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TAC’14 2ième - J’aimerais être bilingue | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Adrean TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member France adrean83.wordpress.c Joined 6166 days ago 348 posts - 411 votes  Speaks: FrenchC1 | Message 25 of 46 16 September 2011 at 11:30am | IP Logged |
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Hi Micorsnout. As always absolutely fascinating to hear about your very hands on approach
to language learning. I often ask myself the question though, how do you afford to live such a lifestyle...when do you work and stuff? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| microsnout TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Canada microsnout.wordpress Joined 5469 days ago 277 posts - 553 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 26 of 46 16 September 2011 at 9:49pm | IP Logged |
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Hi Adrean!! Good to hear from you, its been a while. It was you however that I looked to as an example of a "hands on" approach to learning, first with the long list of books and movies you studied and then actually finding a job in Paris (a tough environment) and meeting language partners. You moved well beyond the stage of hiding in your den with a copy of Assimil and I wanted to do the same.
As for your question, I was a bit lucky during the years when the only languages I studied were computer languages. The name microsnout for example is a combination of 'snout' which for some unknown reason was a nickname I was called by a childhood friend (although I do not have a big nose) and microsoft where I worked from 94 to 2000. I quit working and returned to Canada in the summer of 2000 but unfortunately I didn't get into language learning as a pastime (obsession?) until 2006. I have felt a bit lazy though when I read on this forum about people studying 4+ languages while attending school or working. I realize I should have achieved a lot more by now. I had/have little interest however in becoming a polyglot, possibly because I don't live in Europe and can't drive to another country in a couple hours (other than the USA of course). I don't want to learn a language just for occasional vacations, skype use, ethnic cafés, meetup groups or anything like that, I want to live in the language without flying half way around the world. As for finding the time for this, I did not expect to have as much time this winter but things have changed as I am now single again since the spring and thus lived the entire summer on my sailboat. I was not married but rather had what in French would be called 'un conjoint de fait' meaning living with someone. After I haul the boat out of the water this Monday, I will have no home in Toronto so I thought why not head back to Quebec and continue the mission of becoming bilingual - and maybe meet 'une belle Québécoise' :) Edited by microsnout on 16 September 2011 at 10:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| microsnout TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Canada microsnout.wordpress Joined 5469 days ago 277 posts - 553 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 27 of 46 29 December 2011 at 9:54am | IP Logged |
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Year end update and TAC 2012
This post will be my last log update of 2011 and will also mark the beginning of TAC 2012. Québec French Listening Tool For those interested in listening practice with transcripts and a French Canadian/Québécois accent, I have created an online practice application. It contains 612 short texts extracted from news broadcasts and features 21 different voices, half men, half women. Since they all come from news stories it is all 'Standard French' but with 21 distinct québécois/québécoise speakers. For more information see this thread and post any comments or questions in that thread rather than here. Contained within these 612 texts is a large number of useful idiomatic expressions. Studying this collection has been very beneficial to me and my recent teacher in Quebec City remarked that the number of idioms that I use is unusually high for a student and I think this is entirely due to the study of this collection. The other cool thing about these texts is the number of long compound sentences. You hear a verb and are expecting a phrase starting with a preposition like 'à' or 'de' following it, and it comes about 3 lines later which really helped me gain an intuitive feel for the grammar. La Ville de Québec en octobre As mentioned previously I spent 4 weeks in Quebec City in October attending a new immersion program from a school called Edu-Inter which has classes at Le Collège Mérici. I do not normally like taking classes but I make an exception once in a while. In this case, because the program was new I suspected there would be very few students and I was right. In addition they were offering a 50% discount for the fall and their prices were already very low compared to some schools. Despite the discount there were in fact very few students so there was only three levels - you guessed it, beginner, intermediate and advanced. I was placed in the advanced class, the first time this has happened but it has been several years since I have taken such a class. There were only three of us in the class, besides myself there was a young women from Toronto and a 30ish man from Nevada. The women was often missing so it ended up like semi-private instruction for just $6/hour. Ron, the guy from Nevada was a true francophile who had been learning French only 2 years including 10 months living and working in France. He had remarkable listening comprehension even in Québec so evidently, the skills he acquired in France were quite transferable. When he saw the 50% fall discount he decided to spend the full 4 months at this school. The teacher was from the Gaspésie area of the province and was excellent. We had a lot of fun at the school including going out partying at one of the many bars in Quebec City every Thursday evening after class (classes were from 6pm to 9pm), usually with the other two classes plus the teachers, visiting a Cabane à sucre and other local attractions. One fun night was an 'improv' competition at a 'brasserie' - and was that ever a listening challenge!! At the request of the teacher we each started a French language blog which you can see here if you like although there are only two entries. In my final week, I did a short presentation on L'affaire Coffin which is a famous Canadian murder case from the Gaspésie area of Québec which resulted in a man named William Coffin being hanged in Bordeaux prison in Montréal in 1956 and years later would help precipitate the abolition of the death penalty in Canada. The teacher found this interesting since she had never heard of the case despite being born and raised in the Gaspésie - too young I guess. I left at the end of October instead of staying an extra month or two because I had two important things to take care of in Toronto and I was getting tired of the homestay arrangements. I would consider going back, maybe even this winter but would look for my own place to stay in more central location within walking distance of the school. Back in Toronto I have been attending some French language meetup groups here in the Toronto area with mixed results. One nice thing about French meetup groups in Toronto is that there are always francophones there, many of whom live and work in an entirely English environment and just seek to socialize in their native language on occasion - something that would not happen in Montreal. It is a good thing they are there because I am finding more and more that most of the other 'students' at these meetups are less advanced than me and thus not very useful to talk with. Last week a women asked me for help in how to express some question she was asking me and I then found out that she had been in a 'French Immersion' program in school for 8 years studying all subjects in French!! I thought Wow, OMG, I was able to help a French Immersion graduate ! me who dropped French at the first opportunity after grade 9 and started literally from zero at age 46! I am planning to stay in Toronto at least until the Toronto boat show in mid January. After that I need to go to Ottawa for a week and then who knows, maybe further immersion time somewhere. While here I have been doing a lot of listening practice in an attempt to bridge the gap between the formal speak of news broadcasts, documentaries etc and real world conversational language. One thing I have a big problem with is dialog overlaid with strong emotions like anger, crying or laughing - something that just doesn't occur in a news broadcast. I have been watching a lot of programs on the web site tou.tv which is basically Radio-Canada television plus a DVD set of a legal drama called "Toute la vérité". The programs I have do not have sub-titles but that is ok with me as I find them very distracting and not very helpful. I should expand on this another time. I ripped the soundtrack from several episodes and slowed it down with Audacity by 5%, 10% and 20% which is helpful BUT... somehow I got the idea that maybe I am doing exactly the opposite of what I should do!! If it is easier to understand when it is slower, it would be nice if the slow speed was the normal speed. To test this idea I took an episode and speeded it up by 10%. I then listened to it 3 or 4 times trying each time to understand a few more details, literally getting used to it at a faster than normal speed. I then watched the original video which was of course 10% slower than what I was used to and WOW, it seemed so clear it was almost English. Speeding it up may be better than slowing it down, how counterintuitive is that! I need to experiment with this idea a bit more before deciding if it is better as this was just one episode. TAC 2012 After sitting out TAC 2011, I have joined the Romantics team for 2012. I have not thought about goals for the year yet but this post is long enough already so I will postpone that. Best of luck to all other team members.. Edited by microsnout on 29 December 2011 at 11:36am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5379 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 28 of 46 29 December 2011 at 1:08pm | IP Logged |
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Je te souhaite du succès en 2012. Si t'as des questions, hésite pas!
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| microsnout TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Canada microsnout.wordpress Joined 5469 days ago 277 posts - 553 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 29 of 46 10 January 2012 at 7:51am | IP Logged |
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..thanks Arekkusu.
Some new music Inspired by the Jan 1 episode of the CBC podcast C'est la vie ("..we take a look back at some of the great songs and artists of 2011 in French Canada") I ordered all 6 of the recent CDs they talked about for some new music to enjoy/study. I have just received them so have not yet listened to more than one song per disk. Here are some YouTube links: Galaxie - Tigre et Diesel Piste 1 Salomé Leclerc - Sous les arbres Partir ensemble Caracol - Blanc mercredi Certitudes Catherine Major - Le désert des solitudes Le désert des solitudes (song starts at 1:40) Laurence Hélie Tu ne me vois pas Martin Léon - Les Atomes Le shack à Chuck Meetup group I was at a French language meetup group in the City of Brampton this evening which was pretty good. There was a native francophone man from Africa, the host - a woman with québécois parents but with rusty French (don't know the story behind that) and an anglophone women with 12 years of French Immersion schooling plus university French studies, all very worthwhile and fun to talk to. Last week at this meetup there was a Sikh who told me that here in Brampton it can actually be difficult to practice English because "everyone responds to me in Punjabi"! I don't have that problem here of course but I couldn't help thinking that I'm missing a language learning opportunity that some on this forum might jump at - oh well, back to French. Nearing end of current 'Listening' mission Just 10 days left in my stay here in the outer reaches of the GTA (Greater Toronto Area). Other than the meetup groups I have concentrated on listening practice with TV series, movies, radio and other sources virtually all of which were of Canadian/Québécois origin. I have currently logged 325 hours listening time in 68 days not counting listening to the radio while driving which I cannot give full attention to anyway. Zero reading or writing other than a few emails. Have just received DVDs for season 2 volume 1 of Toute la vérité so there's 10 more episodes to watch. An interesting discovery about the series 'Toute la vérité' is that I found some characters easy to understand and others very difficult which can make it seem like listening to one side of a conversation. I experienced this last winter in Montreal when I saw the play "Tom à la ferme" at the Théâtre d'Aujourd'hui. I could understand almost everything the character Tom said but very little of the character Francis who usually spoke with a voice laced with anger and at a faster rate. Then just a couple days ago it hit me ! I realized I have been listening to and having difficulty with... the same actor!! The Francis character in the play and the Sylvain character in the TV series are both Éric Bruneau! Today I received an email from my number one language partner who lives in the city of Longueuil on the south shore across from Montreal asking when I will return to continue working together (actually I added that working bit, he said to go for a beer) so after 10 more days here followed by a 5 or 6 day non language related visit to Ottawa I will, I think settle in Montreal for a while - all of Feb perhaps, maybe March too. Edited by microsnout on 10 January 2012 at 10:09am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Patriciaa Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5683 days ago 59 posts - 73 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese | Message 30 of 46 19 January 2012 at 5:32pm | IP Logged |
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Est-ce que tu as aimé le CD de Galaxie? J'adore ce groupe-là! C'est sûr qu'un album au complet de rock garage,
ça fait un peu beaucoup pour les oreilles mais il y a quelques tounes, comme Piste 01, Camouflar, Requin Tigre et Shangai que je trouve super bonnes :) Est-ce que tu connais aussi Karkwa et Malajube? En passant, j'ai lu les deux articles de ton blog… Je trouve ça vraiment super, j'espère que tu vas continué à y écrire! Pour ce qui est de tou.tv, je sais pas qu'est-ce que tu écoutes mais voici quelques émissions que j'aime bien: 1800 secondes d'extase (c'est des parodies d'émissions québécoises… donc il faut déjà à la base connaître les émissions parodiées pour comprendre), C'est juste de la TV (ils parlent de ce qui s'est passé à la télévision durant la semaine), Les enfants de la télé, Infoman, Ils dansent (mais il faut aimer la danse :P ), Les Lavigueur, Les Parent, RBO, etc. Si tu peux, il y a Tout le monde en parle qui joue le dimanche soir aussi à Radio-Canada. La saison commence le 29 janvier mais les émissions ne sont pas sur tou.tv Et si tu as une quelconque question sur le français, ça va me faire plaisir de t'aider, vraiment :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| microsnout TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Canada microsnout.wordpress Joined 5469 days ago 277 posts - 553 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 31 of 46 20 January 2012 at 8:56am | IP Logged |
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La toune 'Piste 1' de Galaxie.. oui, je l'aime beaucoup mais je pense qu'elle me ferait rouler trop vite. Il ne me reste
maintenant qu'à me familiariser avec les autres chansons. Non, Karkwa et Malajube je ne les connais pas. Je n'ai pas le temps pour les rechercher actuellement car je m'apprête à me rendre à Ottawa demain. J'y reviendrai sous peu. Merci de tes commentaires sur mon blog. Sur tou.tv, au début j'écoutais les émissions "Enquête", "Découverte", "Une heure sur terre" et "Le droit de savoir" car je les ai trouvées faciles à comprendre. Maintenant j'écoute le téléroman "30 Vies". Si je pouvais comprendre les ados dans cette émission je serais bien content. Merci et bonne journée, 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| microsnout TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Canada microsnout.wordpress Joined 5469 days ago 277 posts - 553 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 32 of 46 07 March 2012 at 8:49pm | IP Logged |
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Time to update my log to avoid being counted as missing by my TAC team.
End of listening mission My listening focused mission in the Toronto area ended in mid January with a total of 350 hours listening time. The last update above detailed the materials used for this. After the Toronto boat show in mid January and about 2 weeks in Ottawa with little or no language study or practice (other than the radio in the car), I moved to a rented furnished condo in downtown Montreal for February and March. Montréal en hiver Last winter I spent 5 months here and met about 6 language partners. This year I will be here just 2 months and have resumed language exchanges with two of them, one of which is now a good friend and considered my primary language partner. Unfortunately I did not get off to a good start here due to some non-language related issues including some minor damage to my car in the parking lot because of which I have at least learned a new word 'la carrosserie' which I would have preferred not to need to know. Anyway Feb saw little progress. I attended some meetup language exchanges, met with my two partners a few times and spent too much time speaking English. March is going better. To supplement my free exchange partners I have found an excellent paid tutor for 1/3 the rate that a school here would charge for private instruction. She is a teacher at a Cégep (type of school) who has free time because of a strike, a literature major (and teacher), published author and 'une Québécoise pure laine' she would be ideal to study writing with but that is not my focus at this time - maybe I will do a bit anyway. Have started watching a new TV series called Apparences which is a sort of mystery/drama I think. I need to rewatch the first three episodes before continuing with the forth because I think I missed too many details. I will be able to discuss the show with my new tutor because she watches it as well so that may be useful. I have also been playing some scenes from my old favorite "Toute la vérité" so she can help clarify some speech. The language meetups have not been very useful this winter since I already have enough language partners and talking with other students does not accomplish much. I still go however, and will later today because it is fun meeting people regardless and sometimes the host even pays me a couple dollars rather than charging me 50 cents because I spend time on the English learning side helping others with English - thats how I met both my language partners. Am spending some time 'un-learning' stuff taught in French classes. I think I have eliminated all 'ne' words from speech but still need to purge a few n' according to my new tutor. Also making some other adjustments like saying j'vas instead of 'je vais'. You really start to notice these when interacting with other learners at meetups, sometimes they don't even believe people talk like that. Some have told me they don't watch any TV in French here because it too difficult. Yesterday while studying the very useful blog http://offqc.com I received an email from wordpress.com informing me that the author of that blog had become a follower of my French language blog. Coincidence ? or can he tell I was browsing his blog. I must update that one soon if there are actual followers. Just over three weeks to go here and then back to Toronto to prepare the boat to launch in April which will become home. (PS: I love the way day, month and language names are not capitalized in French) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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