Iolanthe Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5630 days ago 410 posts - 482 votes Speaks: English*, DutchC1 Studies: Turkish, French
| Message 1 of 88 10 January 2014 at 5:12pm | IP Logged |
------------Contents-------------
Page 5 -
List of resources used in 2014 Super Challenge
Page 10 -
Start of TAC 2015
Introduction
Hello everyone! It's been a while since I had a log here but since I've started
learning a
new language, I feel it might help to have somewhere to log my progress. I'm part of
TAC team TID=37857&PN=1">Deuxième
French
I started learning French last year but stopped when I was too busy studying for
exams.
Over Christmas I decided that French is the one for me so I've started studying again.
I
took French in school from the age of 10-15 but I never became fluent. There's some
French
in the back of my brain and I want to capitalise on this! I live in the Netherlands
but
unfortunately I still haven't been to France or Belgium while I've been here.
Actually,
the one time I visited France was with school when my French was appauling and I
mostly
remember almost drowning in a swimming pool and being scolded by a French lifeguard.
C'est la
vie...
It's not possible for me to travel at the moment due to health problems but I plan on
getting my butt to Brussels whenever that may be possible (and Paris after that!). In
any case,
French seems like a good option for me because even if I can't be in a native
environment, I have easy access to TV channels, radio, music and newspapers in French.
I also think
the language sounds beautiful.
Resources I have:
- Assimil New French with Ease
- French In Action
- Practice Makes Perfect: Complete French Grammar
- Essential French Grammar
- Anki
- radio, movies, tv
Online resources
Collins French
Dictionary
Madmoizelle - For fun articles and videos
TuneIn Radio - Live radio from major French-speaking
radio stations (and every other language you could wish for)
Goals:
300 hours of study (at least)
A0 ---> B1
Dutch
I want to write five 1500 word essays on topics that I've been studying at university
and have a native correct them. I also want to read the Dutch translation of A Song of
Ice
and Fire/Game of Thrones that I've been ignoring for months. Oh and as always I need
to
speak more.
Afrikaans (Update 26/3/14: Mission aborted.)
Last year I started listening to Afrikaans radio on an almost daily basis and I've
decided to continue doing that in 2014. I also read a news article or two every day. I
think
Afrikaans is a lovely language which is why I can't stop dabbling, in spite of my
fears that it
will negatively affect my Dutch. I am a bit on the fence about whether to continue and
if
so, how far I should take my dabbling. I really don't want to start pronouncing things
in Dutch
the Afrikaans way or conjugating verbs wrongly! My only tentative aim beyond doing
what I
already do is to write a few paragraphs in Afrikaans every week.
---
Welcome to my log that I'm rather optimistically calling 'The Road to Brussels'. Will
the road be literal or metaphorical? Je ne sais pas!
Edited by Iolanthe on 04 January 2015 at 12:25pm
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Iolanthe Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5630 days ago 410 posts - 482 votes Speaks: English*, DutchC1 Studies: Turkish, French
| Message 2 of 88 12 January 2014 at 7:26pm | IP Logged |
Week 2 summary
French: 422 minutes or 7 hours and 22 minutes
Dutch: Recorded myself to see what I need to work on with my pronunciation. I'm studying for
exams next week that are in Dutch so that's more than enough Dutch for now :)
Afrikaans: My interest has moved more towards French now but I still listened to the radio
four times and wrote two paragraphs
Edited by Iolanthe on 13 January 2014 at 5:25pm
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BonneVivante Pro Member Canada Joined 4847 days ago 33 posts - 59 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map
| Message 3 of 88 14 January 2014 at 9:54pm | IP Logged |
I'm going to be following your log, since we're both on the second French team for TAC2014. I had a similar experience of studying French in school but never becoming fluent...hopefully we can both correct that old mistake.
I am impressed with your high level of Dutch proficiency as I know it's a difficult language. A friend of mine from the Hague once taught me a little and he found it quite hilarious because he said I sounded like I had a Belgian accent. Since I am Canadian, that seemed quite bizarre.
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Vos Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5555 days ago 766 posts - 1020 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Polish
| Message 4 of 88 14 January 2014 at 10:29pm | IP Logged |
Welkom terug Iolanthe! Echt heel leuk om je rond hier weer te zien. Ik wens je veel succes dit jaar met je talen en
zeker weten dat ik je log ga volgen. Het allerbeste met je tentamen!
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Iolanthe Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5630 days ago 410 posts - 482 votes Speaks: English*, DutchC1 Studies: Turkish, French
| Message 5 of 88 14 January 2014 at 11:10pm | IP Logged |
@BonneVivante Hello Teamie! I'll be following you back. I'm excited to be in a team this
year. I think Dutch people like to get foreigners to pronounce Dutch words for their own
entertainment. I've seen a couple of youtube videos of them doing just that. People used to
ask me if I was German when I first started speaking Dutch.
@Vos Bedankt! Het is leuk om hier weer te zijn!
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Sizen Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4328 days ago 165 posts - 347 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Catalan, Spanish, Japanese, Ukrainian, German
| Message 6 of 88 15 January 2014 at 3:40pm | IP Logged |
I really like multilingual countries like Belgium (though I haven't been there myself), especially when they speak French. :) Guess it reminds me of Canada a little. The most gifted language learner I know is also from Belgium, so that adds a little to the effect...
My father studied in the Hague for a few years and picked up some Dutch while there. I've never heard him really speak it, but I've heard him reading it and seen him writing to old Dutch acquaintances. Kind of makes me more interested in the language than I should be right now!
Either way, I'll be following you, and hope to be there when you make it to Belgium, whenever that may be!
@BonneVivante All my French friends say that the French Belgian accent is kind of like the French-Canadian accent (which always makes me laugh a little... so different), so I guess maybe there's a bit of a connection between Canada and Belgium. ;)
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Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4898 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German
| Message 7 of 88 16 January 2014 at 8:53pm | IP Logged |
Hello teammate! My sister lives near Brussels, so I've been there a couple of times. I really like the city, but I hadn't studied much French when I went there before. If you don't mind me asking, where are you from? And what are you studying?
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Iolanthe Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5630 days ago 410 posts - 482 votes Speaks: English*, DutchC1 Studies: Turkish, French
| Message 8 of 88 17 January 2014 at 5:07pm | IP Logged |
Jeffers wrote:
Hello teammate! My sister lives near Brussels, so I've been there a couple
of times. I really like the city, but I hadn't studied much French when I went there before.
If you don't mind me asking, where are you from? And what are you studying? |
|
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Hello Jeffers! I'm from the UK and I'm studying Dutch and History.
---
My routine at the moment is to do an Assmil lesson every day and work through French In
Action (video, textbook, audio, workbook) bit by bit every day. I want to start using the FSI
phonology programme and I wonder if I shouldn't add another learning method to my routine,
such as Pimsleur or Michel Thomas, because I see that my (much more advanced) teammates tend
to use a lot of resources at the same time. I've been focusing on spoken French more than
written French because I think that in my early days of learning Dutch, I read too much
without aural input and this led to bad pronunciation habits. I was very focused on the
written language back then, maybe because it was easier, but that was the first time I truely
set about learning a language so I had no idea what I was doing.
Speaking of bad Dutch pronunciation, I've been trying to make improvements in that area. I'm
trying to learn how to trill my uvular. Other sounds I need to work on are 'ui', 'ij', 'oo',
'l', the 'a' in 'kat' and unaspirated consonants.
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