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TAC ’15 French Spanish Celtic Adv Study | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5384 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 89 of 336 27 October 2012 at 9:11am | IP Logged | |||||
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Still plugging away. I now have over 1000 words in my Memrise garden which puts me at a
little under 25% of the deck. Not bad for a month's work (though nothing compared to Robert Tickner). I'm taking more notice of vocabulary as I read through Harry Potter, now about 2/3 of the way through the fourth book. As I'm getting more toys and amassing a great passive knowledge of the language I kind of wonder if I should try more active exercises during my commute to really get the language flowing. But I really want to finish off the series (even though I'm heading into the longest books). I just completed my first import from LWT into Anki and I'm loving it. Had to do some fiddling and had to download Opera to make it work but I now have over 500 cloze delete cards that were made pretty simply. This is actually my first foray into clozes as I kind of dropped Anki for a while when sentences were still the thing. I'm liking it though with my Madrigal's deck I'm sticking with translating the sentences for now. Should it be relatively easy to turn them into clozes later? It's funny with my LWT selections so far I have a wide mix of very familiar language with the Kaamelott scripts to very academic with a collection of non-fiction (and summaries of non-fiction) such as The Great Transformation (La Grande Transformation) by Karl Polanyi (economics mixed with history and anthropology). I'm welcome to any other good sources of quality articles and reading material from a variety of registers. Stuff to broaden my general knowledge vocabulary with (the sort of stuff I'd be expected to talk/write about on a C1/C2 exam) and my spoken, informal language. Thanks @Rob Tickner, sending you a PM. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5384 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 90 of 336 04 November 2012 at 5:00am | IP Logged | |||||
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I finally ordered and received the little device to hook up my laptop to the TV which
means I get to watch my full video collection plus anything that's online on TV. This makes watching hours of foreign language video much more pleasant and comfortable. The TV will no longer be a distraction for me but an immersion tool. I now have over 30% of the Memrise First 5000 words of Spanish deck done. The reps from the "garden" are starting to get to be a bit much so it's becoming less enjoyable. With Anki I've been adding new cards slowly to avoid this but I still feel like I really want to step it up. The cards from Learning with Texts have been working out great. I also got a few tips on material I should be covering in preparation for the DALF including the "Ideés" section on Le Monde's web site and the site Canal Académie (canalacademie.com). For Spanish I think I'll add a few Harry Potter chapters so I can start formally learning some of the vocabulary and structures I'm reading and to give myself some fun cards. I currently have cards from Madrigal's going from English to Spanish and boy it's tough. It's definitely easy to overlook how tough it is when just working with the book especially since I'm getting the cards randomly instead of working on the exercises as part of the chapter. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5384 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 91 of 336 06 November 2012 at 9:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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So being that it's still the beginning of the month it's a good time to start a new
goal. So my goal for this month is to upgrade my spoken Spanish from broken and hesitant to a "comfortable" upper-beginner/intermediate level. I'm closing that gap between my active and passive skills. I was previously going to go through Pimsleur II by the end of October but I got derailed while adjusting to my ever-changing schedule. And so I have a new goal: get through Pimselur II and III by the end of November. That means I'm doing two lessons a day: one in the morning and one at night and I'm already on track. I'm using my planner to keep track of what I manage to do. I'll also be going through phrase books and looking for some good conversational and work-related phrases and getting audio for them. And I'll finally do a conversation exchange sometime this month. I'll continue learning vocabulary through Memrise during slow periods at work and I'll continue using Learning With Texts for French as well as my video collection that I can now watch confortably. I also don't want to keep throwing Irish under the bus so I'll set a goal of doing 2-3 lessons a week which is slow but at least represents actual progress. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5384 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 92 of 336 10 November 2012 at 7:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Got halfway through Pimsluer II. There were a couple lessons I was struggling with and
I thought I may have to repeat or slow down but the last few I've nailed so feeling pretty good. It's definitely good for getting me to speak and to do so fairly quickly. I tried a few spurts of self-talk and I can slowly, haltingly, form phrases to talk about the election and the economy. I'll have to try this Verbling thing soon (though I'd like to read some female experience about it - saying that it's like Chatroulette for languages isn't encouraging). 38% through the Memrise deck which means I'll hit 50% before the end of the month. Watching my collection of Star Trek Voyager videos in French. Let me just say that Star Trek is a great choice for beginning/intermediate learners who are looking to start a series in their target language. They speak slowly, they use standard language (few reductions, they use all the proper forms including "nous"), there's not a lot of slang and any idomatic usage you can rest assured is pretty standard. Some examples: Il n'y est pour rien: It's not his fault. Je vous laisse carte blanche. - I'm giving you carte blanche/free reign. Il est a notre portee. - It's within our grasp/our capabilities. Sure, there's the technobabble but you're barely meant to understand that and it's made up anyway. It was funny, in one scene they bring back Alan Ginsberg and they had him speaking in a familiar register and I could identify it immediatly as it stood out so much next to the more formal use amongst the crew. And I can tell Tuvok speaks in an even more formal register than anyone (though I can't always identify what makes it more formal). I'll have to see if I can find it in Spanish. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5525 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 93 of 336 10 November 2012 at 9:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
I've never used Chatroulette, in part because I heard it could be pretty weird and gross at times. From the male perspective, Verbling seemed pretty sane and reasonable. There are a few well-thought-out mechanisms which probably help prevent abuse: 1. At the end of every conversation, it goes to standby mode and allows you decide whether you ever want to chat with that person again. Once you decide, you can click the button to find another partner. 2. There's a link where you can report abusive behavior, or an inability to speak the language in question. 3. There's a mechanism for "friending" people, and if you see one of them online, you can choose to connect directly instead of asking for a random partner. 4. It's really easy to terminate a conversation. 5. Because there's no directory of strangers, there's no way for the 500 creepiest guys on the site to all try to contact the three women with the best photos. They've got to slog through random strangers and risk getting reported. Not that this would make it any nicer overall, but maybe it would spread the problem out a bit. So there's at least some hope that this will work. But on the downside, they haven't taken any visible steps against people who use language exchange as some kind of weird international dating site. And the religious dude I ran into was pretty pushy about God (though I find the whole notion of non-Muslim missionaries in Algeria tolerably interesting so I gave him 5 minutes to make his pitch). The real problem with Verbling right now is the atrocious audio and huge number of people with misconfigured systems. Until they fix that, I plan to give any interesting conversation partners my Skype address. Skype does audio better than almost anyone. Only iChat on the Mac is in the same ballpark. And that has a huge influence on how much fun it is to speak an L2 with somebody.
Sounds great! Do you know if Voyager has good French subtitles? If so, I'll add it to the list on the wiki. Also, in your experience, do French speakers ever use nous as a subject pronoun when speaking? I've spent endless hours listening to them and I hear on at least 99% of the time, unless somebody's giving a rehearsed speech or getting interviewed. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5384 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 94 of 336 10 November 2012 at 9:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
It's almost always "on" they even teach it that way in school ("we are" veut dire "on est"). And I noticed on Voyager when they're not on the bridge they start sprinkling in "on" a bit. No French subtitles on the DVD release though in the upcoming TNG Blue-Ray release it looks like there'll be French subs though not optimistic about them. The speech is so clear that an intermediate learner could cope pretty well without. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5384 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 95 of 336 11 November 2012 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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So Pimsleur II isn't so bad about the whole you're an American businessman asking a
local woman to go for a drink thing. But sometimes Pimsleur is trying to turn me into a creeper. I want Pimsleur to teach the phrase "Take a hint": Man (you're playing the man): Do you want to go to the movies with me? Woman: I don't know. I have a lot of things to do. Man: What things? What things do you have to do? Woman: I have a lot of work. Man: But tomorrow is Sunday. You have a lot of work to do on Sunday? Woman: I also need to buy something. Man: What do you need to buy? Woman: I need to buy t-shirts. Man: I know of a store but it's far from here. We can go together in my car. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| aodhanc Diglot Groupie Iceland Joined 6253 days ago 92 posts - 130 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish | Message 96 of 336 11 November 2012 at 10:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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What are your Irish studies going - have you made much progress?
1 person has voted this message useful |
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