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Gary’s TAC 2011 - Team Œ | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5209 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 97 of 104 18 November 2011 at 12:17am | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the feedback, I do sometimes wonder if anyone actually reads this! I mainly write it for myself but if others read and enjoy it then all the better!
While I may sometimes be shy and awkward, I'm definitely more on the extrovert side of the spectrum; between that and my motivation for learning French and improving my people skills, going out and meeting people is often more appealing than staying in. However, while I always look forward to the Wednesday (all-French) meetups since they almost always go well, there are some Tuesday evenings when I'm tired after a long day at work and I definitely feel more like staying in and relaxing than going all the way to the hit-or-miss Language Café. In general I seem to go through phases between wanting to go out and socialise all the time and wanting to stay in all the time. I'd agree that a lot of the people at the French meetups are sophisticated and older, but they're often interesting and friendly and don't seem to look down on me and my youth and my heavy metal t-shirts (apart from maybe the odd comment in good humour!). I also find that they have a certain respect for me and the effort I make, since a lot of older people, fairly or not, see people my age as the lazy and entitled generation. They're often there to meet new people as well as just practice their French, and if anything the ones closer to my age can be less friendly. The young couple I met the other night were really nice though. You just never know. In terms of practical tips though, I think it's more about just not being shy and making the effort to talk to people, even if you don't feel like you have anything "good" to say, although maybe some "gimmicks" could help! Even if you just start with clichéd stuff about where they're from and how long they've been living in the city, there's often ways to move on to a more interesting conversation from there, for example about why they like the city or about where they lived before or about how they're finding life here so far if they've just come from France. Even just randomly starting to talk about something you're doing next week or did last week is fine. Having some "go-to" topics that people find interesting is useful - for me, if people are talking about pastimes and I mention my music and my band, that always gets people curious and sparks conversation. And I think people like me have a tendency to jump to negative conclusions like thinking nobody likes me just because they haven't talked to me much, which then makes further socialising difficult, so I have to avoid that trap. I guess all that is more general conversation skills than language-meetup-specific, but when you're speaking a language that's not your native one it can take a bit more effort and confidence to relax and get out your shell and talk, especially when it's a case of joining in a group who're already talking to each other. On the other hand though I think there's a bit more tolerance for talking about things that might normally be considered uninteresting, since you're there to practice your language as opposed to have stimulating conversation. And if you go regularly and get to know the other regulars a bit, it gets a bit easier to talk and you feel more relaxed. So in short, just talk, even if that's easier said than done! I've been looking into the C1 exam a bit more, in fact I came here to post my thoughts about it, so that must be something you can tell me more about. From reading through this thread and from a discussion I had with another learner who's considering it and is doing a preparation course yesterday, it seems like a lot of it might be more a case of learning how to pass the exam than good at French. For example, the writing bits seem to involve writing a formal letter and an essay in a very specific format. While writing these well is definitely a test of your French knowledge, I'm not sure how useful it is for someone like me who's mostly interested in the spoken language and doesn't currently have any plans to work or study in France (although maybe I'll revisit my idea of spending a season in the Alps sometime!) and whose motivation for doing the exam is mostly just to have something to work towards and earn some proof of their ability (yes, I was one of these kids who always strived for good marks, and I still seem to have a bit of that in me), and so I'm wondering whether the time it would take me to study how to write these pieces might not be very productive for me beyond for passing the test. What are your thoughts on this? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5209 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 98 of 104 29 November 2011 at 2:51pm | IP Logged |
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Still making good progress in French, been quite happy with my last few conversation sessions. I've been doing around 25 minutes of shadowing a day (on average of course) and I'm sure it's helping with speaking more fluidly and it's good to revise the Assimil content - it's amazing how much I've forgotten since the first time through Using French!
I'm quite settled on doing Italian during my time off work - it's the only time in the foreseeable future that I'll be able to go hardcore and dedicate a good few hours a day to it for several days, which I think is the best way to start my re-learning. I'll come up with a more solid plan later on but I'm planning on spending a good bit of time focusing on pronunciation and working through lots of Michel Thomas and Pimsleur, then hopefully settle into a routine of Assimil and conversations which I should just about be able to keep up after the holidays. Which brings me to my main concern - time. Some pretty serious time management is going to be required. I do think that there's a few opportunities for squeezing in some Italian though, especially in place of French activities for which I've passed the point of diminishing returns such as reading the news and listening to the radio, but it's gonna be tough in any case. French is still of course high priority, especially since I'm getting closer and closer to fluency. I hope the fact that the languages are similar will help them feed off each other a bit. A good idea might be to make a big list of what all my priorities and obligations are in all areas of life and order them to help with planning. Something rigid like allocating half hours to tasks isn't going to work for me since my schedule changes so much, but I should be able to make a rough plan of what I can do when. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5209 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 99 of 104 30 November 2011 at 12:22pm | IP Logged |
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Another wee update from the French meetup last night - got some feedback on my speaking, as expected my accent still needs a lot of work. Apparently it still often "seems like I'm speaking Scottish English but the words are French" and "the main problem is that I don't articulate enough, if I articulated more I'd sound a lot more French". French people do understand me so that's a big improvement since before I did all my work on pronunciation, but obviously I still have some way to go.
I think at least part of the problem is that most of the speaking and shadowing practice I do is at a fairly low volume in my bedroom, so once I go out to a noisy bar and speak it's quite a different thing and the good habits go out the window. Even more so when I'm in a spontaneous conversation rather than reading from a page and focusing on pronunciation. As I've said before I think I need to slow down a bit and focus more on pronouncing correctly rather than just getting the words out quickly, rather than being tempted to try to keep up with the natives' speed. "Articulation" is another of these concepts like the good old "speaking from the mouth rather than the throat" that I don't fully understand the technical meaning of and how to implement. I think that's maybe part of a deeper problem - even in English I often don't speak too clearly, especially in noisy situations where I have to be loud - so it's something to work on in general and not just for French. In terms of French though I think pronouncing the vowels well is very important - again something I know but tend to forget when I'm in a proper conversation. Overall my French pronunciation learning has been done in about the most inefficient way possible - not learning properly at the start then iteratively building it up, trying to improve it, realising I still need to fix things so going back, and so on. So it's definitely something I'm keen to do right from the start in Italian. So main priority for now is pronunciation and accent. Expressing myself is starting to feel quite easy, although I still have a long way to go in doing so elegantly and using expressions well, and understanding fast conversations between natives is becoming a piece of cake, so my accent's definitely the weakest link right now. If only I got honest feedback like that more often - it's a shame that correcting people and pointing out their problems is hardly done these days, even by teachers. Edited by garyb on 30 November 2011 at 12:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5209 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 100 of 104 01 December 2011 at 2:25pm | IP Logged |
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Follow-up to yesterday's post - I had a look around the Net for improving articulation and had the bright idea of searching for it in French - "améliorer son articulation" gave me some good results, including articles on a site about overcoming shyness with exercises and advice for practising and improving articulation of French, and of course a whole bunch of material on shyness which I'm sure could help me! The first set of exercises even promises to help with the whole mouth-not-throat thing! I'll start doing the exercises for the next couple of weeks, along with some reading aloud / talking very slowly and "exaggerating" the mouth movements ("exaggerating" in quotes because that's just how it seems to me since I'm used to under-doing them) and focusing on pronouncing vowels clearly. With a bit of luck this might help my French, my speaking in general, my Italian (another language where articulating vowels clearly is of great importance), and perhaps even my singing, which is something I've recently started trying to learn... We'll see though, I'm not getting too excited just yet.
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| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5209 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 101 of 104 03 December 2011 at 8:06pm | IP Logged |
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Yet another update. I had one of these ideas that's so obvious that I don't know why I didn't think of it much earlier: recording my Skype conversations so I can hear how my speech is when I'm talking normally rather than reading from a page. I did so today and my accent was indeed quite shocking, and I just wasn't talking loudly and clearly enough. I recorded some of the English conversation, and my French was definitely softer and less articulate than my English. While I was saying that it's a general problem for me and even my English isn't always clear and articulate, my French is still noticeably worse. I guess it's a bad habit I've developed so I need to sort it out. I'm sure the exercises I wrote about in my last post are useful, but only as long as I make an effort to apply them to all my speech.
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| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5209 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 102 of 104 05 December 2011 at 11:14am | IP Logged |
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I had a night out in French on Saturday - with a group French people and a few other non-French francophones. That's something I've been wanting to do for a while. For a while we were sitting round a big table in a noisy bar with loud music and it was the first time in a while that I've had significant difficulty with understanding - in that situation you just can't pick up every word, and while in your native language you can "fill in the gaps" enough to understand, that's not so easy in a foreign language that you don't know to such an advanced level. I was still feeling tired and rough from the night before (work night out, free alcohol, go figure) and all this was just a wee bit too much of a challenge for the mood I was in, and while I did make some effort to talk to the people next to me when they weren't in other conversations, I was mostly fairy quiet. As soon as the bar started to close and the music went off everything got a lot easier and I became a whole lot more sociable.
I told one guy about the articulation exercises and practice I've been doing in the last few days and he said he had noticed that I was already easier to understand since the last time he saw me on Tuesday - nice to know it seems to be working already! Still plenty work to be done of course. Two weeks until my time off work, already counting down the days! As I've said I'll be starting Italian, and of course doing plenty French practice. Apart from that I'll be spending a lot of time on music, mostly preparing some solo stuff to play at open mic nights and learning to sing. I plan to include a French song in my set, most likely the new Alcest song. I'll have a lot of time alone in the flat so ideal opportunity for all sorts of voice training with minimal embarrassment... Oh yeah, and I'm also planning on going out almost every night. Maybe I'm being a just wee bit over-ambitious with all my plans, but it's not very often that I have a whole 15 days of free time so I very much want to make the most of it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5209 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 103 of 104 12 December 2011 at 10:57am | IP Logged |
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I didn't have the best week last week, didn't sleep enough at the weekend then never really caught up for the rest of the week. I went to the two meetups I could fit in but wasn't in the most sociable mood thanks to the tiredness. I'm keeping up with the pronunciation exercises and efforts though. I've stopped doing shadowing for the moment except for slow texts like the early Assimil lessons - no point in running before I can walk and reinforcing bad habits.
I had a relatively free weekend and I started working on my singing, and dug out an old instructional DVD I've had for years but never really used. It has a bunch of voice exercises not only for singing but also for speaking - the instructor says that instead of singing being a completely different activity, you should speak like you sing and sing like you speak to an extent. And guess what the exercises help improve - exactly the same things I've been working on for my French! Speaking from the mouth rather than the throat (along with a very good explanation of what this actually means and how it feels - as if you're holding a pencil along your mouth and your voice comes "over the pencil" rather than under), articulating vowels clearly, not aspirating on plosive sounds, and improving fluidity of phrases. There are also some exercises for the tongue and jaw etc. that are similar to the ones I posted before. I love it when I find one of these "two birds, one stone" things. Actually if this helps with my general speaking and with future languages then that's many birds with one stone. I recorded some of my Skype conversation again and it sounded like, while it still needs a lot of work, my pronunciation wasn't quite as offensive as the last time. However I was speaking more loudly this time round because nobody else was in my flat, so that would have made my voice different. Should really have saved the recordings for comparison, ah well, too late. I'm aware that it's almost the end of the 2011 TAC and beginning of the 2012 one, and since I'll be starting Italian in a week (and of course am as excited as I'm sure all of us are when starting a new language) I might as well start the new TAC when I start Italian. So a summary of this year and a new log for next year will come, probably later this week. Edited by garyb on 12 December 2011 at 1:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5209 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 104 of 104 15 December 2011 at 11:21am | IP Logged |
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Right, TAC 2012 preparations are well under way and it's only two days before my time off, and hence my Italian learning, and hence my TAC 2012, starts. So it's time to finish off and summarise my TAC 2011.
My main focus during TAC 2011 was of course French, aiming to go from an intermediate B1-ish level to an advanced C1-ish level. French goals from my first TAC ‘11 post: Overall “Reach C1 by the end of the year” Judging by the descriptions at the Wikipedia CEFR page I’d say that my knowledge and understanding is probably at a C1 level, but my speaking isn’t quite there yet. The B2 description of “Can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party” describes my speaking much more accurately than the C1 “Can express him/herself fluently and spontaneously without much obvious searching for expressions; can use language flexibly and effectively for social, academic and professional purposes”. I don’t quite yet have the ease and spontaneity that characterise fluency, but I’m finding it easier and easier to express myself, and judging by my progress in the last few months I’m definitely on track. Vocabulary: “I'd like to reach a point where I can understand almost all of the general, non-specialised words I hear, and know enough to express myself in a manner that isn't necessary elegant but gets my point across and is mostly correct.” Definitely achieved. I never really “worked on vocabulary” as such, it just came from lots of exposure and talking. Listening: “I want to be able to understand regular social conversations well; perhaps not every single word, but enough to understand what's going on and to be able to join in.” Achieved. I now have little problem understanding, even in conversations with multiple native speakers, unless there’s a large amount of background noise. Again this just improved with exposure - conversations, radio, films and TV. Speaking: “My goal is to be able to have conversations with natives easily and be understood with good pronunciation.” Speaking has been my main area of focus, and I’ve certainly made some progress, especially after doing some proper phonetics study. My pronunciation has improved a fair amount, and native speakers can now almost always understand me, but I still wouldn’t go as far as calling it “good”; it’s still very much a work in progress and I’m still working on eliminating bad habits and improving my articulation and accent. Between the bad habits picked up by not focusing on pronunciation from the start and the difficulties of finding natives to speak to, this has been a hell of a lot of hard work for relatively unimpressive results. However I’ve certainly learned a lot of lessons about pronunciation that I’ll be able to apply to future languages to avoid going through the same sort of difficulty again. Italian I studied Italian for a couple of weeks in 2010 and intended to “restart” sometime in 2011. However I’ve done no work on it whatsoever in the last year, unless you want to count the listening practice of hearing it quite a lot due to having an Italian flatmate and some Italian friends. I decided that I’d be much better off focusing on French and getting it to a good level, by which point I’d be a more adept language learner and I’d get more of a “discount” thanks to my better French knowledge. This has definitely paid off I think, especially regarding the aforementioned lessons learned about pronunciation. Russian I started Russian because at the time it appeared that there was a good chance I’d be spending a few weeks in Ukraine, which seemed like as good an excuse as any. I did a lot of work on Russian for a few months and learned it to a very basic level where I was starting to get the hang of things, but as it became more apparent that the Ukraine trip wasn’t going to happen I lost interest and soon gave up, again deciding that I’d be better focusing my efforts on French. No regrets about picking it up or about dropping it. I’d definitely like to return to Russian or another Slavic language at some point in the future, but for now I’m far more interested in the Romance languages and will be focusing on them for the time being. Overall I think I overestimated my capabilities between reading about other forum members’ goals (mostly people who are far more experienced language learners and/or have far more free time than me) and seeing the speed at which I learned during my two weeks of work on Italian in 2010. Since French is the first foreign language that I've tried to learn to a good level, learning it has been a very long and inefficient process in which I’ve made a lot of mistakes and tried to figure out what works for me, and that combined with the difficulties in pronunciation and finding speakers, and the fact that I just simply don’t have a lot of free time between working full time, a busy social life, and a lot of interests, has meant that my progress hasn’t been as fast as I’d have liked. Despite all that I’m still immensely proud of what I have achieved and the level of French that I’ve attained, and hope to continue the good work. The year has been as much about learning how to learn languages as about learning languages, and I think I've built a good foundation for improvement of my French and learning of other languages. So that's TAC 2011 over for me, and my 2012 log will be coming soon! Edited by garyb on 15 December 2011 at 11:24am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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