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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 57 of 104 11 April 2011 at 12:13pm | IP Logged |
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Now that the Ukraine trip looks like it'll happen in May, I've once again found some motivation for Russian, so I did a lot of work on it at the weekend. I know I said before that I wasn't planning on learning more after finishing Pimsleur 1, but I decided that firstly I still lack some quite important basic knowledge, secondly that I could really do with consolidating my existing knowledge, and thirdly that it's an awesome language so I'd like to learn more :P.
I like Pimsleur because it teaches useful phrases and constructions and because of its programmed repetition; but for me its drawbacks are that it doesn't explain the grammar well enough so I'm often left wondering why, for example, "I have time" is "у меня время" but "I have some time" is "у меня немнога времени", and also it can be hard to pick out the pronunciation and spelling of unstressed syllables (is that времени or времини or времиня or what?) - and seeing it written also helps me remember better. And as I've said before, the Penguin book is a great resource but I don't find its "grammar then examples" style very useful for learning new material. So I've come up with a method that seems to work very well: I do Pimsleur, and whenever a phrase or point that I don't understand or that I struggle to remember comes up, I pause the recording, look up and study the relevant word and/or grammar point in the book, and write down the phrase in English and Russian along with any relevant explanation, for example the point that the noun after многа/немнога needs to be in the genitive case because it means "[not] much OF noun". As I say this method seems to be working well and I feel like I made a lot of progress at the weekend - my understanding of the phrases I knew is a lot more solid and the grammar is making a lot more sense. I've also been doing some of the exercises from the Penguin book for further consolidation and to improve my writing and spelling knowledge. Hopefully I'll keep up the progress! Anyway this method is a bit of a breakthrough for me. I don't think it's particularly useful for other languages: my French grammar knowledge is already quite advanced, and it seems like overkill for Italian although it may come in useful for some of the more awkward points, but for a "grammar-heavy" language like Russian it's just the ticket. 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 58 of 104 15 April 2011 at 12:40pm | IP Logged |
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Busy week, not much studying done. I've not done Assimil for a few days as it's just not high priority right now. I did go to the Meetup on Wednesday. As usual it started off slowly but later on I had quite a few good conversations; however later on most people decided they didn't want to talk to me any more and in any case it was getting late so I left. Overall it was definitely useful, and one of the French guys said that I had definitely improved recently, in that I seemed a lot more at ease with the language.
Someone also mentioned a weekly Saturday language meetup at the University that I hadn't heard of before, at which there's a table for each language. I looked it up but it seems to be very much aimed at students - seems like one of these things like student societies where non-students are welcome but will be seen as "outsiders", although since I'm an ex-student of the University and I still look like a student I might get an OK response, and the conversation might be more interesting to me than at, for example, Yakety Yak where most of the people are older. It's worth a try anyway, I'll go sometime if I'm free. I have an Internet connection at home now so hopefully I'll have time for plenty Skyping and SharedTalking. New goal: have a French conversation every day. And that takes priority over Assimil, watching TV, etc. Real life best, voice chat good, text chat acceptable; although Skype might be preferable to some of the real life meetups because I know for sure I'll get a good chance to talk! I know that every day is probably unrealistic given my unpredictable schedule, but I'll aim to get as close as possible. Only way I'll ever reach my goal in a reasonable amount of time. 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 59 of 104 16 April 2011 at 2:39pm | IP Logged |
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Latest news is that the Ukraine trip probably won't happen at all - shouldn't really have come as a surprise since I kept hearing so many different things. I still can't say for sure, but it looks quite unlikely. Which means I don't have much need for Russian. I'd love to continue studying it, especially since as I said a couple of posts ago I was really beginning to make progress and get the hang of it, but... I probably won't be in a situation in which it's useful any time soon, I don't have many Russian-speaking friends, I don't have any particular interest in the culture or literature, it's an interesting language to me but no more so than Italian etc... so overall I see little point in continuing.
Of course all the work I did wasn't a waste of time - as I probably said at the start of my log, Russian is a language that I knew I wanted to learn at some point, and no doubt will go back to at some point in the future, either once I've got the "big"/useful languages out the way (French, Italian, Spanish, German) or if it again becomes useful to me. And with my plans being as subject to change as always, maybe another Slavic language will suddenly become useful, so having made a start in Russian will help. Hell, if nothing else, saying you can speak a bit of Russian always impresses people a lot more than the usual Western European languages, haha. So... да свиданиа русский язык, ciao Italiano ! French will obviously remain my top priority for the next wee while but Italian will take the place of Russian as my "secondary" language of study. My plan is basically to get through Michel Thomas, finish off Pimsleur, then start speaking and start Assimil. I should be able to reach an intermediate level fairly quickly, especially if I learn from my mistakes with French and make speaking a major priority from early on. Edited by garyb on 16 April 2011 at 2:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6087 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 60 of 104 17 April 2011 at 2:07pm | IP Logged |
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Hi garyb!
It's fun reading your comments on speaking, esp. since I'm viewing that goal from afar ;) I read that you're trying to skype in French. Where do you find your French Skypers? I used SharedTalk when I was doing Japanese, until I realised how hard it was to find speakers. Most of the people I contacted prefered writing over speaking. So I quit skype and switched to just email. 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 61 of 104 17 April 2011 at 9:54pm | IP Logged |
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Cheers for reading! The only site I've found useful so far for Skype contacts is Conversation Exchange. And even at that it's difficult to coordinate and stick to a time to talk to each other - my speak-every-day mission has been a bit of a failure so far!
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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 62 of 104 19 April 2011 at 12:17pm | IP Logged |
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Finally got a French Skype conversation yesterday, and was told that I still have a LOT of work to do on my pronunciation - particularly speaking too deeply "from the mouth" rather than "from the throat" and I still get vowel sounds wrong sometimes, especially when I'm in a conversation and am not really thinking about proper pronunciation as much as I would be if I were, say, reading from a page. The microphone I'm using is a bit crap as well, so I'm getting a decent headset which should eliminate that variable; I'm told that I sound quite muffled and I think that's partly due to the mic.
That's really an issue I need to fix ASAP so it'll be my focus for the next week at least. To be honest I'm not sure exactly how to fix some of the problems; listening and imitating just doesn't seem to be enough for me. I might look for a good teacher (in real life or online) and do a few lessons just focusing on pronunciation; aside from that I might go through some of the FSI Phonology course again and record myself to compare my voice to recordings. I doubt I'll ever sound like a genuine French person, but I'd like to speak clearly enough that I can be understood without problems and don't sound like a foreigner butchering the language. I've been invited to stay in Paris for a few days, at at time when I'll be passing through there anyway after the festival, but unfortunately I've already booked my return flight in advance so I don't think I'll be able to do it. Damn this planning-in-advance stuff. 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 63 of 104 25 April 2011 at 3:18pm | IP Logged |
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I went to the meetup on Tuesday and it was good this time - plenty opportunity to speak (albeit not much with native speakers) and some interesting discussion about language learning and in particular phonetics and accent, so I got some advice about the problems I discussed in the last post.
I also discovered the site Fluent French as a result of some magical combination of keywords on Google, which has some good pronunciation tips. In particular I found their advice to keep the tongue down against the bottom teeth useful: just doing that seems to put the whole mechanism in a more appropriate position for speaking French. Their advice "speak from way back in the throat" conflicts with the elusive, easier-said-than-done "from the mouth, not from the throat" advice I'm always hearing; however I think they mean that the sound mostly comes from the throat and isn't modified too much by the mouth, as opposed to in English where the mouth does a lot of the work of modifying the sounds. Or something. Since I'm still unclear on a lot of things phonetics-wise, I ordered a book on the subject: The Sounds Of French. It claims to explain and help with common problems that English speakers encounter with French. I'll report back once I receive it. Hopefully it'll explain everything in the agonising detail that I seem to need, and if I read that and try to apply it when I'm speaking it'll be helpful. I had a Skype chat yesterday with the usual guy and he seemed to have less trouble understanding me, so perhaps the combination of a better microphone and applying some of the advice has helped. I recorded myself speaking a bit as well and, while I'm still far from having a native accent, I felt that I was quite understandable. But as always it's difficult to apply everything in a conversation as opposed to when slowly reading out sentences and focusing on the movements. I should get some reasonable practice at least: planning another Skype chat today, and meetups tomorrow and Wednesday. I was reading and watching some of Luca's stuff, as he makes accent an important part of his studies. He says that to have a decent accent, listening and repeating just isn't enough, you need detailed study and practice of the language's phonetics. Exactly what I've been thinking recently, amen. He suggests getting this out of the way near the start of the learning process, so you can focus on language acquisition afterwards and not have to worry about pronunciation, which is advice I'll keep in mind for Italian. I still keep hearing different things about whether or not I'll be going to Ukraine, so who knows. In any case French is keeping me busy and I don't have time for much else. I've had a long weekend but the time seems to have flown by without me getting a whole lot done in any area of life. Edited by garyb on 25 April 2011 at 3:20pm 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 64 of 104 28 April 2011 at 1:27pm | IP Logged |
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Four days in a row of speaking French... Barely.
Sunday and Monday: Skype conversations. Half an hour of solid French conversation each time, very useful as always. Tuesday: Exchange meetup, which was as bad as ever. For the first half there was a football match being shown at the bar, making conversation difficult, so everyone appeared to compensate for it by continuing to speak in English for the rest of the session. I got a few sentences of French in, but to be honest, while my speaking needs a LOT of work, I'm beyond the stage where saying just a few sentences is of any benefit. I need a longer conversation to actually get a good chance to put everything I've learnt into practice. I left after the second hour because I really felt like I was wasting my time and it didn't look like it would get better any time soon. Wednesday: French meetup, which was so-so. As I've said before, some of the people in the meetup group are friendly and willing to talk to me but some just aren't and even make efforts to exclude me from the conversation. I found myself surrounded by the latter types and wasted what felt like the best part of an hour, then made a strategic move to the other table. This other table was a lot friendlier; I was in a bit of a bad mood by this point and I must admit I inflicted a wee rant on the girl next to me, about how nobody at the other table wanted to talk to me and how most the Tuesday meetups are a complete waste of time, but it was a rant in French so it's all good. Other than that there was one very talkative Frenchman who dominated the conversation but there was enough opportunity to speak and he did make the effort to ask us questions about what he was saying. Overall not a highlight of my meetup-attending career but still much better than nothing. So my three main obstacles to fluency at the moment are: - Pronunciation and accent. - Spoken production, i.e., finding the right words/phrases to express what I'm talking about, even though I'd easily recognise these words/phrases on hearing them. - Finding people who want to speak to me in French. I still find myself making a lot of pronunciation errors, and too often falling into speaking with my default Anglophone accent rather than making the effort to use a French accent, but I'm becoming a lot more aware of my errors and correcting them which is a good start. As I've said, all the correct pronunciation I practise at home tends to go out the window as soon as I go into a real conversation, but it's just a case of habits. It's like with playing guitar: bad habits are completely correctable, but it can take months or even years before you become aware of them, during which time they hold up your progress without you realising. I've developed a lot of bad habits due to not focusing properly on phonetics from the start (just out of ignorance really; I didn't realise just how important it was) so I need to consciously and systematically correct them and apply the new habits to my conversational speech until they become natural. My phonetics book arrived yesterday; I've not had time for more than a quick look at it yet but I'll get stuck into it during the upcoming long weekend. As for the second problem, it's definitely improving with practice and should continue to do so. Generally the knowledge is there but it's just passive not "activated", so it's more a question of activation by using than learning anything new. Translating sentences such as those from Assimil dialogues from English to French, and having internal dialogues, are good "assistance exercise" for this and things I can do at any time, but having conversations is of course the "main exercise". Which brings me to the last problem, and unlike my pronunciation, I don't have such a clear idea of how to fix it. My issues with Meetups have been a common theme on this log so no need to moan more about them. Regarding the people being rude and ignoring me, it's the old social dilemma of "is it me or is it them?". Skype is good but it's hard to find partners and arrange a time to speak. SharedTalk is also very hit or miss and it's mostly just text chat, it's hard to find people who're up for voice chat on there. And I find face-to-face interaction a lot better in any case. And unlike Italian or Spanish, I don't really have any French-speaking friends other than a couple of acquaintances who I don't see very much. Ah well, I like to think that the old cliché that if you really want something enough you'll find a way to get it has some truth to it. Edited by garyb on 28 April 2011 at 1:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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