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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4680 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 801 of 1317 06 December 2013 at 6:04pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I'm sure it never goes away entirely--when I get sufficiently tired my English falls apart. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Ninibo Diglot Groupie Germany Joined 4008 days ago 88 posts - 116 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 802 of 1317 06 December 2013 at 7:33pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Thank you, I'll keep that in mind. I hope, that I can take a course in french on day, too. Reading is my strongest skill, so I got that covered at least; listening is harder. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5383 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 803 of 1317 06 December 2013 at 9:50pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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No shame in offering a free membership/premium membership split or in putting up a
donation link! There's a clear reason for making it paid rather than trying to monetize something that anyone can offer free with just a little coding knowledge.
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 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5524 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 804 of 1317 07 December 2013 at 12:27am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I think the lower limit does improve. I can't imagine my speaking dropping below B1 unless there was a serious medical emergency involved (shock and head blows can both do weird things). But that's because I've spent 5 years listening to my wife speak French to my kids, and almost two of those years speaking French on a daily basis myself. That "deep core" of my French may be a bit of a mess, but it's mine, even when suddenly awoken at 2am. It doesn't feel like play-acting, or performing a fancy skill—it's a part of me. The biggest problems arise when there's a mismatch between the French that I think should be available to me, and the actual French my brain is willing to produce. When this happens, I tend to try to say too much, too quickly and too idiomatically, instead of going for ruthless simplifications. One of the reasons I did fairly well on my B2 oral presentation and the accompanying Q&A session is that I had laboriously mapped the exact limits of my French for several weeks in advance, and I knew exactly when to push things and when to simplify unobtrusively. And I was at a very high level of activation. When I can get up to a high level of activation today, it's glorious. For example, if I sleep 8 hours per night for a few nights running, read 100 pages of a French novel, and have a long conversation with my wife, then speaking French is just amazing. I still make errors, but many fewer.
Ah, that's good news. Turning reading skills into listening skills is fun, because you've got an excuse to watch lots of TV series. And the French produce lots of good TV (for any taste, including the inexplicably weird).
Well, I also dislike the way that free tools are punished by success: When every additional user causes a small company to lose even more money, the software's going to get sold out to the first buyer with a checkbook, in sheer self-defense. This has happened to way too many small companies. In any case, I'm not trying to make money off of language-learning tools. My back-of-an-envelope financial analysis says the only way to make real money is to sell to novice language-learners, because they outnumber the intermediate and advanced students by a huge margin. And there's a huge gap between the tools I want to use myself, and those which would interest a novice language learner just starting their first language. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5524 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 805 of 1317 07 December 2013 at 12:28pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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My wife and I watched episode 2 of La legende de Korra yesterday night. At the end of episode, I was suddenly convinced that I had gotten happily lost in the story, and that I had understood every single word.
Looking back, I think I actually missed several lines of dialog, mostly from young children. Still, this is something of a milestone: it's not uncommon for me to understand 90% of a TV show (or 95+% if I've been following the series). But getting virtually everything is new. One of the things I love about Avatar and Korra is the combination of short episodes and excellent writing. Sitting down to an hour-long episode of Le trône de fer is a major commitment. But it's easy to say, "I'll just watch one episode. It's only 20-something minutes!" And then it's good, and I watch another episode, and another, and actually spend more time doing French TV than I would have with a longer series. Unfortunately, there are only 73 total episodes of the two series available in French right now, and it's possible to zoom through them at a ridiculous rate. But I do highly recommend the idea of an extremely entertaining series with short episodes. I also rewatched an episode of Bunny Maloney on the official YouTube channel, and I understood quite a bit more the second time through. This is an exceptionally hard show, particularly for the first few episodes, because it's a bunch of half-crazed rabbits written and voiced by native speakers, and because it's very fast and satirical. Still, every time the inexplicable "chicken cheerleaders" cut scene comes on, and I know they're about to launch the giant robot, I cheer a bit. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5524 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 806 of 1317 13 December 2013 at 9:31pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Also worth checking out: Un cas pour deux, the French dub of Ein Fall für zwei, a German series about a private detective. This is relatively easy to understand (much more so than, say, Engrenages) and the French voice acting is quite solid. So if you're looking for an easy detective show in French, it's worth a quick look.
On a study front, things are about to get a bit crazy: I'm busy with a big project for one my clients, which means I need to cut back a bit on Anki, and focus my efforts on my online statistics course in French. It's times like this I'm thankful I can watch French-language TV for fun. It's definitely one of the more agreeable ways to maintain my skills when I'm at risk of mental burnout from non-French activities. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4699 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 807 of 1317 13 December 2013 at 10:44pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
This sort of thing is also my experience. Edited by tarvos on 13 December 2013 at 11:28pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| corjine Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4012 days ago 55 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 808 of 1317 13 December 2013 at 11:03pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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EMK, I'm curious, did you read the Little Prince at all? And if so, what level were you
comfortable reading it? I'm reading it in Italian, but since I'm only at the A1/A2 level, I've been struggling through it. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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