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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5524 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 41 of 101 07 July 2012 at 5:26am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Congrats on finish NFWE and starting the next course!
We have a lot of children's books in French, which we read to our preschoolers at bedtime. Probably 80% of these use the passé simple, including virtually 100% of fairy tales. So French kids have been hearing this tense read aloud since before they could walk. The passé simple is the normal tense for (written) narration in modern French, and it's certainly not an archaic literary tense. So just dive in and enjoy it. :-) Now, the imparfait du subjonctif and the passé anterieur in Le Petit Prince, those do sound a little weird sometimes… 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| sillygoose1 Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4628 days ago 566 posts - 814 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: German, Latin | Message 42 of 101 07 July 2012 at 2:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Thanks! It's actually a very liberating feeling after all of this time on NFWE, and now I at least feel functional in French, finally!
Haha, can't wait to hear them. Those are just tenses (imparfait du subjonctif, passe simple, passe anterieur) that need to be recognized and not necessarily "known" unless I'm writing a book or giving a speech, right? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5524 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 43 of 101 07 July 2012 at 10:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Congratulations on a very major milestone!
Yeah, you don't need to produce any of these tenses. The most important, by far, is the third person of the passé simple, where you might want to spend 2 minutes reviewing the endings.
That was easy, I hope. :-) I used to think the passé simple was highly literary, so I tried to find modern fiction which didn't use it. This turned out to be really hard. The passé simple is still pretty standard in modern fiction. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| sillygoose1 Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4628 days ago 566 posts - 814 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: German, Latin | Message 44 of 101 07 July 2012 at 11:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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That wasn't so bad. Haha. I hear Using French goes through all of that stuff too, so I should be good to go.
Having different tenses just for literature makes the language all the more beautiful to me. I'm going to have to do some googling to see if it's like that with other Romance languages also! Oh one quick thing, I'm not sure if you heard but I think I read it on french.about.com, that aristocracy used to use those tenses to sound more smart and high class or something, I found that pretty cool for some reason. Thank you for the help and encouragement the whole way through my little French journey so far emk, and everyone else who participated. I appreciate it dearly. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| sillygoose1 Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4628 days ago 566 posts - 814 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: German, Latin | Message 45 of 101 13 July 2012 at 4:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Thought it was about time for a small update.
Today, I finished Lesson 8 of Using French. I can appreciate how it's moving slow at first, but after skimming through, I can tell I'm going to get slammed at Lesson 23. I'll be ready for you, Lesson 23. My Book/TV/Movie arsenal has increased drastically since my last list, so here is my current arsenal: (This is for my own noting because it's interesting to see how things change in the future and I like to be organized, and if anyone happens to read this who has read/seen anything in my list, we could discuss it.) Books: (I'm going to utilize the L/R technique, but I won't focus on vocab. If I come across unknown words, I'm going to figure them out by context unless it gets to the point where I'm missing a lot. Il faut oublier, as Luca said. :D) -Le Petit Prince -L'Etranger -La Chute -La Peste -Le Mythe de Sisyphe -Candide -Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers, la chambre des secrets, le prisonnier d'Azkaban, and le coupe de feu (This works out great because for my next language, German, it continues off from here!) -Various short stories WITHOUT audio I found some Sartre books, but could not find the accompanying audio. So, they will have to wait for now. TV Series: -Fortier Seasons 1/2/3/4/5 -Braquo Seasons 1/2 Movies: -Incendies -Amelie -Un Prophete -Coco avant Chanel -Les Trois Couleurs, Bleu, Blanc, Rouge (This looks extremely interesting and artistic) -Seraphine -Monsieur Lazhar -Double Life of Veronique -Le Chat du Rabbin -Le Diner de Cons -Les Infideles -Horloge Biologique -Mesrine L'instinct de Mort 1 & 2 -Bon Cop, Bad Cop -Quebec-Montreal -Project X dubbed in French There is a nice mix of Quebec and France, which is what I hoped for considering both places are on my travel list. I'm going to save the Quebecois movies for last so by then I'll hopefully already understand France French with at least 80-85& comprehension by the time all of the shows/movies have been viewed. I think I've noted before, but my biggest problem will be informal speech and slang. I'm guessing I'll just pick it up from all of these movies and TV shows. My projection is that I should be able to get through all of this stuff by Feb. 2013 at the latest. Using French should be done by Mid Sepetember as planned. Everything is looking good so far. I wonder how much I'll be able to understand when I first watch Braquo.... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5524 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 46 of 101 13 July 2012 at 1:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
As a book person, I have a terrible, terrible confession to make: I once wrote in a book. I used an ultra-faint 0.5mm mechanical pencil. My first big French book was a 450-page monster. Every time I hit a word that I didn't understand, but which seemed important, I'd lightly underline it and keep reading. Several days later, I'd flip back through those pages, decide which words were still interesting, and make Anki cards. By the end of the book, I was only underlining words that I saw repeatedly without understanding. I learned about 1,000 words this way. You've already got an excellent base vocabulary, thanks to Assimil. And maybe 75% of your new vocabulary can be picked up passively from context, because you're learning a cognate language. But there's going to be a little core of important words which don't want to stick. Sooner or later, they'll start jumping out at you. What you do with them is up to you. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| sillygoose1 Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4628 days ago 566 posts - 814 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: German, Latin | Message 47 of 101 13 July 2012 at 4:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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You learned 1,000 words from a 450 page book using that method? That's impressive and very motivating for me.
How well can you understand TV shows and movies, emk? Last time I saw your log, or maybe another post, you said you needed to read a transcript first. Do you still have to do that even after learning all of these vocab words and being B2? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5524 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 48 of 101 13 July 2012 at 6:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Warning: Long digression ahead. I wrote half of this to organize my own thoughts, so
feel free to skim. :-)
Well, I probably got about 500 words from the book and another 500 elsewhere. It's hard to remember. Still, remember that 2500 of the most common 6000 words in French are trivial cognates, and many others can be guessed and reinforced simply by reading. Back then, my cards were simple L1<->L2 translations, and I had roughly 1000 cards in each direction. These are easy to create and work pretty well up through B1. If you're low tech, you can do pretty much the same thing with Iversen's word lists. Here's a long digression on vocabulary and SRS… This is all pretty personal, but might suggest some ideas to someone. When I started towards B2, I ran into problems with L1<->L2 word cards: 1) I started to have too many words with closely related meanings, so I failed a lot of cards. And since my old-fashioned SRS didn't automatically "suspend leeches", my daily reviews turned in a treadmill of the same awful 200 cards. For some stupid reason, I didn't delete the problem cards either. Today I'll delete a card if it looks at me funny. 2) I trained myself to translate from French to English, which was OK when reading but awful once I started working on listening comprehension. I broke the habit by creating a new, monolingual deck from scratch. 3) You can't learn grammar or co-locations from L1<->L2 translation cards. Today, I use sentence cards. Let's pick an example sentence from Le Monde:
I've never seen the expression le coût du travail before, and it's exactly the sort of thing which comes in handy during a DELF B2 oral exam. If I wanted to add this to my passive vocabulary, I'd create a card which looks like this:
If I wanted it in my active vocabulary, then I'd create 4 cloze cards, each one with a different word erased (there are tools to automate this):
There's actually 3 or 4 interesting things going on in that once sentence, and I'd pay more attention to them with each reading. Each of these options (L1<->L2 vocab cards, sentence cards, cloze cards) has tradeoffs. If you decide to try out Anki, it might be worth trying a mix of them and seeing what works best for you now. Oh, the usual SRS disclaimers apply: (1) don't learn more than 10 cards/day at first, or reviews will eat you alive in two weeks, (2) delete or suspend cards that annoy you, or they'll suck all the joy out of reviewing, (3) if the SRS starts to take up more than 25% of your language study time, be very suspicious, and (4) keep your deck full of stuff that you enjoy looking at.
It's all over the map. I can now get 80% of some Buffy episodes without a transcript, which is more than enough to enjoy them, unless there's some critical plot points in the 20%. Then I hit pause and ask my wife to repeat it slowly. Other Buffy episodes (maybe 1 in 3 or 1 in 5) are harder. Movies are harder. Some movies are fun, others are basically incomprehensible. As far as I know, this is pretty typical for B2, maybe slightly on the low side. In theory, I should now "understand 50% of movies in the standard dialect". My current plan of attack is this: 1) Focus on stuff which is in my "enjoyment range". 2) Watch a lot extensively (5 Buffy episodes in 3 days!). 3) Turn especially challenging scenes into SRS cards in my new "oral comprehension" deck. I can get through maybe two scenes a week like this. So far, (3) is very experimental but it seems to be helping a lot. Edited by emk on 13 July 2012 at 6:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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