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Raconteur’s Humble Beginnings | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| linguaholic_ch Triglot Groupie IndiaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5054 days ago 69 posts - 96 votes  Speaks: English, Hindi, Bengali Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, French | Message 9 of 27 06 April 2014 at 2:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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emk recommended me Essential French Grammar by Dover Publications. It is worth taking a look. I feel that Schaum is good, but there better ones out there like P &P Complete French Grammar and grammar books by CLE Internationale. But Schaum has good exercises. It should do the work. Anyways about.com will suffice for any deficiencies in French grammar. I will be following your log. Bonne Chance! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Raconteur Diglot Newbie Poland bit.ly/1eiSWnc Joined 3898 days ago 34 posts - 47 votes Speaks: Polish*, English | Message 10 of 27 06 April 2014 at 3:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Sunday Review
Everyone, thanks for words of advice and support. Trust me, your input is very much needed and appreciated over here! The remainder of April is panning out to be a very busy/stressful time for me. May is likely to be at least as bad as April, if not worse. Finding the time & motivation to study while juggling everything else will be a challenge, but I am determined to make it work! The good news – things should slow down again in June. I’m soooo looking forward to that! 
This week I’ve completed Week 1 of H3M. Most of it feels familiar (and too basic) but I’m going through it carefully nevertheless. I want to build a solid foundation; internalizing even the finer points. Other than that, I’ve listened to Assimil (L13) during the Friday commute, and watched an hour of FiA this weekend. I’m also watching the F24 news bulletin every day, although I am not sure if its not too early for this – I barely understand anything, and so it is all too easy to lose concentration. Overall, so far so good! Edited by Raconteur on 13 April 2014 at 12:35am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5538 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 27 06 April 2014 at 7:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
OK, this is just based on my personal experience, so please take it with a grain of salt. Basically, I find listening is good for two things: 1. Teaching my brain what sounds fit together with other sounds, and in what patterns. This is sort of like listening to a radio station that plays the same 150 songs constantly: Even if I don't pay attention, my brain will pick up a lot of patterns. This is useful, but only to a certain extent, and it works almost as well in the background. This is an excellent reason to leave the TV on when you're busy with other stuff, but a relatively poor reason to spend time staring at talking heads. 2. Actually helping me learn the language. This requires my full attention, and it works by taking "stuff that I can somehow figure out" and turning it into "stuff that's completely automatic" through sheer repetition. This, in turn makes it possible for me to figure out even more complicated stuff, and the process repeats. But for (2) to work, I actually need to be able to figure stuff out. If I'm lucky, I can figure stuff out using context and images, just like you presumably do now with French in Action videos. But it's also possible to figure stuff out using translations, outside knowledge, pantomime, or whatever. But my larger point is that if you listen to the TV news, and if you don't really understand anything, then you probably don't have enough "hooks" to make progress. If it's just talking heads blathering about a local election, you could listen to it forever and not learn anything, because there's no way to link words to meaning. In other words, if listening is working, it should feel like it's working—or at least you should understand a fair bit while your subconscious keeps puzzling stuff out so unobtrusively that it feels like you just understand it, even if you're never heard it before. Listening ideas So how can you link words and meaning? Well, here are a few things which might work better than straight-up TV news. If one of these sounds like it might be amusing, give it a try. :-) 1. apprendre.tv5monde.com. This site has lots of listening exercises for various levels. Alternatively, Le Journal en français facile comes with a transcript that you can use, even if they're sort of joking about the "facile" part—it's nearly as hard as any of RFI's regular broadcasts. 2. If you use Anki, and you're a fan of Amélie, try out this subs2srs deck. Every card has a picture from the movie, a short snippet of dialog, and the accompanying French and English subtitles. Just be sure to delete ruthlessly—aim for at least 90% deletion within the first few repetitions. Many cards will be too hard, too easy, boring, or just out of sync. Keep only the cards you can't bear to delete. 3. If you're a fan of music, check out this sappy love song about a chance encounter in the Paris metro. You can find the French lyrics here. You can find a semi-literal English translation here. And I'll give you a gloss of the refrain. Here, "M" means masculine, "PL" means plural, etc.
Another good place to look for music, as Serpent often points out, is Lyrics Training. The idea is that you try to fill in a few blanks as a song plays. Anyway, that's just a few random ways you might be able to get enough context to help bootstrap the listening process. If any of these ideas turn out to be pleasant or stress-relieving after a long day, then you're in luck. :-) But don't expect just staring at incomprehensible news to do much by itself. Edited by emk on 07 April 2014 at 4:28am 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Avid Learner Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4668 days ago 100 posts - 156 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: German | Message 12 of 27 08 April 2014 at 3:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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Raconteur, reading how stressful and busy you are with work, and how you haven't been able to relax while learning, to me it's not very surprising that you ended up giving up. ;) I would have, too, because I wouldn't need more pressure in my life. I hope you can develop a sense of pride for what you have learned each day, or revised and improved on, no matter how modest it might be when you are tired. :)
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| Raconteur Diglot Newbie Poland bit.ly/1eiSWnc Joined 3898 days ago 34 posts - 47 votes Speaks: Polish*, English | Message 13 of 27 09 April 2014 at 9:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Avid Learner, those are some very kind words, thanks. :)
Yeah, I need to stop beating myself up, and just keep going at whatever pace I am capable of. The circumstances are what they are. Even if I'm slow like a turtle, and need a lot of repetition to consolidate my gains, so what? Who cares? EMK, wow another very detailed guide - I'll definitely have to look thru all these sources you posted. I'm sure I will find something that fits my learning style and personal taste. The news, albeit hard to understand, are important to me mostly because the subject matter relates to work (and thus I usually know what is talked about even if I can't understand much). Also, the types of words/terms/phrases used on the news would be beneficial for me to know. Thanks team, Rac. Edited by Raconteur on 13 April 2014 at 12:35am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Raconteur Diglot Newbie Poland bit.ly/1eiSWnc Joined 3898 days ago 34 posts - 47 votes Speaks: Polish*, English | Message 14 of 27 09 April 2014 at 9:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Wednesday Update
Nothing much to report. Pages keep turning with H3M and Assimil. On Hugo I am halfway thru Week 2. Most of the stuff I am seeing so far is geared towards review & consolidation rather than acquisition of new information. I can see that the pace in this book is rather fast; I might have to slow down substantially once I start stumbling on previously uncharted linguistic territories. Assimil – I’m covering Lessons 12-15, with L14 being a non-audio grammar review. With Assimil I start w/ listening to the audio a few times, trying to see how much I can understand. Usually it isn’t much, is that normal? Once I look at the transcript in French, I can pick up more clues… and then I reference the English side to fill in the missing pieces (the parts I still can’t understand). Edited by Raconteur on 13 April 2014 at 12:34am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Raconteur Diglot Newbie Poland bit.ly/1eiSWnc Joined 3898 days ago 34 posts - 47 votes Speaks: Polish*, English | Message 15 of 27 10 April 2014 at 3:33am | IP Logged | |||||
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Some inspiration from Pablo Picasso:
You must always work not just within but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve. or as reinterpreted by Khatzu from AJATT: A twenty-minute walk that I do is better than the four-mile run that I don’t do. Less perfection, more persistence. That's what I need right now. Yep, yep. Edited by Raconteur on 13 April 2014 at 12:36am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Raconteur Diglot Newbie Poland bit.ly/1eiSWnc Joined 3898 days ago 34 posts - 47 votes Speaks: Polish*, English | Message 16 of 27 13 April 2014 at 12:27am | IP Logged | |||||
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Sunday Review
I happily acknowledge that this has been another good week! So far I haven’t missed a single day since I started, which is nice… however the real assessment of perseverance is still ahead of me. Right around the corner, actually! In the next two weeks I will be facing holidays, extensive travel, and a number of hard deadlines. Where and how will language learning fit into all of that, well, we shall see! Looking at my chart filling in so nicely, I am motivated to keep it going at all odds! 
Yesterday, I have finished revising Week 2 in H3M. To celebrate, I treated myself to a film in French, albeit with English subtitles (for now!). The film Renoir (2012) portrays the last years of the great impressionist painter during WWI. It takes place at a beautiful estate in the Côte d'Azur province, right on the Mediterranean. The cinematography is wonderful – you could watch this film with the sound turned off and still be fully captivated. The use of color and light is particularly striking, but then again, better keep the sound on or else you will miss on all that French practice! 
Today, I will continue to revise what I have learned so far using Anki, there are still a bunch of new cards from Week 2, and I want to get them into the rotation before I start on Week 3. Thankfully, this is still familiar territory, thus adding a bunch of cards in a couple of days is not as daunting as it would be later on. For this reason, I think I will soon switch to using 2 weeks to cover each H3M “week.” Continuing to cover 1 Hugo week per week would likely become overwhelming (and frustrating). Other than H3M/Anki I am continuing to dabble with Assimil, although I did not have too many commutes between Thursday and Sunday, and so I only covered one new lesson (lesson 16). Additionally, I revised a bit with lessons 10-13. To wrap up this edition of Sunday Review, here is a gem from the latest Assimil lesson: Le voyageur ouvre son sac... qui est plein de diamants. The traveller opens his bag... which is full of diamonds. -Ces diamants sont pour mes lapins, dit le voyageur. -These diamons are for my rabbits, says the traveller. -Pour vos lapins, vous dites? s'exclame le douanier. -For your rabbits, you say? exclaims the customs officer. -Parfaitement. -Exactly (perfectly)! Edited by Raconteur on 13 April 2014 at 12:33am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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