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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 |  | |
| joanthemaid Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5471 days ago 483 posts - 559 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, German | Message 193 of 198 18 October 2011 at 9:13am | IP Logged |
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Joyeux anniversaire Renée! 700 heures de français O_O... T'es la meilleure!
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| nogoodnik Senior Member United States Joined 5570 days ago 372 posts - 461 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Modern Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew, Russian, French | Message 194 of 198 19 October 2011 at 5:47am | IP Logged |
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Another Happy Birthday! That is excellent news that you are going to Paris and I hope you will provide us with a
report of your trip so that I may live vicariously through 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 195 of 198 26 October 2011 at 11:13pm | IP Logged |
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Weeks 41-42 : October 10th – October 23rd
Midterms are officially over! It's been a pretty stressful week and all I really want right now is to go to sleep but since I'll be away for the next four days, I wanted to write in my log before leaving. I was pretty upset when I didn't have time to write my log update last week but I think I will thank myself for it when I get my grades back. I haven't done any deliberate language studying for almost a week and it's kind of scary how easy it is to get used to. That's why I'm pretty excited to go to Paris tomorrow and be reminded of how much I suck and why I'm doing this. Next week I'll be back to my normal laid-back schedule so I plan to finally make a new list of weekly things to be done (and go to that stupid Maison Descartes!) Week 41 (58): 25 h. 25 min. 2011: 757 h. 45 min. It's kind of sad that this was a very good week with over 25 hours worth of studying and I have absolutely no recollection of what I did. I suppose I went to class and did my homework but apart from that I have absolutely no.... oh wait, I just remembered something. Something rather cool, actually. Since watching Être et Avoir was a success, I decided to watch a film that I've been wanting to watch for several years but I couldn't find it and when I finally did, I had started studying French so I decided to put off watching it until I could watch it without subtitles. I tried to watch it several months ago but noticed it was still too difficult so seeing it this week and not finding it very difficult to understand at all felt like a pretty important milestone. Like Être et Avoir, this film features a lot of mumbling four-year-olds and the fun thing about those is that they make listening to adults seem very easy because at least they articulate. Week 42 (59): 3 h. 30 min. 2011: 761 h. 15 min. Ouch, I think we have a new worst week of the year. Still, it was both the week of my birthday and the last week before my midterms so I suppose this was to be expected. And I did spend those three hours studying for several different tests so you could even argue that they were far more useful than the twenty-three hours from the week before. Oh, and then there was some writing to a potential pen-pal and I read a letter that came with by far my most exciting birthday present. Up next on Le Cinéma Rex Since my last midterm was today and I am leaving for Paris early next morning, this week is probably going to be a lot more exciting than the last two. I'll be in Paris until Sunday and return in time for the kick-off of the next Six Week Challenge, for which I'll be studying Old English. I'm really lookign forward to this challenge because of a super exciting birthday present I got this week from a very good friend, which included a book of Anglo-Saxon poetry as well as L'indonésien sans peine, which will undoubtedly lead to some Indonesian dabbling in the (near)future. Thanks again, very good friend, you know who you are. :D -------------------------------------------------------- @ Solfrid Cristin: Takk, I did have a wonderful day, which was a surprise since I usually don't like my birthdays. I'm still not too impressed with my own French but a native speaker recently called my written French “wonderful” so I think I may finally be making some progress. @ Ellasevia: Merci beaucoup! Comme tu le sais déjà, j'ai passé une journée plutôt fantastique bien que j'étais un peu épuisée. Le problème avec mon insomnie est qu'il n'est jamais là quand j'en ai besoin. Par exemple, cette dernière semaine ça aurait pu servir de ne pas avoir besoin de dormir, mais bien sûr tout d'un coup j'avais sommeil tout le temps. L'insomnie est nul. @ Joanthemaid: Merci! Si j'étais la meilleure autrefois, je ne l'ai surtout pas été cette dernière semaine mais je suppose qu'il faut bien laisser la place aux autres, histoire de ne pas les décevoir (ooh, j'aime bien ça. Ça donne l'air que j'étais nulle exprès.) @ Nogoodnik: Thank you. I will probably write another way too long report of my struggle with the Parisian metro and the itinerary for the trip includes some interesting places that I've never been to before so I'll probably be inspired enough to include some other things as well. Edited by ReneeMona on 09 November 2011 at 3:29pm 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 196 of 198 22 November 2011 at 8:19am | IP Logged |
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Hi, waiting for you report on the French metro! I laughed so much when you wrote about your last trip to France :-)
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| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5336 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 197 of 198 29 December 2011 at 11:50pm | IP Logged |
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HAPPY HOLIDAYS EVERYONE!!!
I can't believe it has been this long since I updated my log. Needless to say, I got a little sidetracked. I had a wee burn-out after my midterm test week because trying to cram twenty hours of French study into a week on top of university courses and a job is just not a good idea. After a few weeks, I just stopped counting my hours entirely because there was nothing to be counted. This is partly because I was too tired and busy with other things to do anything and partly because I've decided to drastically overhaul the way I study and with the amount of studying I was doing (none), it seemed silly to put it off until next year. But more about that later. First I think I have an outstanding promise concerning an account of my trip to Paris. I will try to remember as much about it as possible but I'm a little fuzzy on the details because it was nearly two months ago so please bear with me (and if you don't want to, I guess you can just stop reading). After three trips through Paris within the space of four months, I am getting noticeably better at navigating the subway. I was one of the few in my group (which consisted of about fifteen people) whose suitcase did not get stuck in those infernal entrance gates and after I got the hang of figuring out my way through the jungle of lines and stations, I found myself almost enjoying it. I did have a small situation one night when I took the wrong metro in the wrong direction, got the same wrong metro in the same wrong direction again because I got lost on my way to the opposite platform and ended up on the same, and then got the right metro but still in the wrong direction. I also got lost in Montmartre on my way back from a Halloween party but that was quite easily resolved by walking back to exactly where I started and trying again. As always, I did my best to overcome shyness and snobbery and practice French with as many people as possible. Unfortunately (and as per usual), the city seemed to be conspiring against me. A lot of people I asked for directions turned out to be tourists themselves or otherwise incapable of speaking French with me. The most embarrassing incident featured a woman to whom I had been talking for around a minute before she finally managed to make me understand that she was deaf, which made me feel so guilty that she got me to donate the entire content of my wallet to whatever deaf society she was collecting money for. I also had a very animated discussion with a shopkeeper who, hearing where I was from, charged me with saying hi to an old flame who apparently owns a restaurant in my hometown. I have so far been unable to find this restaurant and I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing because judging from the malicious-looking grin on his face, I have a feeling the relationship may have ended badly and he was just aiming to rub some salt into an old wound. But that’s just my overactive imagination’s interpretation, of course. Our hotel was located in the middle of Montmartre and sitting on the steps of Le Sacré Coeur, drinking wine and discussing politics with boys in tweed jackets and girls wearing red lipstick, I actually got quite close to that bohemian idea of being a carefree student/artist in Paris (even though the illusion was slightly diminished when people pulled out beer and cheese balls). French students are definitely very different from English students and I was considered somewhat of an oddity, though of course still langophilic enough to be worth conversing with. There was even another girl who’d studied languages on her own and whose wish list included the likes of Swedish, Hebrew and Russian. Naturally, I ended up spending a lot of time talking with her. Most of us had already visited Paris many times before and some of the French students were either living in Paris or had lived there before so thankfully, the scheduled visits were very interesting. Highlights were a visit to the Pompidou Centre, a treasure hunt through parts of the city I had never been to before, and going to the movies, which I was a bit apprehensive about but even without subtitles, it wasn’t hard to follow at all. However, most of the time we were simply set loose to figure out what we wanted to do for ourselves. I sniffed out some wonderful little book stores and bought more books than I had room for in my suitcase, including L’arabe pour les nuls, a book about Indonesian and some others than I can’t remember the titles of. Apart from that I just strolled around a lot. On our last day, I went to visit Le Cinéma Rex and considering the name of this log, I have to talk about this in some detail. Of course, my log was technically not named after the cinema itself. It’s actually named after my mother’s response to the annoying demand “Say something in French.”, to which she always replies (=shouts) “PIN PON PIN PON AAAAAAAH C’EST LE CINÉMA REX QUI BRÛLE!!!!, a phrase she apparently read way back in her high school French book in a story about the famous cinema burning down (which, as far as I know, never happened). It’s become a popular catch phrase in my family and that coupled with me being a film geek is why I chose it as a title. Anyway, back to the real Rex. Before entering the actual cinema, I went on the Les Etoiles du Rex-tour next door. We were led around in a small group by a sort of omnipresent invisible guide and we got to see a lot of film-related artefacts, as well as an original projection booth. The only downsides were that being such a film nerd, I already knew the vast majority everything the guide told us about the movie-making process and I detest interactive tours so I was very annoyed when we were constantly required to get on platforms and speak into microphones. The proper conduct in a museum, in my humble opinion, is to shuffle slowly through room after room with your hands held behind your back or touching your chin and your brow furrowed in a profound look of contemplative concentration. After completing the tour, I bought a ticket to see a movie on the biggest screen in Europe, which is appropriately called le grand large. Since there weren’t many movies playing (and the movie wasn’t the primary aim of the visit anyway), I decided to take a change on Tin Tin, which I would normally not have bothered with. The amazing thing about the le grand large is that the auditorium is made to look like you’re outside, enjoying a movie on an open-air stage under a starry sky. The screen is actually suspended from the ceiling right in front of the balcony, which I didn’t see coming so I sat way too close to it. Le grand large is indeed very grand and very large, a little too large perhaps, because it gave me that really uncomfortable feeling when you’re watching a big screen from too close and your eyes feel like they’re going to turn out of their sockets from moving back and forth across the screen too much. I’m pretty sure a screen as large as le grand large could cause epilepsy attacks. Tin Tin turned out to be the most boring film I’ve seen in a long time (I’ve now tried to watch it three times and I just can’t get through it) so I was quite relieved to get a call from one of the French students saying that we needed to assemble to wait for the bus a half hour earlier then was originally said, which gave me an excuse to walk out on it. I had a final little panic attack on my way back to the hotel because the subway gate wouldn’t eat my ticket so I had to walk all the way to the next station because this one didn’t have any customer service. Thankfully, the service lady at the next station had that magical ability of dismissively saying “Yes, it does work” and then suddenly it does. Talking to customer service people all the time, it struck me that one good thing about my constant troubles with French public transport is that I get loads of opportunities to approach people and speak French with them for a legitimate reason. These days, I’m not even nervous about approaching people anymore. So, that was my action-packed trip to Paris. Now, as for my new study method. There's really nothing revolutionary about it but for the last couple of months, the thought has been nagging me that obsessively counting my study time is rather a waste of time. I am very competitive and a control-freak so it's fun to keep track of how much time I've spent studying but I think it's been taking away from the quality of my studying. I'm also just kind of tired of constantly watching the time, calculating, estimating and writing it all down in my log because it gets really restrictive after a while. Therefore, I've decided to just do away with all of it. I'm not sure what exactly I'm going to do but it’s probably going to be another list of activities (I love lists, after all) only without any time requirements. I’ve already implemented a system of making sure I’m always reading a book in English, Dutch and French because I don’t read enough (a downright sin for a literature student) and I plan to also watch at least one or two films a week. So I guess it’s not really a new study method at all, since I’ll be doing the exact same things I used to do, but more of a new way of keeping track of things. Quality over quantity is the central idea here. Oh, and I almost forgot about my grades! I managed to get nothing but good grades on all my grammar and vocabulary tests and I even got a 9 for listening comprehension, which I wasn't expecting because I'd been too tired and caught-up in other things to do any of the listening exercises. It was a simple transcription exercise of a snippet of audio about the attacks in Norway and I had missed the part of the introduction where they said we didn't have to transcribe any of the foreign names so I spent some time painstakingly figuring out the spelling of unfamiliar Norwegian and English names said in a French accent. The end result was probably fairly amusing. I eventually passed the course with an 8,4 out of ten. Now as for this year’s final results. I’m a little disappointed with them but considering that I’ve done nearly nothing for two months of it, they’re not as bad as they could have been: French: 781 h. 40 min. German: 93 h. Spanish: 39h. 30 min. Arabic: 3 h. 50 min. Esperanto: 2 h. 35 min. Old English: 1 h. 40 min. Greek: 45 min. --------------------------- Total: 923 h. Weekly average: 17 h. 45 min. Daily average: 2 h. 32 min. All things considered, it’s not been a bad year. I managed to (mostly) keep from dabbling, went to a language festival in Belgium, spent a very interesting month in France (which seems an eternity ago now), took part in two 6 Week Challenges that were both great fun, and most importantly, made a lot of progress with my French. A year ago, I was underlining ten words per page in a children’s book and having trouble following the dialog in Disney movies, and now I’m reading novels without a dictionary and watching authentic French films in Parisian cinemas. If I set aside my obsession with numbers and look at it that way, I’m actually very satisfied with this year’s progress. Well, that’s it for this year. I’d like to thank everyone who read my log, with a special thanks to all the people who left comments because it’s always a huge relief to know that someone liked your ramblings enough to comment on them. Also, a shout-out to my fantastic fellow Team Ohana-ers and all the other TAC-ers and I wish you all a very happy and very linguistic new year! Edited by ReneeMona on 02 January 2012 at 5:03pm 2 persons have 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 198 of 198 30 December 2011 at 12:24am | IP Logged |
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Dearest ReneeMona,
So good to see you here, and I really enjoyed what you wrote. It has been lovely to be on team Ohana with you. Big hug from Cristina 1 person has voted this message useful |
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