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Eagle32 - Triomphe, French - TAC 2014 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Eagle32 Groupie New Zealand Joined 6443 days ago 56 posts - 83 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 1 of 25 27 February 2011 at 9:44am | IP Logged |
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TAC 2014 begins in the forth post (of mine) on this page. Edited by Eagle32 on 03 January 2014 at 12:33pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Eagle32 Groupie New Zealand Joined 6443 days ago 56 posts - 83 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 2 of 25 03 March 2011 at 11:35am | IP Logged |
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I found some new (to me) French sites which cover things I'm interested in. I spent quite a while browsing MyTaratata looking for new French music to listen to. I really like Coeur de Pirate, they make a nice change from Kyo (and the various English pop/rock music I mainly listen to). I also spent some time reading French (well French speaking people's) opinions of American TV shows on AlloCiné. I watched a few trailers in French there as well. I think I'm likely to spend quite a bit of time there in the future.
While I was doing the above I noted down about 20 words that appeared repeatedly. I looked these up and added them into my study list. As an aside, while I was looking words up I realised that all three of the French dictionaries I've been able to find in the house pre-date the Internet. Fortunately the Internet was able to tell me that, to browse a web page, was naviguer. Yesterday I learnt the meanings (or one rough meaning) of all those words + the last 10 "new" words I had waiting in Anki. Then I put the new words into Anki. Today, when I reviewed them, there were 6 cards I couldn't remember (three words, I run the cards both ways). It took me ~12 minutes to do ~100 cards, 60 of which were "new" and the remainder were reviews. I'm putting "new" in quotes because while they're new cards in Anki I did the initial learning to get the words in my brain before putting them into Anki. I'm pretty happy with that. If I could double it and maintain that on a daily basis, that would be fantastic. However even just doing 30 new (unique) cards a day would be great. Hopefully Anki will do its thing and remind me of the words before I forget them, keeping them alive in my memory. That is, after all, it's purpose! To learn the words initially I basically used Iverson's word list method. Between repetitions I would read or watch some TV before running through the words again. I think I repeated the words three times in each direction before I added them into Anki. Then I ignored them till I did my Anki reviews today. Based on the above usage of word lists for learning and Anki for keeping those memories alive, I've come up with a strategy to try for a while. When reading I'm going to write down words I don't recognise that I notice popping up repeatedly. Each time I have a set of 5-7 words and translations written down I'm going to attempt to memorise them. Then I'm going to continue reading and start jotting down a new set of words. Each time I memorise a new set I will review the previous sets at the same time. If I repeat that cycle 3-4 times I'll have between 15-28 words at the end and I'll have been seeing the words repeatedly while reading as well as actively memorising them inbetween the reading periods. All the words can go into Anki at the end of the session. I should note that when I say "words" I actually mean any small chunks of information; phrases, words and anything else I think I can usefully use Anki to remember. Also, on a general note, I'm primarily a reading orientated learner so I have a strong bias towards reading based learning. One last note with regards to Anki. I noticed I was looking at the "days till the card repeats" numbers over the buttons and choosing based on those numbers. I'm pretty sure that's not a good idea, especially as it was making me tend towards the first option most of the time. Because of this I turned the display of those numbers off and I know choose based on the button labels. This has definitely reduced the number of times I choose the first button. Hopefully it will improve the effectiveness on Anki for me. The Rambling Section What on earth is up with how they choose what languages to put on DVDs? I refer, specifically, to TV series DVDs. Examples from my DVDs: NCIS - Season 1 and 2 have French voice overs, Season 3 does not (admittedly all 3 are from different sets). Stargate - no French voice overs EXCEPT two discs in the middle of one of the latter seasons (all seasons from the same set). I borrowed Season 1 from a different set from my folks and that version has French voice overs for the 1st, 4th and 5th discs. Scrubs - Season 1, no French. Seasons 2-4 have French voice overs. All 4 season from the same set. *set - I say "set", I don't know what they call it for DVDs. For books the equivalent would probably be an edition. What I mean for DVDs is One lot of DVD's might have a single slim line case for a whole season with one cover art layout and another might use fat cases and a different cover art layout. All the mentioned DVD's are from the same region. There are more examples but you get the idea. Edited by Eagle32 on 03 January 2014 at 7:22am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kmart Senior Member Australia Joined 6066 days ago 194 posts - 400 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 3 of 25 04 March 2011 at 3:12am | IP Logged |
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Greetings from across the Ditch !
;-) When you get through/bored with Pimsleur and MT, give Assimil a whirl. Given that you have previously studied french, you will probably pick it up quickly. Another helpful feature of Anki is that it actually highlights one of the button labels, I think based on the history of the card. For really quick run-through, you can just click on the "suggested" button, unless you get stuck on the card. I understand your frustration with DVDs - I bought dozens of Italian movies here in Australia, only to find that the only subtitles they have are in English! What about the poor deaf Italian grannies who want subtitles in their own language ??? The only option is to do a search on the internet for what you need - it's hardly immoral since you've already paid for the movies. all the best... 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Eagle32 Groupie New Zealand Joined 6443 days ago 56 posts - 83 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 4 of 25 10 March 2011 at 9:49am | IP Logged |
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I don't know that I'll do much with either Pimsleur or MT. Purely audio courses really don't work well for me. I've only been considering using them because I could borrow them.
I eventually got through checking all my DVD's and the only one that has French audio and French subs that actually match the audio is Top Gun. Progress has been slow this last week. The weather got cold and I got a cold so I've not been very productive. I have been slowly reading over a condensed French grammar. I'm nearly done skimming through it and I really don't want to see another exception to an exception mentioned about anything for a while. When my French is where I want it I'm going to learn Esperanto just because of the nice regular grammar. :p 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6027 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 5 of 25 10 March 2011 at 7:29pm | IP Logged |
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Hi Eagle,
I can concur with that subtitle-audio-matching business. A lot of series' that I get from amazon.uk are dubbed in french and it's hard for a learner like me to pick out what they're saying, because (like you said) they don't match. Sometimes I think the script is written with more attention to a word-for-word translation, and then they just improvise on top of it. It helps when I watch it in English first, otherwise I'd be lost. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Eagle32 Groupie New Zealand Joined 6443 days ago 56 posts - 83 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 6 of 25 03 January 2014 at 12:35pm | IP Logged |
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-------------- TAC 2014 - Starts HERE --------------
I'll guess that my starting level is around "false beginner". Non-existent production but enough passive understanding to follow the gist of easier material. I read something on the forum the other day that described (para-phrasing here) a stage of passive understanding where you get enough words to know roughly what you are reading but you basically ignore all the little bits of syntactic language glue that are important to not sounding like a caveman when you speak/write. That pretty well describes my comprehension level. I want to start doing a bit of grammar study to mix with my preferred activities of reading and watching TV shows and movies. Edited by Eagle32 on 04 January 2014 at 6:55am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Eagle32 Groupie New Zealand Joined 6443 days ago 56 posts - 83 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 7 of 25 04 January 2014 at 7:08am | IP Logged |
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I've tried reading books in the past that people have recommend as being relatively easy to follow, like the Harry Potter books. The trouble is I don't like Harry Potter, I have no interest in the story and I give up inside 10 pages.
I'm currently reading Pandore Abusée, the French translation of the first half of Pandora's Star, by Peter F. Hamilton. About 60 pages in so far. It's definitely not easy reading but I know the story well from reading the English version and I understand enough of what I'm reading that it's enjoyable to read. Funny(?) anecdote from today: I started watching Ocean's Twelve today while my brain was apparently half asleep. During the first couple of minutes I thought that Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones were pulling off remarkably good French accents doing a scene in French at the start. Took me a couple of minutes to realise that the audio was set to French rather than English. On the plus side I was able to follow 3/4 of what was going on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4951 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 8 of 25 05 January 2014 at 6:03pm | IP Logged |
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Hi, Eagle32, I am looking forward to following your log during the TAC14 :-) I am sure you will progress greatly!
What kinds of books do you like? Perhaps I could give you a few tips on things worth trying. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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