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Yet another study schedule, comments? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| PeterMollenburg Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5467 days ago 821 posts - 1273 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: FrenchB1 | Message 33 of 46 31 December 2013 at 7:37am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Update:
Over the course of 2013 my average amount of study per day was 1hr and 15min. Over the course of my new '5 hour mission' my hours of study per week were as follows: Week 1: 26 hrs Week 2: 9.75 hrs Week 3: 3 hrs Week 4: 3.25 hrs Week 5: 10 hrs Week 6: 14 hrs Week 7: 5.5 hrs Week 8: BIG FAT ZERO hrs Week 9: 16 hrs Week 10: 9 hrs Week 11: 4.25 hrs 5 hour mission results: 1 hr & 20min per/day (5hours!!!??? nowhere near it!) So I bought a house, moved house and throw in Christmas and any other things... still i surely could've done better. Thus I say this is mission failure at this point. Had I made the 3 hour minimum I would've given it a 'pass' mark. Anyway 2014 tomorrow. I'm going to try again believe it or not, with some adjustments and renewed fervour (again I know, I know). This time I'll be taking on advice of almost everyone on this forum and be incorporating reading.... yes reading... of native French material!!! (well almost native... okay so native with translations down the side. Think French/Bien-dire and childrens books (all this has audio), once childrens books are done I move down my list into teen books, bilingual texts and finishing one day with 'normal' books for accomplished readers. My plan is as follows: Hour 1: continue with Assimil NFWE (great course!) Hour 2: Bien-dire (French language audio magazine with translations of difficult words- I will read all levels A1,A2,B1,B2,C1,C2 and beyond if there are any- not skipping any articles no matter the level of difficulty is the idea) Hour 3: French in Action (won't let this one go) Hour 4: Alternating between Think French (another French audio mag) and French ebooks (most with audio) beginning with childrens books and progressing Hour 5: Alernating between Fluenz French and FSI (one one day the other the next) One of my biggest issues I have found (aside from not reaching the time targets) is Flash cards. Every hour of study I take the first ten min to do flash card work (SRS) and then for the remaining 50 min whatever course etc i'm doing (ex FIA) I enter ALL words I am unfamiliar with into my flashcard deck as i come across them. Problem is many of the cards take 10 minutes to enter a single word!!! There is sooo much info associated with one word sometimes. Take the verb passer- how many ways can it be translated? It's frustrating. I'm trying ever so hard to teach myself to enter ONLY the basic definitions of words and stop getting caught up in the details, and then learn the details from context (reading, listening etc). In the end i'm not sure I like flashcards, but memory needs to be trained and with 5686 cards and counting i'm not keen to stop such a great collection that randomly throws words at me to commit to memory. Okay so i'm frustrating some of you ppl I know, i'm sorry, i might appear a bit stubborn and come across as a fool, but remember we share this in common, I, like you, love languages! Vive les langues etrangeres! Happy New Year people! Bonne annee ! PS I also attended another French language meetup. This time for advanced learners, believing I needed to throw myself in the deep end. To be honest it wasn't difficult at all. 98% of the French spoken to me by the other 'advanced' learners I understood no problem and found their accents to be a little too Australian for my liking. I guess that's where my perfectionism comes in. I make slow but as close to perfect as I can progress... of course i'm aware of the many draw backs with this approach, but one thing I won't do is NOT pay attention to authentic French prononciation and try every single time I speak to speak with an authentic accent. Anyway i'm soon getting internet set up at home (waiting for the company to phone) and then i'll look into language exchange/skype something of the sorts.... bla bla bla, hope everyone is well out there! Edited by PeterMollenburg on 31 December 2013 at 7:46am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7196 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 34 of 46 31 December 2013 at 8:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I would suggest giving each task 5-20 minutes on the days you do them, instead of an hour. If any of them are a drag at all, drop them. You'll probably get more done by limiting your time and focus.
Hint 1: Drop the flash cards. They are crap for you. Hint 2: Ignore reading above B1 (and possibly even B1). Edited by luke on 31 December 2013 at 8:36am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| PeterMollenburg Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5467 days ago 821 posts - 1273 votes Speaks: English* Studies: FrenchB1 | Message 35 of 46 31 December 2013 at 9:00am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I appreciate the response Luke. However 5-20 min per course/session/task won't do it for me. It might work for others but my style is to focus 100% on new material in order to absorb it. Rushing over things or going faster to cram the same amount in just won't do it for me. It will make me feel out of sorts as much as a person with OCD is told they can no longer do what it is they 'need' to do. For some it will work wonders, just not for me, at least not right now, although I do understand what you mean. I know a month or so of reading things that make only 80% sense for some works, whereby they eventually suddenly understand the meaning of these once unknown words. I need to analyse. It's my nature always has been to be very analytical, through that slow steady way I learn. As for dropping the FC's... that's something i'm certainly considering but still unsure on. And for not reading above B1 you may have a point (it may include too many words I don't know), but most posters prior to yourself underlined that I wasn't challenging myself enough, so I'll wait to see what others may say before making a decision on that one. So points taken Luke, advice very welcome, and I will consider this advice but i may or may not go with all or none of it. Hope you have a great new year! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7196 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 36 of 46 31 December 2013 at 4:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I understand OCD. My advice is based on my experiences. For me, lofty plans have to be revised based on my track record. That's why I've lowered the bar for myself at certain points. It has made it easier to make progress and avoid procrastination. I was just thinking you need a simple plan you can stick to, feel good about, and tweak only when you find something not working.
On the reading level stuff, my other thought was to pick a level, perhaps one that is somewhat easy for you and only read the stuff at that level until you've completed it or it's just too easy. If that level is B2, cool. Then skip B1 and below as well as C1 and above. It the comfortable level is A2, then only do A2 until it's too easy or you run out of material. Then move on to the next level. The secret with OCD is to pick things you can do that will help you progress. The challenge is leaving out the things that make it difficult to find comfort in what you do accomplish. Edited by luke on 31 December 2013 at 4:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5523 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 37 of 46 31 December 2013 at 5:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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For the time targets, I consider myself lucky if I can spend one good hour on French a day, and that for maybe half the days in the year. Good hours are a scarce resource.
But bad hours are cheap: I can listen to French radio while cleaning, or now that my level is halfway decent, I can watch French TV. I can listen to French music in the car. I can flip through comic books or look at song lyrics online.
I don't like to tell people, "Hey, you're doing it all wrong," because everybody's different and I'm far from an expert. But believe me, if it takes you 10 minutes to make a single vocabulary flash card for passer "to pass", then you're doing something wrong. Let me make a few suggestions that might make Anki a lot easier. Limit yourself to one or two core meanings, and move on. Have a little faith in your brain. You'll figure out the finer shades of meaning from context, exactly like you did (and still do!) in English. And let some vocabulary go: adding every word you encounter to you SRS software is a recipe for misery. All this stuff with beginner courses, flash cards, etc.? It's just a way to help you get started, and a way to speed up parts of the natural learning process (and to fix the natural learning process when it goes off the rails). If you need to spend 10 minutes making a flash card for a word, just let it go already. When your brain is ready to learn that word, it won't take very long at all. Anyway, here's a card for passer, if you like vocab cards. It hardly seems worth the effort of making:
As for me, I've been doing a lot of AJATT-style MCD cards lately. Let's zip over to WordReference, copy and paste a bunch of example sentences, search for the stem pass, and replace it with "{{c1::pass}}". (And be sure to use the "Cloze" template in Anki.)
When you review this card, you'll see:
To mark this card as "passed", all you need to do is fill in the blank correctly. That's it. You don't need to understand all the sentences—you don't even need to read them. Just say "pass" with a French accent and show the answer:
If you get that one syllable correct, you can mark the card as "good" or "excellent". So, the steps: WordReference, copy, paste, (optionally) delete the definitions, search and replace the stem "pass" with "{{c1::pass}}", save card. To review: Get one syllable correct. These cards will go through ancient Egyptian like a knife through hot butter. So they'll certainly work fine for French. And look at all the good things: These cards include tons of nuanced examples. They require active recall of one important detail. They allow you to ignore context that's above your level. And you can get all that in way less than 10 minutes per card. Anyway, my point isn't that you should make MCD cards. My point is that when something hurts, stop. If your goal is to actually learn French, then have a little fun, and stop demanding perfect execution of stuff. Edited by emk on 31 December 2013 at 5:40pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5382 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 38 of 46 31 December 2013 at 6:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Emk beat me to it but absolutely, positively, do not put every single definition you can find for a word on a single card! An ideal flash card should only be testing you on one concept only. Sometimes, for the sake of time if I see interesting alternate definitions I'll note them on the back with the intention of splitting them up later for learning. Make different flash cards showing the word "passer" (plus any important prepositions - usually that's what makes the difference in meaning) in different contexts for different cards. But don't do this all at once - don't go through the dictionary and add every nuanced meaning of the word to your deck and then learn them all at once. Take one or a few of them at a time or else you're going to start getting confused. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6588 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 39 of 46 31 December 2013 at 7:33pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
At your level GLOSS should also be very useful. I've enjoyed some of their French lessons, and I'm not even learning French! Edited by Serpent on 31 December 2013 at 7:55pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6588 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 40 of 46 01 January 2014 at 6:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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As for flash cards, just pick the meaning in which you came across the word. If there's one that's 5794593456x more important, add a separate card with it. Otherwise just wait until you actually see it in your materials (including textbooks).
English example: you are reading and you see the sentence "he got a cold". Do you add all the meanings of "get" to your flashcard? NO! DO Add a card with a more direct meaning, like "I got this book for Christmas". DON'T Add things that just look interesting, like "Let's get down to business". Underline them if you want, but learn the basic meaning before going into the details. For paper dictionaries, I've seen the following suggestion: if you don't mind writing on your book, put a dot near the word each time you look it up. I think the original idea was recording it when you've looked it up five times, but this can be adjusted of course. Some e-dictionaries also allow you to keep track of the words you look up. And then there's Learning with Texts. Edited by Serpent on 01 January 2014 at 6:41am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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