439 messages over 55 pages: << Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 12 ... 54 55 Next >>
luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7208 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 89 of 439 02 December 2012 at 2:40pm | IP Logged |
I've been keeping up with writing out French without Toil lessons. Yesterday I did 32 and 33. I missed a day of because we had a visiter for a few days and that pre-empted some study time. I'm back on track, listening to 29-43 today.
In Using French, I've been keeping up the one lesson per day pace with some review or preview on either side of the lesson. Since I don't write out the lesson, it's less demanding time wise. I also have the oomfort of knowing I'll go through this course in more waves.
Back to the question of what to do when I have perhaps 3 hours of study time per day for 3 days, I'm once again considering a grand review of the Assimil courses. Long term I think that will be helpful, although it may be perhaps less "fun" than listen reading a short novel. We'll have to wait to see how this turns out.
Slept good last night. Over 10 hours, although I woke up about 4 times. My head is swimming in French and Esperanto when I wake up. That's a good sign.
Edited by luke on 02 December 2012 at 2:47pm
1 person has voted this message useful
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7208 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 90 of 439 05 December 2012 at 2:44am | IP Logged |
Okay, the time has arrived. My wife has left town and now we are in the thick of it. The French immersion. What have I decided to do?
Here it is. I'm doing a grand review of French Without Toil. What does that mean? Well, let me describe this evening's review, since this is the start of it all.
I have the mp3 player turned up plenty loud. I have the pdf of the book looking big on the screen. I'm speaking loudly in the house. There are plenty of hard surfaces; not much carpeting or things that would absorb sound. Good for shadowing, and that's what I'm doing, but not all.
Take a single lesson...
Set mp3 player to repeat the lesson.
Read along with the lesson, probably shadowing it because it is now quite familiar. I've heard it dozens of times. Then I ease off the volume on the player a bit to save my ears. I read the lesson notes and pay attention. Then I have a finger on the mp3player's stop button and read a line from the book while I hear it; I stop the audio; I look away from the book; then in a loud voice, I repeat the line. I move on to the next line.
I haven't timed how long each lesson takes, but since the audio for these is short and there aren't many notes, I probably spend about 5-10 minutes or so on the lesson review.
Tonight I did lessons 1-14. I plan to review these lessons tomorrow. That time I'll make a note of any exercises that aren't recorded or of any written exercises. Officially there aren't a lot of "written" exercises. Of course one can make them up easy enough, but that won't be part of this review.
Here's my review schedule:
Tuesday night lessons 1-14
Wednesday: Review 1-14 and do 15-28.
Thursday: Review 15-28 and do 29-42.
Friday: Review 29-42 (this is the day my wife returns).
So the review will fit perfectly. I also discovered in doing the pause the audio and repeat the line, that I may also be able to do that in the car. There is something additional in the memory and acting out of the dialogue that becomes part of the exercise this way. Shadowing is good too, but pause and repeat is a bit more challenging. Two different speaking exercises and I'll do them both. This review will set that up for me.
I had thought of doing a big review of Using French, using an approach much like the one above, but after doing 1 lesson I could see that that would be too much. I'm better off just doing my normal workload for Using French. It will get reviewed as I do lessons 71-140 in French Without Toil. It will also get reviewed during a jaunt through New French with Ease, so I don't have to worry about getting it all under my belt now. Perfection on the first time through is definitely not the Assimil way.
One other note. I looked at sonez les matines on images.google.com as mental support for a job well done. Actually, I was just trying to see what a matine was for sure. One can guess, but a picture is worth a thousand vocabulary items.
Edited by luke on 05 December 2012 at 3:45am
1 person has voted this message useful
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7208 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 91 of 439 06 December 2012 at 3:56am | IP Logged |
Today was a grueling day. In French Without Toil I did both lessons 36 and 37, since I was one lesson behind due to company this past week. There was the grand review of lesson 15-28, and the day 2 review of lessons 1-14. It seemed like it would only be 2 or 3 hours of study, but it really feels like it was a lot more. I guess there was also the normal track on Using French too, which ramped up the load.
So one lesson learned for me was that a 7 lesson grand review is plenty for any sort of multi-day schedule. I'd thought I could do 14 at one point, but now I imagine that to be a bit much. I did think that starting a 7 lesson review schedule by starting with lesson 7 might not be a bad idea, although I guess there are the forward references to the review lesson, so that may not be necessary.
I also had too much caffeine early on. I looked for some info on how to accelerate the clearing of caffeine out of one's system and tried something that worked. I ate about 5 cloves of crushed garlic with a big glass of water. I took about 4 grams of Ester-C for ascorbic acid, and a calcium supplement. I took a great nap maybe an hour or two later, so it seemed to work.
I have one more big review day like today tomorrow, although there will only be 1 "new" lesson. I am thinking about listen/reading Le Petit Prince tonight, since I'm not sleepy. That's 2 hours. We'll see where it goes.
Edited by luke on 06 December 2012 at 3:58am
1 person has voted this message useful
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7208 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 92 of 439 09 December 2012 at 2:18pm | IP Logged |
The big push a few days back perhaps took a toll. I've done well on the Using French track, where my standard is really to understand the current lesson and review and preview a few others. That only takes 20-30 minutes sprinkled throughout the day. It could be as little as 5-10 if I were busy and I wouldn't be too concerned.
I did listen/read through Le Petit Prince again. I did the first half late in the evening when I'd already studied a lot. I finished up the rest over the next few days, with the last few chapters this morning.
On the Without Toil track, where my standard is higher, what with writing out a lesson each day and of course moving forward a lesson per day, I've got off track. I have been reviewing earlier lessons and that is good. I haven't moved forward or written out a lesson in 2-3 days. I'm thinking of allowing myself a week or so here for review, consolidation, etc. It's more important how things go over a few months than over a few days.
1 person has voted this message useful
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7208 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 93 of 439 13 December 2012 at 1:35am | IP Logged |
I'm doing pretty good on the Using French track, which for me is the easier track although it is the advanced course. I listen and read in the bathroom several times a day. I'm on lesson 45 of 70 today so I'm into the 3rd CD.
On French Without Toil, I've come up with some resistance. Perhaps it's the writing of each lesson. I've written through lesson 38, but I haven't been progressing one lesson a day for more than a week it seems. Time to take another new approach...
I noticed in my reading that there are some instructions for writing out an exercise, but not necessarily for writing out the each and every lesson, although it's not a bad idea, it takes a lot of time and energy, which are in short supply at the moment. So, I'm shifting gears and won't be writing out each lesson, unless there are specific instructions to write something out. The active wave is about 3 weeks off, and I don't know what I'll do yet there. The book gives the nice little contradictory instruction of "adding five minutes to your daily study" to translate from English to French orally and in writing. I wonder if what others do in the active wave.
1 person has voted this message useful
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7208 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 94 of 439 15 December 2012 at 2:42am | IP Logged |
Eh bien, je pensais à renommer cette journey quelque chose comme, trois Assimil en même temps, mais j'ecoute Les liasons dangerouses et je me pense que je ne vais pas ajouter une autre méthode d'Assimil. Non, je pense qu'il serait mieux si je fait le Listen/Reading.
1 person has voted this message useful
| conroy Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5077 days ago 36 posts - 51 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French
| Message 95 of 439 15 December 2012 at 4:01pm | IP Logged |
Hello Luke. I've been enjoying reading your blog over the past few months and as you are delving into literarture I thought I'd pass on a recommendation.
Recently I've been L/R-ing Madame Bovary. There is an excellent free audiobook for it, a bi-lingual edition on Amazon (paragraph by paragraph so it works well on an e-reader) and a website called "Tailored Texts" has grammar/translation notes for the full text.
I'm enjoying it a lot and finding the translations very useful.
2 persons have voted this message useful
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7208 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 96 of 439 16 December 2012 at 3:18pm | IP Logged |
conroy wrote:
Hello Luke. I've been enjoying reading your blog over the past few months and as you are delving into literarture I thought I'd pass on a recommendation.
Recently I've been L/R-ing Madame Bovary. There is an excellent free audiobook for it, a bi-lingual edition on Amazon (paragraph by paragraph so it works well on an e-reader) and a website called "Tailored Texts" has grammar/translation notes for the full text.
I'm enjoying it a lot and finding the translations very useful. |
|
|
I've certainly heard of that book. Do you recommend it because it is fairly easy, or very interesting, or what?
I tried going to the site a couple of times, but it seems to just spin endlessly and never load the page. I thought I'd visited the site many months ago, but wss turned off by the requirement to setup an account to access any content. That could have been another site. Are you afiliated with the site?
On the French Front, I'm on lesson 49 of Using French and am reviewing the previous 7 lessons today.
With French Without Toil, I'm going through lessons 44-53, listening, reading, reading the notes of the more advanced lessons, etc.
I pulled the preface and first letter out of Les Liasons Dangerouses into seperate mp3s and listen/read them yesterday and this morning.
1 person has voted this message useful
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum - You cannot reply to topics in this forum - You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum - You cannot create polls in this forum - You cannot vote in polls in this forum
This page was generated in 0.9531 seconds.
DHTML Menu By Milonic JavaScript
|