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TAC 2011 - Team Ohana – Le Cinéma Rex | ||
Tags: Dabbling | France | 6 Weeks Challenge (6WC) | Immersion | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | English | German | French | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5335 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 137 of 198 20 June 2011 at 5:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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I love your posts. And I got really nostalgic thinking about all the times I changed trains in Paris on my way
to Spain. Gare du Nord to Gare d'Austerlitz was my standard route. I used to go by train from my home town Tonsberg, South of Oslo to Granada. 4 nights on the train, as I was too scared to take a hotel room anywhere along the way. Agh, those were the days. Have fun in France, I' ll cross my fingers for you! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5336 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 138 of 198 27 June 2011 at 3:46pm | IP Logged | ||
4 nights on a train!? Wow, that must have been hell! By the way, both Tonsberg and Granada look like awesome places (from what I can see on Wikipedia). I've always wanted to go to Norway but everyone I know refuses to go with me because they think it's too cold. :P Thanks for the crossed fingers. I'm going to need it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5336 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 139 of 198 27 June 2011 at 4:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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Week 25: June 20 / June 26
French Week 25 (42): 14 h. 20 min. 2011: 406 h. 35 min. (Wheee! Reached the 400-hour mark in under six months!) This week’s result is a little disappointing in comparison to the previous but it’s mainly because I got sick for a couple of days and felt too miserable and listless to do anything for the rest of the week. As I mentioned in my previous post, I had a nice little list of things I promised myself I would do before next Saturday but I wisely decided to narrow it down to just two goals: reading Harry Potter et la Chambre des secrets and finishing Michel Thomas, which I later amended to “getting as far as possible through Michel Thomas” because I sensed failure heading my way. Harry Potter I am six chapters into the second Harry Potter book and I am enjoying it a lot more than the first. The narrator is the same (or if not, he does an eerily good imitation of the original narrators’ character voices) but I think the difference is that I may just have read the first book one or two dozen times too many. The second was never my favorite so I didn’t re-read it as often and consequently, reading it now is actually a lot of nostalgic fun. One thing that’s rather annoying is the fact that both the audio and the text I have seem to be abridged (or just badly translated), only in different ways. This means that sometimes the audio omits several lines that are in the book or the narrator rattles on while the text cuts or modifies entire paragraphs. As a result, whenever I am suddenly lost, I am never sure if I have to quickly skip ahead to keep up with the audio or if I have to wait for the narrator to catch up with me. Thankfully, my listening comprehension is good enough to make it no more than a minor annoyance but it was rather confusing the first several times that it happened. As I mentioned, I plan to finish this one before next Saturday and if I manage to keep up the pace at which I am going right now, that should be easy. Films I keep a (not so) little stash of films on my external hard drive in case I suddenly crave a film (which I tend to do unexpectedly and obsessively) and this week I suddenly felt like watching Pirates of the Caribbean so I was very pleased to discover that at some point in the past, I had to foresight to make sure I had the entire trilogy (not the fourth film of course, since I refuse to acknowledge its existence), dubbed and ready to go, so I watched all three of them in succession. I also saw the French film Les femmes du 6ème étage in Theater Tuschinski and was very pleased to find I hardly needed the subtitles at all, not even for the large parts of dialogue that were spoken with thick Spanish accents. And of course my favorite bit in the entire movie was a quick shot of a little book called L’espagnol sans peine which made me elbow the person sitting next to me in the ribs and exclaim: “OMG look, it’s Assimil!” Reply: “Who?” Annecy I was supposed to receive some information about my host family several weeks back and I was getting very impatient when I still didn’t know anything last week but I immediately forgot all about my irritation when I got the email a couple of days ago. I will be staying with a lady (we will call her Madame T.) who apparently 1) loves to cook for her guests, 2) is an English professor and 3) loves cinema. Seriously, could this be any more perfect? My only concern is that in my email to her, I felt compelled (somewhat stupidly perhaps) to point out our shared interest in the English language so it will probably take a lot of determination to keep all conversation in French. Ah well, too late to change that now. So, since I will leave this Saturday, my next update will be written in sunny Annecy. I am toying with the idea of posting a little update every (other) day while I’m there but that all depends on how much I actually have to talk about so I am not making any promises. In the meantime, I will go back to trying to get this maddening song out of my head. My father made me listen to it earlier this week after one of my enthusiastic exclamations of “Ik ga naar Frankrijk!” reminded him of it and it only took one listen for the refrain to get stuck in my head (as annoying songs tend to do) so in a couple of days, I will probably be worrying my fellow passengers by involuntarily singing: “Ik ga naar Frankrijk, ik kom nooit meer terug. Ik ga naar Frankrijk, ik kom nooit meer terug. Ik ga naar Fraaaaankrijk. Ik kom nooooooit meer terug!” 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5335 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 140 of 198 27 June 2011 at 4:54pm | IP Logged | ||
It was four nights on four trains, and very enjoyable. I took the night train from Oslo to Copenhagen, and spent the day there shopping and sight seeing and eating Danish pastry, then I would take the train to Paris where I would visit the Impressionist Museum and the Latin quarters, and have dinner on a cozy little restaurant before I left for Madrid. There I went to have churros at la Puerta de Sol before going to el Prado, el Parque del Buen Retiro and sometimes to the Zoo, ending the evening with some tapas, before boarding the train for Granada. I always kept a couple of suitcases in Granada, with the basic clothes and shoes, so that I could travel light, just bringing a new dress, my favourite jeans or a few tops and some presents. As for visiting Norway, just get in touch and let us find a time. You are more than welcome to visit us!!! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5336 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 141 of 198 04 July 2011 at 12:59am | IP Logged | ||
Thank you, that would be awesome! I will definitely do that as soon as I find the time, which may not be for a while. And of course, if you're ever in Amsterdam (or somewhere close-by) and need a local guide, you know where to find me. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5336 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 142 of 198 04 July 2011 at 1:24am | IP Logged | ||
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Week 26: June 27 / July 3
Firstly, I need to congratulate all the brave TAC-ers who’ve made it to the halfway point. This challenge has been a blast so far and I hope the second half will be even more fun with plenty of studying and annihilating of bad habits. Speaking of annihilation, that brings me to the subject of my journey to Annecy (where I am right now, for those who’ve somehow managed to miss it). As I predicted (I know myself well), it was not an altogether smooth ride, but surprisingly, most of it was not my fault. The Train That Wasn’t We will begin our tale by flashing back to yesterday, around 8 in the morning local time, which is when I arrived at the train station of Dordrecht from where I was supposed to take a train to Brussels, only to find out on arrival that said train had been canceled for reasons that never became clear to me. Now, this train only runs once an hour so that meant that I would have missed my connection in Brussels and subsequently the one in Paris as well. Due cause for a panic attack, you would think, and I would surely have had one had I been alone. But thankfully, my mother had decided to drive me to the station and see me off so as soon as the completely useless NS-people explained there was nothing for it but to wait for the next train, she decided to drive me all the way to Brussels. Bruxelles-Midi ≠ Brussel Centraal There was some talk of dropping me off at Antwerp station and me taking a train to Brussels from there but since the internet on my phone was not cooperating and my father, brother, neighbors and the Dutch and Belgian railways were all not answering their phones, we decided it was too risky to wing it. We were supposed to arrive in Brussels a good half hour before the train’s departure but since maneuvering around a city one does not know very well is a time-consuming nightmare, we arrived with just fifteen minutes left. Now, here is where I must claim my role in this unfortunate affair. Since I was still in a state of slight panic and confusion at the time, I had told the GPS that we wanted to go to Brussel Centraal, which I assumed was the same as Bruxelles-Midi. It wasn’t until we were already in Brussels (I had plenty of time to think since we got lost on our way to the station) that the thought started nagging me that if it was central station, wouldn’t they have called it Bruxelles Central? Well, they did. I found this out after I strolled leisurely into Brussels Central Station and looked for my train on the board of departures, when I noticed that an awful lot of them were apparently going to Bruxelles-Midi, which was translated into Dutch as Brussel Zuid. Crap. So that’s how I found out that I was in the wrong station and that my train was departing from Brussels South, which for all I knew could have been on the complete other side of town. At this point, I had about ten minutes left so I raced back to the car, frantically told the GPS where I really wanted to go (whoever invented those things, you are my hero!) and we drove to Bruxelles-Midi in record time (we could have been even faster if not for the obligatory getting-stuck-behind-huge-trucks-who-have-no-business-drivin g-through-narrow-streets). Rush rush, hurry hurry, and as I was sprinting to the platform, I was in full-on panic mode at this point, my mother calmly told me to stop freaking out because my train had been delayed and wasn’t leaving for another fifteen minutes. The Ephemeral Sunglasses I remember predicting that I would not arrive in Annecy with all of my luggage intact, and this prediction proved to be spot-on as well. On the way to Brussels, my mother had borrowed my new sunglasses that I had bought the day before and just before I got out of the car to run to my train, she remembered to give them back to me, which was quite extraordinary in itself since she’s almost as Swiss-cheesed brained as I am. The only problem was that this took place in front of the wrong station, and by the time we had stressed and panicked our way over to the right one, we had both forgotten all about them so when I turned on my phone about half an hour later, I had five or six missed calls and a text telling me that my glasses were to be found at the train-bar, where she had dropped them off after discovering that she was still wearing them because she couldn’t find me. I looked for and found the bar once we had arrived in Paris but no one there had seen my sunglasses and I was too freaked out about the next leg of my journey to worry about them much so I decided to consider them a sacrifice to appease the God of Travel that would hopefully secure my safe passage through the part of the journey that I had been dreading the most. Le Métro d’Horreur It will come as no surprise to anyone that after all these near-heart-attacks I’d suffered that day, I had already ruled out trying to visit Le Cinéma Rex long before I ever set foot in Paris. This turned out to be a very good idea because once I had very inelegantly dragged my suitcase through those tiny gates (which for some inexplicable reason are not suitable for travelers with luggage at all) and got into the right metro (heading in the right direction, that’s another thing I tend to do wrong in subways), it turned out the station where I was supposed to transfer had been temporarily terminated which meant that the route I had so carefully planned out the night before was completely useless and I had to come up with a new one on the spot. Cue panic attack # 14. Thankfully, I underestimate my own intelligence sometimes (or overestimate the complexity of the Parisian subway, but I prefer to think it’s the first) because I figured out a new route to Gare de Lyon and didn’t get lost once, though I never did manage to get through those gates with my dignity intact (my number one rule as a tourist: in case of embarrassment; smile, pretend this is what you intended to do all along). Annecy My last train departed late because of some incident I never quite understood but apart from that, this was by far the most stress-free part of my journey, since I knew my hostess would be waiting for me at the station so there would be no possibility of getting lost. So after almost four hours of enjoying the breathtaking scenery (I love mountains), I arrived in Annecy at half past five in the afternoon, after almost ten hours of travel, of which I probably spent half freaking out. French Week 26 (43): 17 h. 20 min. 2011: 423 h. 55 min. By Friday evening, I had only studied for about four hours, which would probably have made this week the worst so far this year if not for the fact that I have been hearing and speaking nothing but French since my arrival. Contrary to what I had feared, my hostess has not spoken a word of English to me and I find (to my delight) that understanding her and her friends does not pose much of a problem. Speaking is a different matter so I spend most of the time just listening but when I do speak, I apparently do so well enough to earn compliments and assurances that I have a good base and will improve hugely over the course of the four weeks. I had meant to write more about my first 1½ day here but it’s late and I have to get up early tomorrow to go to class so it will have to wait. Bonne nuit. Edited by ReneeMona on 04 July 2011 at 10:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5335 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 143 of 198 04 July 2011 at 10:25am | IP Logged | ||
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Your last post actually caused me physical pain. I have been working out a lot lately, and my stomach muscles took a rather severe beating at my last session, and are still in a fragile state. Reading this post I laughed so hard that I was in real pain, but hey, it was still worth it. :-)
And I agree that the stations in Brussels have illogical names. One would think that Midi would be in the middle. I have made the same mistake myself, though with slightly more time on my hands. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Vos Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5567 days ago 766 posts - 1020 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Polish | Message 144 of 198 05 July 2011 at 1:00am | IP Logged | ||
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Fantastic post Renee, your English is phenomenal, really. And your vocabulary is impressive, and what's better is
that they're all placed and utilised at exactly the right time. Glad to hear that you finally made it to Annecy despite the abundant hurdles and that you've been speaking nothing but French since arriving. How exciting! Have a most wonderful time, take lots of photos, explore the countryside and simply enjoy. Have a great summer! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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