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Gary’s TAC 2013 - PAX | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5199 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 65 of 160 20 May 2013 at 12:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I didn't get as much done last week; with all my recent progress I've been feeling a bit burnt out on languages, and it was an otherwise busy week. I've kept up with Anki, spoke a little French and Italian at the weekend, and watched a bit of TV and film. I've done very little pronunciation work, and it shows.
I saw a few more Les Revenants episodes in French, and for Italian, Parlami d'amore, almost two hours of pure self-indulgent style-over-substance implausible rubbish that only the unintended entertainment value got me through. I also saw Gomorrah recently; I'm not sure if it should count as an Italian film because it's 90% in Napolitano. I watched it with Italian subtitles, just like most Italians did. Out of curiosity after the film, I saw a documentary about the infamous suburb where it's set, L'altra Scampia. Some good Naples accents in there. Overdue update: Italian Super Challenge Films: 72.5 done, 37.5 to go. Conversation hours: 100 done. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5199 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 66 of 160 27 May 2013 at 12:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Busy week yet again - this month is killing me. I think the weekend was the peak of the party/music season and things might start to calm down a little bit from now on. In terms of language learning ups and downs, I'm decidedly on a down at the moment, but I knew that was going to happen - I've now reached the point where I can predict them quite accurately. I seemed to make a pretty impressive amount of progress last month, and what goes up must come down.
French meetup on Wednesday. My fluency and accent seemed to be at the higher end of their ranges, but my vocabulary at the lower end and I was having trouble expressing myself outside of familiar territory. One data point, doesn't mean much. At the weekend I went to a party with an international group of people; more Spanish than any other nationality of course. My passive understanding of Spanish is decidedly improving, from a mixture of exposure and Italian knowledge. I even managed to join in a conversation about family - really simple "first high school lesson" type stuff like "my mother is Scottish" and "I have a brother", but still, for a language that I've never studied it's something, and I don't think my accent was bad - I'll put that down to exposure again, as well as developing my ear with my recent prosody exercises. And more interestingly, it just felt natural - the people around me were speaking Spanish, so I joined in in Spanish. I wasn't thinking "maybe I should try and say something in Spanish" or anything like that, it just sort of happened. It's at times like these that I sometimes wish I had stuck to my original plan from three years ago of French then Spanish then Italian, before that holiday to Italy made me change my mind. But no regrets, I love Italian as much as ever and I'm now quite confident that I'll be able to reach a conversational level in Spanish relatively quickly whenever the time does come. I was thinking about my language learning experience so far - I did underestimate the time that it would take to learn Italian, but all the same, I'd say that so far I've learnt it about twice as quickly as I learnt French. Specifically: a few weeks to start understanding a significant portion of what my Italian friends were saying to each other; around four months to be able to converse; and if my current predictions turn out to be accurate, two years to be able to converse well. So if I extrapolate for Spanish, I should be understanding conversations after a week or two (I already have a decent understanding as I said, but working through something like Michel Thomas would definitely close a lot of gaps), having them after a couple of months, and be good at them in a year. That might be overly optimistic though - after all, I thought I'd be good at Italian after a year, and even my updated estimate of two years is just that, an estimate. So take this with as much of a pinch of salt as any future prediction. My main point is that, regardless of the order that I chose for Spanish and Italian, I should be awesome at both in a few years' time ;). And in terms of finding native speakers to practice with... after French and Italian, well, I'm sure there's a saying that you don't appreciate having it easy unless you've gone through struggle. Anyway back to reality instead of getting ahead of myself: I did speak some Italian at the weekend, and I felt like I was able to say what I wanted but I was pausing and hesitating even more than usual. Like the connection to the Italian part of my brain was of a lower bandwidth than normal. I also bumped into a French guy from the meetup when I was out at the weekend, and my French was downright bad. He commented that my level seemed intermediate, which I admit was a bit of a blow for me since I like to think I'm relatively advanced by learner standards, but at that particular moment in time, my level was decidedly intermediate. Language competency isn't a point, it's a range, and a rather wide one at that. I think it's because I had had a reasonable amount to drink and I was starting to get tired; we all know that a bit of alcohol helps, but any more than a couple of beers and I find it starts to cancel out and then some. On a similar note, I also have it on good authority (ahem) that smoking certain substances absolutely kills certain people's foreign language ability. I remember when I was at the festival in France last year, where one starts drinking immediately upon waking up in the morning, I was finding the language unusually difficult. When you're drunk, it seems to be a case of "decent pronunciation, decent vocabulary, decent grammar: choose at most one." This year, I might drink a bit more moderately for the sake of my French, even if it means breaking with festival tradition. Dedication or what? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| pesahson Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5720 days ago 448 posts - 840 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: French, Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 67 of 160 27 May 2013 at 1:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I haven't seen that particular movie but I do agree with you in general. I do have hard time finding films in French that I would really like. For language purposes I have to settle for less I guess. I’ve seen Rust and Bone some time ago at cinema . I went to see it only because it was in French and I really liked it. I recommed it. It has the wonderful Marion Cotillard in it. If you haven’t seen it and would like to, try not to read too much about it before as not to spoil any surprises. The Belgian directors Jean- Pierrre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne are on my radar. I’ve heard very good things about them but haven’t yet seen any of their movies. Persepolis is very very good. I also enjoyed a film titled just Paris from 2008. Le chat du Rabbin seems interesting and I've heard good reviews of The Intouchables. Oh, and the movie Le scaphandre et le papillon was absolutely beautiful.
They’re not really sequels ;). It is a trilogy but the films aren’t connected. White which I think is my favorite, is mostly in Polish so it might not interest you that much, it’s still worth watching though. Red is in French and very good as well.
I’ve seen three episodes of Les Revenants so far. I like it. It’s slow paced which is not necessarily my thing but I like the fact that it’s an original series and not dubbed. Edited by pesahson on 27 May 2013 at 1:25pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5199 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 68 of 160 28 May 2013 at 2:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks for the interesting post on films. I've heard great things about Rust and Bone and Le scaphandre et le papillon but I haven't managed to watch them yet. I'll also put the others you've mentioned on my list. Although at the moment I already have plenty films to watch but little time to watch them...
I've seen six episodes of Les Revenants now and I like it a lot; it just took me a bit of time to get into it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4657 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 69 of 160 28 May 2013 at 4:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I liked that one, too. I love Fabrice Luchini! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5199 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 70 of 160 31 May 2013 at 11:59am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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The other day I ended up going to an English/Spanish meetup - don't worry, I haven't fallen prey to my Spanish-envy just yet, it was just because an Italian friend invited me to come along and I had heard that it's recently become more of an all-languages thing rather than just Spanish. It didn't turn out to be useful for me - there were a few French and Italian people but they were very much there to practise English or Spanish. But it was interesting in a "this is how the other half live" sort of way, in this case referring of course not to the rich but to those who chose Spanish.
In its favour, the meetup was friendly, there were some unbelievably hot women there (obviously not a good reason to learn Spanish on its own, but certainly a bonus!), it was in a bar with cheap beer that's less than five minutes walk from my flat, and there was even free food - a couple of hours after the start, big trays of sandwiches appeared from nowhere! On the negative side though, it was noisy and crowded to the point where latecomers couldn't get a seat, although I'm told that the numbers vary from week to week, and it's on Wednesday night, which is already the busiest evening for social life in my city. Overall, I won't be going back soon because it's not useful - I'm not learning Spanish yet and I really don't need yet more temptation to start, and I like to think my level in English is already just about satisfactory ;). The same Italian friend recommended the Fantozzi films to me. So far I've watched the first half of the first one and I'm enjoying it. It's a classic comedy about a frustrated middle-class man who gets into funny situations; it's typical 70s slapstick humour but it's well done. For French I'm trying to get back into doing regular Grammaire Progressive lessons. My plan was to finish it before my holiday to France, but that's now less than three weeks away and I still have half the book to go and not a whole lot of free time. My attempts to stay focused on French before the trip are failing because I have too much motivation, and recently opportunity, for Italian... For all people say about Italian being a "useless language", I'm definitely finding more uses for it in my life than French. That said though, even if French isn't too useful for me, I still immensely enjoy studying it for its own sake. But I'm pragmatic at heart and I need some purpose to keep up the motivation, especially when more useful things are competing for my time and effort. I pretty much expect that in a few years time French will be my least-used and weakest language. Which is a bit sad considering how much work I've put into it and that I feel like I'm finally starting to break into proper fluency. For that reason, I'm keen to reach as high a level as I can by the end of this year; after that point it'll probably go into back-burner/maintenance mode for the foreseeable future. If I'm around a low C1 by then, that'll probably be my "good enough" / diminishing returns point. Edited by garyb on 31 May 2013 at 12:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5199 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 71 of 160 05 June 2013 at 11:54am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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My plan of doing lots of work on French before my holiday still isn't working out very well. I had planned to do a lot at the weekend, but the weather was nice for once and friends were going out so I made the most of it. I was with a big group of mostly Spanish and Italian people, so I did get to speak some Italian, although they're of course pretty keen to speak English, and English is the lingua franca for these sort of groups so speaking too much Italian is a bit rude towards those who don't understand it. I did meet a French girl at one point and I managed to have a short chat with her, but she was busy so didn't stay around long.
Then there was the language café on Monday. I had a good French conversation with another enthusiastic learner, but apart from that it was the same problems as usual: too much English, and a group of people older than me having a conversation that didn't really interest me and I didn't have much to contribute to. But some of my Italian and Spanish friends were there again so I mostly spoke to them. So yet again more Italian than French. In both French conversations, I felt like I was mostly expressing myself as well as ever, but my pronunciation wasn't good. I've not had the time for much pronunciation work recently or even done a whole lot of listening. It's now two weeks until I go to France, so I think it's time to focus on the important things, i.e., conversation. Ideally that would of course mean conversing lots, but realistically I think it'll be more self-talk, pronunciation work, and TV/film that has a lot of everyday conversation, and less news/academic language and grammar study. At this stage it's probably more important to practice expressing myself than to try to perfect my grammar and vocabulary, so I think I'm abandoning the idea of finishing Grammaire Progressive and leaving it until after the holiday. Not that it's going to make a big difference anyway, it's only two weeks, and at that, two very busy ones in which I'll struggle to get in much French work of any sort. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| pesahson Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5720 days ago 448 posts - 840 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: French, Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 72 of 160 06 June 2013 at 11:43am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm jealous of your holidays in France. Especially of having the chance to stuck up on books. The last time I was in France, my French wasn't that good and I didn't think it would get better any time soon, so I didn't buy any books. Too bad.
Which part of France are you going to? Have you finished watching Les Revenants? I've seen the last episode last night. I wish there were more answers to many many questions I have. It seems like to whole season was just a build up to a climax we had in the series finale. I know there will be a second series, I'll probably watch it if I'll have the chance, but still, it left me a bit disappointed. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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