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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 |  | |
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5336 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 10 of 198 01 January 2011 at 12:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@Fasulye: Dankjewel. Ik wens jou ook heel veel succes toe met je talenstudie dit jaar.
@Kuikentje: Ik denk ook dat we een heel goed team vormen met z’n vieren. ------------------------------------------------------------ Happy new year, everyone! I hope you’ve all managed to keep all your limbs and eyes in place. Last night marked the first time I celebrated the new year in Amsterdam and it was certainly an experience I won’t soon forget. I even managed to get some practice out of it when a drunk French guy assaulted my bike. I’m afraid my studying over the last few days has been quite inconsistent. Everything that I’ve done has been in between bouts of a very peculiar flu that can’t seem to make up its mind on whether it really wants me to be ill or not. French Now that the TAC has officially begun, it’s about time I explain my French study regime. I started with it about four months ago and it’s based on my dislike of actual studying. My experience with learning English is that immersion is by far the best way for me to acquire a language naturally so I like working with as much native materials as possible. Apart from that, I’m also a university student with limited and inconsistent amounts of time available for studying so I devised my schedule to be flexible. I have a list of about six or seven activities (I change it around every now and then) that I have to finish each week. Some take a lot of time and some only about twenty minutes so that I can choose one of them depending on how much time I have to spend studying on a particular day. For now, I’m focusing mainly on my passive skills so I do a lot of reading and film watching. I stocked up on children’s books when I was in Orléans this summer and I’m half way through Charlie et la chocolaterie. I read one chapter a week and underline and memorise any words I don’t know. This week I underlined a very inconvenient 68 words (usually it’s only about 30-40) so that combined with my flu, upcoming exams and the holidays means the week is now nearly over and I’m probably not going to be able to finish my list. That’s okay though, because my last exam is this Monday and after that, I’ll have almost an entire month before school starts back up again to get some hardcore studying done. Arabic I take back what I said about the bol.com people. It seems I’ve had the rare foresight to have my Arabic book delivered to my home in Amsterdam so it was waiting for me when I arrived. I’ve been leafing through it and it looks interesting. The only complaint I have is that it doesn’t teach the alphabet until the very end of the book but transcribes everything phonetically. But then again, since I’m learning the spoken language, I’m probably not going to be writing in it anyway. Edited by ReneeMona on 30 May 2011 at 2:13pm 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 11 of 198 05 January 2011 at 2:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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School is not going as well as I had hoped but I refuse to let it distract me from my languages. I’ve finished my French studying from last week and have already begun on the list for this week. I still haven’t officially started on Arabic, which I’m postponing for when I have an entire day to myself to delve into it and really get the basics right.
French Today is the last day of the fourth month of my intensive French studying (as opposed to the “Oh, I’m studying! Why, I learnt a new word just three days ago!” studying I had been doing for a couple of months before) and I’m very pleased with the results so far. Spoken French no longer sounds like the speaker is in a hurry to catch a train and I can easily read almost all levels of written French, even if there is still a lot of unknown vocabulary. It’s amazing to think that I’ve achieved more in five months on my own than six years in a classroom. It also makes me wonder how fluent I could have been by now if I had been smart or willing enough to put just a little more effort into my French class when I was still at school. With a native-speaker teacher at my disposal and just a few hours of immersion per week, I daresay I could have been at advanced fluency by now. English Over the last couple if days, I’ve been watching a disproportionate amount of documentaries, most of them about Charles Darwin, and it’s annoying how rarely I hear a word I don’t know. Listening to four hours of English and having exactly one new word to show for it at the end of it makes the entire effort feel rather redundant. But if I’m honest, the documentaries are kind of a cop-out. I know exactly what I can do to improve. The problem is getting over some stupid kinks in my thinking. I’ve been faithfully underlining words in a book I’ve been reading (not the words I don’t know, but rather the words I can’t translate into Dutch) and I could probably fill an afternoon just copying all of them into my computer and translating them, perhaps even memorising them. But the idea of actually studying English, really working on it the way I work on French, is rather … confusing. Learning English has always happened so naturally and unconsciously that it feels strange to imagine myself actually putting my back into it. The language already feels so much a part of me already that I can’t consider it a target language anymore. This is all very stupid, and I’m probably overthinking it (I have a habit of analysing everything to death) so one of these days I’m just going to set aside my pride and set myself to the task. If anything, I can at least amuse myself with trying to figure out the differences been American English and British English. I’m currently stuck in a BE period (been watching Pride and Prejudice again, which never fails to inspire me to adopt the docile tones of Received Pronunciation) and so far, even watching the entire sixth season of House, M.D. in a matter of days hasn’t been enough to pull me out of it. Edited by ReneeMona on 30 May 2011 at 2:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| rob4languages Groupie Egypt Joined 5198 days ago 53 posts - 55 votes Speaks: Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: English | Message 12 of 198 13 January 2011 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi ReneeMona!
I see you're so interest in B.E , I think B.E is good but look at A.E (American Accent) , It's more easy I think though the resources for B.E is much more than A.E , but I think A.E is easy to follow 'coz of all good series & movies that you can watch (like Vampire Diaries , SmallVille , Lost , Lie To Me , ...etc.) but I know also some good British series (like Life On Mars ) any way B.E or A.E , English is English but with some differences at Grammar , Vowels, .. etc. I wish you a good & a perfect year and making a good progress in your study ! Robert Edited by rob4languages on 13 January 2011 at 3:15pm 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 13 of 198 13 January 2011 at 4:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi Robert, it's true that American English is more omnipresent but I've never had trouble finding enough resources to listen to British English. In fact, I've received such large doses of both over the years that now I can't choose which to adopt as my standard accent. I sometimes wish I'd been more structured in the way I learnt English so I might now not constantly be thrown between these two dialects. I probably sound stupid switching from one to the other every few weeks but I simply can't choose one because I've grown to love both so much that relinquishing one feels vaguely like sending one of my children to the gas chambers. (That sounded more dramatic than I meant it)
So instead of just choosing one, I've set myself the insane task of achieving native fluency in both. I think I'm doing alright so far but I still have trouble keeping American vocabulary out when I'm speaking BE and I think my RP accent sounds a little too affected. I hope to remedy this with an extended stay in England, possibly through a university exchange project. Edited by ReneeMona on 10 February 2011 at 7:30am 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 14 of 198 13 January 2011 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
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French
In the first few weeks that I studied French seriously, I always spent between 14 and 17 hours per week on French. But with motivation waning and school work waxing, that number dropped to less than 10 hours per week in the last two months, which is really pathetic. So I’ve decided to set myself a minimum of 10 hours each week, maybe more if this turns out to be easily achievable. Last week I managed to clock in a decent 12 hours and this week looks good as well. I’ve combined all my vocabulary lists from the last four months and together they constitute almost 2,000 words. I planned on taking an entire afternoon to do a grand review to see how many of them I’ve remembered but I’m afraid I’ll have forgotten more than half of them so I decided against it. I watched La Princesse et la Grenouille last week, which I thought went rather well, until I found out afterwards that I’d apparently been watching the Quebec French version. I don’t know whether to be pleased that I could still understand so much of it or annoyed that I listened to one and a half hour of a completely different dialect without noticing the difference. Whenever I watch clips in Quebec French on YouTube I always fancy that I can hear a definite difference in the pronunciation but apparently I’ve been deceiving myself. I’ve decided to try and avoid listening to anything but standard French until I’m at a basic fluency level at least to make sure that my accent doesn’t become such a hopeless hodgepodge as my accent in English. Arabic I felt very guilty last week when my Egyptian friend asked me how I was getting on and I had to tell him that I hadn’t even started on Arabic yet. He left for Egypt yesterday so that gives me a week to ten days to make an impressive beginning. I’ve had a look at the pronunciation key in the front of the book and I’m pleased to see this is not a book for phonology-lays. I really hate it when a sound is described as sounding “somewhere between a French u and a Dutch ui”. Right. In any case, I won’t be paying much attention to their explanations on pronunciation anyway since I have three native speakers at my disposal to help me with my accent. Edited by ReneeMona on 30 May 2011 at 2:17pm 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 15 of 198 18 January 2011 at 6:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Week 2: January 10 / January 16
I had a bit of a slow start this week because I had to finish an essay and my room was in desperate need of a premature spring cleaning. I also spent a day fighting off a particularly nasty bout of wanderlust. I discovered that my knowledge of Latin and French makes trying to figure out Italian song lyrics a fun challenge and this set me off comparing Italian and French pronunciation and vocabulary. This then led me to a couple of interesting articles on Italian grammar and before I knew it I was downloading (oh dear, did I say downloading? I meant legally buying of course!) a couple of audio books and films for an afternoon of immersion. Note to self: Don’t listen to Italian music for more than 15 minutes at a time. French Week 1 (18): 12 h. Week 2 (19): 09 h. 40 min. 2011: 21 h. 40 min. I will spend the weekend at my parents’ this week and I look forward to practising a little French with my mother, even if I have to remind her not to speak Dutch every other sentence. She will at least understand the humour of the situation when I tell her about the time I said “Il porte une crevette” instead of “Il porte une cravate”. (My father and brother would think I’m talking about liquor.) I’m a bit hesitant to write in French in my log because I don’t think I write very well yet but at the same time it feels strange to write a log about my French studies without ever actually writing any of it in French. So, shoving my perfectionism aside, here it goes; FR: Aujourd’hui j’ai regardé Le Roi Lion encore une fois. Je crois que maintenant je l’ai vu environ dix fois pendant les quatre derniers mois. Mais j’ai une excuse pour cette obsession! Chaque fois que je le regarde, j’ai appris un petit plus donc je comprends un petit plus et ça me rend plus motivée qu’avant. C’est une bonne façon de suivre mes progrès. Et en outre, les voix dans cette version sont particulièrement bien choisies. J’aime la voix basse de Mufasa et la voix du petit Simba est trop mignonne! As always, any and all corrections are welcome. Especially if they’re nitpicky ones about grammar. ;-) EDIT: Typos and corrections. Edited by ReneeMona on 30 May 2011 at 2:19pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6143 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 16 of 198 19 January 2011 at 12:22am | IP Logged | |||||
Well, since you're looking for nitpicky grammar corrections...
It should be parents', with the apostrophe on the outside since it's plural. But judging from your otherwise native command of English I'd guess that this was just a typo.
N'oublie jamais l'accord! Peut-être qu'un Français pourra en trouver plus à corriger, mais je crois que c'est tout. Très bien écrit! 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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