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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| 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 697 of 1317 30 September 2013 at 5:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I once read through an ex-gf's French biochemistry notes. Those were fun to puzzle out,
haha... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5158 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 698 of 1317 30 September 2013 at 11:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I see we have something else than French in common, emk! I usually can't stand studying
languages hardly during the day if I haven't been to the gym in the morning. I just feel sleepy and tired for nor reason. I don't have a special method though, I'm mostly concerned about keeping good health, I tend to gain muscle and lose it next because I can't eat properly to sustain the new mass, but somehow I still make small but noticeable progress in the long run, and I just like the idea of keeping my body alive. I believe it is all about discipline and I like being disciplined, usually doing things that make me learn and grow as a person and only staying idle once in a while, instead of doing the other way round. 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 699 of 1317 01 October 2013 at 4:57am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Good to hear about your wellness projects. I've been trying to add in some healthy
habits myself but not succeeding very much. I got resistance bands as they're a cheap, convenient alternative to weights or a gym membership, especially if I intend on potentially moving again, but they require you to modify a lot of the basic exercises. I've also tried some meditation which I highly recommend. Before I was all for cramming every moment with mental exercising but I'm starting to realize that the whole machine just works better when you take care of it. Taking university classes in French was at once an ego boost when I realized how much I was able to keep up with and yet also brought me down to earth when I realized how behind my output skills were. Someone who passed the DALF C2 recommended Canal Académie to me saying that some of the topics came directly from materials he had studied on there. He also suggested concentrating study on editorials and opinion pieces over regular news articles. I'm still too lazy, though, to practice writing synthèses - I find my tolerance for that kind of stuff diminishes greatly the longer I'm out of school. 2 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 700 of 1317 01 October 2013 at 1:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I totally, completely and utterly despise French cursive writing. It's different from US cursive, and often almost illegible, until you reach a level where you could fill in every other word from context. And the French almost never print. Argh!
I was always pretty bad at self-discipline, which sounds weird coming from somebody who has done something every day in French for an unbroken 2150+ straight days. But all you really need is a decent roadmap, and the ability to stick to it for a month, and you'll see some nice improvements. That should give you enough faith for another month or two, at which point continuing is natural, and the gains are undeniable.
For those who want to get in shape without going to the gym, I'd also like to recommend You Are Your Own Gym (the book and the app). I paid $15 and now I'm learning all kinds of ways to get a "weight" workout in 35 minutes, anywhere. VoilaTV and Castle My beloved VoilaTV box was broken all month, and I was reluctant to call tech support, because I hate talking to strangers in French on noisy telephone connections. (Especially when they work for a US company, and they presumably speak English, because then I'm afraid they're going to switch on me, and I'm as egotistical and insecure as anyone else.) But I finally decided to suck it up and make the call. As expected, I could only understand 75% of what they were saying. It turns out that my box had somehow failed to upgrade itself, and that I needed to download a file, save it to a flash drive, and plug it into the VoilaTV box. So I did it, and everything worked, and nobody insisted on switching to English. (As I mentioned in another thread: Native speakers are far less likely to switch to English if you're carrying a book in your L2, or if you're buying a cable package in your L2, etc. At that point, they generally assume you know what you're doing.) Once the VoilaTV was working, I sat down with my wife and discovered that France 2 was showing recent Castle episodes! And despite a 6-week break from heavy French TV, I could still understand nearly all the dialog. The dubbing was quite good, too. So I warmly recommend Castle to anybody looking for a dubbed series of intermediate difficulty. 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 701 of 1317 01 October 2013 at 2:02pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I found them easy to read. Besides, it's a girl's handwriting, and girls tend to write with neat loopy handwriting. But our cursive writing is much like theirs (Dutch cursive writing, that is). But the bigger thing was that she was a med student and had to learn all this biochemical terminology (which I only know in Dutch or English), and then had to figure out similar experiments to what I'd done a few years prior (I have a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering, but there was some obligatory biochemistry and cell biology involved in year 1). So she was dealing with books and materials that I could have figured out, if only I had understood the relevant French vocabulary! Now she graduated from an international school, so she could translate, and technical terms are among the most transparent ones. But still, that's surprisingly difficult if you, like me, only had moderate school French as a background back then! Edited by tarvos on 01 October 2013 at 2:03pm 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 702 of 1317 01 October 2013 at 5:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
The kind of French handwriting that drives me nuts looks sort of like this: 
Except that this example is actually more readable than a lot of the stuff I see, from men and women alike. Oh, and one more notebook, this one on l'écart type (the standard deviation). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| 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 703 of 1317 01 October 2013 at 6:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Huh. What kind of handwriting would not drive you crazy? I fail to see the difference--but I think I learned to write cursive in Germany, so maybe it's less different for me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4631 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 704 of 1317 01 October 2013 at 6:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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emk, I am curious. Is American handwriting really very different from European? I hardly every communicate with people handwriting any more, so can't remember ever having seen an example written by an American.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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