous amount of work it would take me to get to no hesitation or mistakes and always knowing just the right expression, but diminishing returns and all!
If I can just keep that level up, and continue to improve my accent, I'll be in good shape for my trip to France. Of course, we all know by now that language learning doesn't work like that, and yesterday was simply an unusually good day for my French. And also, just because a conversation is long doesn't mean it's difficult. But the fact that I'm capable of speaking like that even sometimes is reassuring: as one progresses, what was a good day eventually becomes an average day. 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 62 of 160 03 May 2013 at 7:22pm | IP Logged | ||
This is a really insightful observation, and it definitely mirrors my own experience. For me, the great challenge is escaping all my regular topics: parenting, personal biographies and language learning, and turning the topic towards, say, what's good about certain books, or why feature X would cost a client $Y. If everything lines up in my favor, I can fake C1. If everything lines up against me, even B2 can be a real challenge some days. Part of advancing beyond the basics is simply accepting this roller-coaster ride. I wish you great progress for your trip to France! But given your overall level, I don't expect that you'll have any problems. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5200 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 63 of 160 07 May 2013 at 1:47pm | IP Logged | ||
Thanks! I agree about regular topics: personally most of my conversations are at meetups or in exchanges that never last beyond one or two sessions, so it's a lot of small-talk and "getting to know you" type conversation, and it becomes more difficult when things go beyond the surface. I've found "describe the event/situation/story and give your thoughts on it" sort of self-talk exercises to be helpful, as they force you to go deeper, and obviously doing that sort of thing with an exchange partner or tutor would be even better. But there's too many variables in each situation, regarding where the conversation goes and whether you're having a good day. I had a lot of free time at the weekend so I got some good work and practice done. I went to the University meetup (yes, the one I said I probably wouldn't go back to; you know how these things go!) and spoke a lot of French. As expected, my level wasn't quite as high as it was for that unusually good conversation last week, but it was still decent. I also got a compliment on my accent, but it was from another learner so I didn't really take it seriously - I do think it's improving, but there's still a long way to go. I also talked to a couple of Italian guys, but since it was straight after two hours of French, it was difficult to shift gears: I made a few embarrassingly basic mistakes and one of them even said my accent in Italian sounded French. Still, it was practice. Out of a combination of free time, impatience, and good results so far for French, I started doing a bit of prosody work for Italian earlier than planned. The post and video on Luca's blog that I linked to a couple of posts ago is a great start for understanding Italian prosody and what to listen for. As well as for prosody, it's good practice for getting some of the trickier individual sounds correct in the context of a phrase; for me that's the rolled R in certain places, open versus closed E and O, and the /u/ which I often pronounce more like an English /u/ than an Italian one - a bad habit, but one that, unlike in French, doesn't impede understanding so you can get away with it. I think I've said already that I'm gaining more of an awareness of my own accent, of when it's good and when it's bad. I was speaking more Italian last night, and there were good moments but also moments where I realised that I had pronounced a word or phrase in such a Scottish-accented way that it annoyed me. That awareness is a good thing - I think it was Arekkusu who's written a few times about how a key to good self-teaching is being able to effectively give yourself feedback; I'm starting to see what he means. Also a bit of film and TV: Nosferatu a Venezia (dodgy 80s vampire movie; I can't highly recommend it, but the Italian they speak is impeccable and it has some so-bad-it's-good moments), the start of La nostra vita (modern drama; so far good but sad), and the first episode Les revenants (supernatural-themed series; strange and not exactly my cup of tea, but it's a real French series as opposed to a dubbed American one, it has very accurate French subtitles which is a big plus even though so far it's been easy to understand without them, and the music is by Mogwai). Recently I've been meeting and even making friends with more and more native speakers and keen learners of both my languages, which is amazing. I'm not sure if it's my social skills finally getting better or it's just being in the right places at the right times. Between that and my accent and general improvement recently, things all are coming together nicely, so I'll just hope it continues! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5200 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 64 of 160 14 May 2013 at 11:43am | IP Logged | ||
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Loads of practice in the last week...
- French meetup. I was a bit tired so I wasn't speaking amazingly well. Tiredness is definitely one of the biggest factors that determines my language ability on a given day. All the more reason to get plenty sleep! - University meetup on Saturday. At my side of the table there were two French guys who were a great laugh, but also a couple of people whose levels were relatively low so the guys had to explain all the expressions and jokes. From a selfish point of view I'd have preferred a full-speed conversation, but that obviously would have excluded the others, who were enthusiastic and there to learn. I remember how hard it was for me to join the conversation when I first started going to meetups, so it's great to see other people being given a chance. At the other side, people were having a serious conversation about politics and economics, which I really wasn't in the mood for at the time. I also saw a few of the Italian people I've met recently there, so I had a chat with them. Good move, as they were planning to go out for a drink later and they invited me. - I took up the offer. It was a big group of Spanish and Italian people; we mostly spoke English (I find it interesting that Spanish and Italian people here generally talk to each other in English, even though their languages are so much closer to each other) but there was a good bit of Italian too. - After that, I went to another bar to join some friends who were out for a birthday. Just when I thought my language practice for the day was over, I bumped into another Italian friend there and chatted with him for a bit. The next day, I had a very well-earned break from languages and spent a bunch of time on music. - Language café last night. It was particularly busy and noisy - another huge determining factor on ability for me; I was talking to a French woman next to me and really struggling to hear her. I think she had a bit of a strange accent, which didn't help, but the main problem was simply the noise level. Then I saw some of the Italians again at another table where things were quieter and I talked to them. I said I wanted to focus on French for the moment, but Italian opportunities keep coming up so in reality I'm practising that a lot more. I'm enjoying the fact that my Italian practice is almost entirely with native speakers, which is a luxury that I've never been able to enjoy for French. I hear so much incorrect French these days that I feel like I need to do a ton of listening to native materials just to balance it out, whereas all the Italian I hear, apart from my own of course, is of native quality. I'm definitely seeing improvement in my Italian, although there are still more little mistakes and hesitation than I'd like. I reckon that if I keep going I should be doing pretty well by the end of this year. I'm not sure if I'm quite into B2 territory yet; my conversational knowledge is good but I've done very little reading and writing and nothing particularly "academic" - I'm yet to even finish one book. No real surprise since my learning up until now has been very geared towards conversation and that's been my real goal all along. I suppose I'd say that French is my "serious" language that I want to attain a high general level in, while in Italian I mostly just want to be able to chat to people well. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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