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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| 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 241 of 336 07 March 2014 at 8:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
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French
I had my French lesson the other day. We worked on a listening comprehension exercise which was GREAT! It's really good to work on listening comprehension with a teacher because once you get to a high level where your general comprehension is good enough that you don't even notice what you don't understand, it can be hard to work on on your own. She got the material off of the TV5 Monde "Enseigner le Français" site. From there you can go straight to "A Télécharger" then sort the lessons/documents by level. She had me work on this one (will turn into a clickable link later): http://enseigner.tv5monde.com/fle/les-banques-cooperatives-e ntretien-avec-bernard-bayot It has to do with banking, which is already a difficult subject. There were definitely a couple questions where I knew while watching that I wasn't comprehending at 100% especially when they had to do with the history of regulations and the political response to the 2008 crisis. Also, the fact that I lacked some knowledge of the banking structure of Europe, Belgium, and France and some of the business regulations meant that it was harder for me to respond. This was not a "Banking 101" interview so lack of background knowledge can interfere with comprehension. She had me watch it again with the transcript (provided with the documents on the site) and highlight anything I missed. There wasn't a lot overall, but the difficult portion I mentioned above definitely had some. It's really good to have a collection of audio documents and a method for improving listening comprehension! Irish I started the unit on past tense. I have to say that for regular verbs, the past tense is quite easy (and considering that practically nothing in this language comes easy, I'll take it!). But Irish never lets you off that easy. Past tense is really hard for the irregular verbs. Buíochas le Dia that there are only 11 of them. And actually, not all 11 are *that* irregular plus I've already worked quite a bit on "Bí" so it's not that bad. I'll have to do a lot of practice though. The unit content stays relatively simple plus the following unit on travel reviews past tense and a lot of the other previous content (I've already been previewing the audio). Now for the exciting part! After all the work with verbs starting with the imperative unit, reviewing the daily life unit, and now with past tense (and a bit of previewing of future tense) my comprehension rate of Aifric has skyrocketed! I'm talking something like a four-fold increase. And because all the verbs are coming through more clearly, I'm able to hear a lot more of the little words around them as well. I love it when listening comprehension boosts itself overnight like magic! I'm sure I'm due for other major upgrades when I work more on prepositional pronouns and on verbal nouns. 2 persons have 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 242 of 336 09 March 2014 at 3:48am | IP Logged | |||||
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So I just participated in a dictée at the Alliance Française. Participants were split into multiple groups: adults
were split into Francophiles, Francophones, and Francophones Pro (those who work as translators, writers, etc) while kids were split into age groups. We had a text specially-made for the event by someone who writes them for a living and it was filled with pièges and jeux de mots. After grading, I was tied for first in the Francophile category with nine mistakes but after being reviewed by the jury, the other person had one mistake taken away so I came in second. The top three of each category was placed in a drawing for three prizes: a three-month book rental gift certificate for the online French bookstore Les Petits Livres, a gift certificate for the European Bookstore in Oakland, and a round trip ticket between San Francisco and Paris. The three people who were picked in the drawing were a little girl from the poussins category (under 5 or 6 I think), an older boy, and yours truly. Guess what I won? That's right! The children's book rentals! The little girl won the plane ticket. No luck getting her to switch... And just for fun there was one mistake that I shouldn't have made but I did. It's hard catching them all because you start second-guessing everything. There were two things I was tempted to change at the last minute but didn't which ended up being right and one that I did change that I would have gotten wrong otherwise so that's good. But I should have caught this one (let's see if one of you can catch it): Mais comment peut-elle couper court à cette pratique quand ses copines se poilent si elle ne s'est pas épilée le maillot ? Edited by sctroyenne on 10 March 2014 at 6:33am 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 243 of 336 09 March 2014 at 8:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Spending a lazy post-Daylight Savings day watching In the Name of the Fada, comedian Des Bishop's quest to learn Irish. It's funny and very inspiring. For those of you not learning Irish, it's still good to watch because it shows how to get the most out of learning in an immersion environment and it shows what a difference it makes when you start learning a language because you want to.
In the Name of the Fada 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Mohave Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Mohave1 Joined 3999 days ago 291 posts - 444 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 244 of 336 09 March 2014 at 9:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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| 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 245 of 336 12 March 2014 at 5:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
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To anyone wondering what I spend so much time listening to in French, I'll share some
of the radio programs I listen to a lot: FRANCE CULTURE: Concordance des temps - an historical show La suite dans les idées - deep discussions of general topics of society, politics, etc Les enjeux internationaux - a short analysis of international politics and events L'économie en question - deep discussion of economic issues - this one is frequently too difficult due to the subject matter, lack of familiarity with what's being discussed, and general dry nature of the subjects FRANCE INTER: Service Public - a general interest show that discusses issues that effect French people everyday Si l'Amérique m'était contée - a show about the US from the French perspective. Really insteresting! Là-bas si j'y suis - a show by radio personality Daniel Mermet. The subjects are all over the place from exploring the attraction the French have to Dieudonné and investigating the Dassault vote-buying scandal to playing a recording of a woman going into labor and giving birth. He tends to be very anti-mondialiste, and he likes to present a lot of alternative views. He plays messages by callers at the beginning of his program which can sometimes be a little unhinged. Les petits bateaux - a show where experts in various subjects answer questions about the world submitted by children. It's not too simple for adult learners. Inter Activ - part of Patrick Cohen's show where he usually interviews someone in politics or otherwise newsworthy. La marche de l'histoire - another historical show. Lately they've done a few shows where they reconstruct parliamentary debates with the help of actors from the Comédie Française which have been pretty interesting. Le téléphone sonne - a call-in show that features a different theme (typically based on current events) with a panel of experts who debate. It's fun seeing what themes will end up being the most heated debates. So far the notion of selling prescription glasses in large stores like Carrefour was the most heated debate (even more than the proposal to sell pregnancy tests in large stores, which was discussed in the same show). Rendez-vous avec X - Stories about secret missions, the CIA, etc. Really fascinating! RFI: Accents d'Europe - various special-interest stories from around Europe. 2 persons have 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 246 of 336 12 March 2014 at 5:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thank you! 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 247 of 336 20 March 2014 at 5:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've still been going strong. By the end of last week I started feeling a bit of
burnout so I allowed myself a break to watch some Law and Order (in English) and to read a bit in English. Even so, I still got a few hours in on Saturday and there was a Language Hunters Irish session here that lasted a few hours on Sunday. Sunday/Monday, we found out that Duolingo plans to add Irish! It's thanks to the strong Irish language community that turned out for a Reddit poll that we'll have another great resource. I find that despite the challenges of learning a small, endangered language, the learning communities can be quite strong. Since I'll be adding Duolingo Irish when it becomes available, I went ahead and started to check it out in Spanish. So I'll actually have some Spanish study time recorded this month! I finished the Memrise Gaeilge gan Stró course. I've also created a set of interactive flashcards for myself to study the verbs, sentence structures, etc (interactive meaning that I have the different particles, the úrús and séimhiús, subject cards, adverb cards, etc). I still need to review the last two units in more detail and review the book as a whole (especially the dialogues and the talking heads) but other than that I'm ready to move on to the intermediate level. I had my French lesson yesterday. We practiced oral skills. She tested me by having me talk about three subjects: narrate something I did recently, talk about a topic in the news (the Malaysian plane disappearance), and present multiple arguments about a topic (Crimea). As expected, each one was more difficult than the last and it was good for finding my limits. For news subjects, it was immediately apparent the importance of having the precise vocabulary (especially in the case of the plane). Nonetheless, she said that I did well, especially with relations of time (use of plus-que-parfait), and that I'm good at argumentation and going deep into a subject. I think I'll try one of the suggestions in my "Finding Holes" thread and record myself speaking, write what I said, and then analyze how well I did. I'm planning on entering the Learning Challenge so I'm thinking of goals I can set for that. 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 248 of 336 27 March 2014 at 12:30am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think I've come up with my Learning Challenge list. I'm torn as to whether or not I
want to try the Super Challenge. It just seems to be so much of a commitment. But I've been searching around for good history bibliographies and found these: Histoire Globale (PDF) Bibliographie If I can get a good number of these cheaply/easily than I'd like to tackle the list but nonfiction can be trickier. This site looks really good as well. I may consider subscribing to get unlimited access to the archives (6 euros a month): Sciences Humaines Edited by sctroyenne on 27 March 2014 at 6:05am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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