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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 |  | |
| Adrean TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member France adrean83.wordpress.c Joined 6169 days ago 348 posts - 411 votes  Speaks: FrenchC1 | Message 65 of 198 10 March 2011 at 10:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi Renee, I'm going to start L-Ring 'Le Petit Prince' in German this week. It's gonna be awesome, I'm gonna try and beat you in the most friendly way.
Hey and if you're in Paris you can make a tour of 'Le Cinema Rex', it being in the title of your log and all. I did it and it was great. I agree very much with Ella that reading you're last update was very interesting, keeping those goals is something else though :P all the best. Edited by Adrean on 10 March 2011 at 10:30pm 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 66 of 198 11 March 2011 at 12:32am | IP Logged | |||||
@ numerodix: Een tandje bijzetten is an expression meaning “to work a little harder”. Tandje refers to a cog on a gear wheel (=tandwiel) so if you add one the machine goes faster...or something.
Awesome, it's on! My petit prince is totally gonna kick your kleine Prinz's ass! And I mean that in the most friendly yet still competitive way. :)
Thanks for the tip, that sounds like a great idea! (Even though my log is technically not named after the cinema itself). My schedule for this summer is going to leave me very little wiggle-room but it should be possible to get myself a day or two in Paris. I think it'd be fun to roam the city on my own for the first time (as opposed to with parents, teachers, annoying younger brothers and fellow students hot on my heels). Maybe I'll finally understand why everyone is always raving about the place. Edited by ReneeMona on 13 March 2011 at 11:59am 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 67 of 198 13 March 2011 at 8:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Week 10: March 7 / March 13
Little self-correction about last week’s milestone; apparently I miscalculated (while using a calculator) so my 360-hour-milestone was actually a 375-hour-milestone. Arithmetic was never my strong suit so we should probably not put too much stock in these neat little numbers I post every week. I’m pretty sure of the following though: French Week 10 (27): 13 h. 55 min. (but this number will probably grow as I plan to study some more tonight) 2011: 171 h. 15 min. AUS Le Petit Prince March: 42% LPP: [51/115] 44% Assimil March + April: 21% Ass: [11/70] 15% (Note to self: trying to do 12 lessons per week is too much) Considering that I had to write three essays, work two days and still maintain something resembling a social life, I’m pretty pleased with this week’s results. I had another look at the European language levels - Self Assessment Grid and tried to gauge my own levels in French and English. Here are my guesses: French Listening: B1/B2 Reading: B1/B2 (I mainly just lack vocabulary) Spoken interaction: A2 (I can say more than that but it just takes me way too long to formulate sentences) ]Spoken production: A2/B1 (I added B1 because the A2 description sounded way too easy) Writing: A2 (possibly approaching B1) Overall: A2/B1 English Listening: C1/C2 (mumbling, background noise and unfamiliar accents make it hard sometimes) Reading: C2 (even though I still come across unknown words sometimes, I never completely lose sight of what’s going on) Spoken interaction: C1 (I’m a little fuzzy on the difference between interaction and production so I just put the same for both) Spoken production: C1 Writing: C1 (C2) (I added C2 because I’ve been writing pretty complicated literary essays at uni for the past year and a half, and I seem to be doing alright at that) Overall: C1/C2 I find it really hard to asses my own skills this way because I think the descriptions are kind of vague and some of them mention things I never do so I wouldn’t know if I’d be any good at them. Then there’s those blasted speaking skills. The problem with those is that I’m a shy and inarticulate scatterbrain so I don’t usually speak fluently or coherently in any language at all. I can jabber on for hours when something interests me and get my points across pretty fluently but the C2 level description uses words like clear and smoothly-flowing and those aren’t really applicable to my style of speaking. ;-) And then there’s still so much vocabulary I don’t know… As frustrating as it is to reflect on my many shortcomings, it’s good to also notice that I’m improving. I’m so caught up in constantly wanting to be better that I don’t notice the steady progress I’m making. Sometimes when I’m browsing the archives of this site I come across one of my own posts from less than a year ago and I find myself shaking my head at the horrendous mistakes in them. For instance, in the free audio books thread I found this sentence “I haven’t found much Dutch audio books”. Much audio books!?!?! Honestly Renee, ga je schamen in een hoekje!. I’m pretty sure this particular mistake arose from absent-mindedness but it nevertheless makes me miss the old “edit” button more than usual. :) Edited by ReneeMona on 30 May 2011 at 2:58pm 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 68 of 198 13 March 2011 at 9:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
I can totally sympathize with you on all of this. It's really hard to assess yourself on things that you never do or can't do in any language. Have you ever seen these websites with real examples of people speaking in different languages at the various CEFR levels? English examples only, Examples for 5 languages
I've had the same feeling about reading many of my old or not-so-old posts too, in English or in other languages. Reading something I had tried to write in German a couple years ago was particularly painful, as was seeing all of the mistakes with case and such that I was making in Greek around the same time ("βλέπω τη θεία μου," not "η θεία μου!"). With the mistake you mentioned in your English, it is a big mistake but I can assure you that plenty of native speakers including myself make the same error while speaking. In fact, I routinely hear people (again, including myself) mixing up singular and plural agreement while speaking. And that's not even mentioning all of the errors with the past tense and past participles of verbs that I hear all the time ("I had went"). 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5336 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 69 of 198 13 March 2011 at 10:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
I looked at the first site the first time you posted it but for some reason the videos don't work on my computer. I did read the commentary and watched the C2 English speakers on the other site which restored some of my faith in my English because I kept thinking "I could do that..." :)
Well, people mess up and can't find the right words when speaking all the time. If my Dutch were judged based on my speaking alone, I'd barely be at a C1 level. What pissed me off about this mistake was that it concerns a grammar rule that I've been aware of for at least a decade and the only reason I made it is that I was too lazy or distracted to proofread before posting. Ah well, as I said, it's a sign of progress. Hopefully in another few years I'll be able to read this log and laugh at my ignorance. My French will probably be very painful to read. :) 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 70 of 198 19 March 2011 at 12:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Week 11: March 14 / March 20
I’m posting a day early this week because I won’t have any time for studying or posting tomorrow (or rather I shouldn’t have time for it, since I’ll hopefully be studying very hard for my test). This is probably starting to sound old, but it’s truer than ever: I’m so busy! I can’t even remember the last time I had more than two or three hours to myself and for a slightly misanthropic person whose sanity depends on large amounts of me-time, this is very bad. Luckily next week is text week and I only have one exam on Monday which means I’ll have a delicious four days to myself. Oh, think of all the studying…. I can’t wait! English I feel a little bit guilty because I’m on the English team and yet I never write about my English studies. It’s not that I’m not doing anything (I sure as hell am), but I just never have anything interesting to report. I am working actively on it though, both at uni and in my spare time. I’m currently reading two books and underlining new words as I go. I’m also learning new words through my French studies because I put everything into Anki with both the English and Dutch translation. (This week’s favourite new word: baobab – apenbroodboom) These log posts are also very good practise because I spend a lot of time looking for new idioms, words and ways to phrase things to make sure I don’t keep using the same vocab and structures over and over again. I’ve also learnt to use Google to check if people actually write something, which is very helpful and I use it intensively for every language I know/study, even Dutch. :) This week I finally discovered MeetUp.com (where has this site been all my life?!) and I’ve become a member of an English group that seems to have a pretty structured approach to improve people’s conversational skills. That’s exactly what I think I need so I’m very excited to attend the next meeting. French Week 11 (28): 16 h. 55 min. 2011: 188 h. 10 min. This week I got to use French in the wild! I was at work and making up the bill for a middle-aged couple when I noticed they were speaking French and my finger promptly slipped and hit the delete button so I had to do the entire thing again. Drat. I’m pretty sure my cash register loves me because he refused to accept French guy’s debit card so everything combined I ended up having a five-minute conversation with his wife. She complimented me on my French after I had uttered about one or two sentences so I should probably not take that too seriously but it was still fun to hear. :) Talking with one of my colleagues about it afterwards, (of course I told all my colleagues all about it multiple times) I found out we apparently have French customers who refuse to speak English very often, which she finds annoying. I get that it’s irritating if you’re not a Francophile (happens to me all the time with Germans) but what I want to know is; what happens to these people on their way to the check desk to make it possible that I never see any of them? I get plenty of Spanish, German, British and American people but French speakers are rare. So I’ve asked my colleague to give me a heads-up the next time she spots one so I can intercept and ambush them. I also became a member of a group for Francophiles on MeetUp.com so I hope I’ll soon have a lot more opportunities to practise speaking. 1. Le Petit Prince (85 min) March: 61% LPP: [71/115] 62% I wonder what it is about French that makes it sound so impossibly cute when spoken by children. I think it might be the high occurrence of sounds like –ou and –u, which make it an excellent language for petulant pouting. Whatever it is, I’m completely in love with the voice of Le Petit Prince. Anyway, still going strong with this one. The narrator really likes to take his time pronouncing every word which is fine by me but I wish he wouldn’t leave out entire sentences sometimes because it’s confusing. 2. Harry Potter (25 min) Narrator, oh, narrator, why art thou so bloody annoying? 3. Reading (120 min) I’ve abandoned my crappy fanfic (bit of a tautology there) and switched to reading articles on wikipédia, which makes it pretty simple to read about whatever I find interesting. 4. Film watching (160 min) Titanic! I watched it over six months ago and this week I was pleasantly surprised to notice that I understood what must be a good 90% of it the second time round. This is probably not terribly impressive because I know it so well in English and the second half mainly consists of “Jack! Rose! WAAAAAAAH!”, which is the same in French. One thing that still puzzles me is that “I’m the king of the world” is translated as “Je suis le maître du monde”. WT*, why not just “je suis le roi du monde”? I honestly want to know. Anyone ? 5. Film vocab (150 min) 6. Assimil (140 min) March + April: 31% Ass: [20/70] 29% I was so tired and stressed out that I found myself getting irritated by the simplest things, (like the narrators’ voices) so I decided to leave Assimil for what it is this week. 7. French in Action (0 min.) I know, I know. Please don’t say anything. 8. Anki (60 min.) I nearly went into cardiac arrest this week when I accidentally deleted every single card in my French deck of over 2,000 words. Thank every deity know to mankind that there is an undo button! I had a look at the PreMade Anki decks on their website because I was looking for a French deck with the 1,000 or so most common words to make sure I get al the basics right. I ended up downloading an Intermediate French deck, an Esperanto 101 deck and an excellent English deck with over 5,000 advanced words, some of which I’d never even heard of before. So, still a reasonably good week despite all my stressing. I planned on showing you a picture of my new mentor and travelling companion but my computer refuses to cooperate so it’ll have to wait until I figure it out on my own. EDIT: Silly mistakes and also I use the word also too often. Edited by ReneeMona on 30 May 2011 at 3:02pm 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 71 of 198 27 March 2011 at 11:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Week 12: March 21 / March 27
I’m quite disappointed with this week. As predicted, I finally had some time off from my hectic schedule and you would think that this would result in lots and lots of studying but for some reason I always end up spending my vacations doing the kind of mundane tasks that are necessary to keep my apartment fit for habitation. I have a lot of other excuses but I’m sure you’re not interested in them so I’ll hereby plead guilty of language-neglect and be done with it. My wanderlust thrived this week and I’ve started considering (and that means I’ve already decided on it because I never consider things for too long) taking a small step back from French this August and to dabble away in three or four side-languages before the new semester starts. Prime candidates for now are German (certain), Old English (certain), Esperanto (probable), Greek (probable), Papiamentu (possible) and Indonesian (possible). Hmm, that’s a little more than three or four. English Disclaimer: Starting this week I’ve decided to switch to American spelling in my English. I’m supposed to use British spelling at uni but this Tuesday I’ll be starting my introductory course on American Studies and seeing as I plan to minor in this subject next year, it feels weird to continue using BE. I usually try to keep an eye out for vocabulary differences as well but I know I slip up sometimes because I’m too lazy to go look up the right word for the right dialect. I sometimes tutor high school students in Dutch, English and history and this week I got assigned a new pupil who needs help with his English. Seeing as I’m now a second year English student at university you would think I’d be able to help him but I think I ended up confusing him even more. It took me about a week of high school English to figure out that following my gut took less time and resulted in better grades than learning grammar rules by heart so as a result I now find myself incapable of explaining them even if I can apply them subconsciously. So half the time when he asked me why I had used a certain word or tense my answer would be “It just sounds better”. Next week I’m bringing my grammar book. ;-) French Week 12 (29): 13 h. 10 min. 2011: 201 h. 20 min. Milestone! Last Friday was my first anniversary as an independent language learner. (Well, not technically, but in a way) I did exactly what I did on this day last year which was watching the French version of Bambi and I’m pretty sure I understood 99% percent of it. But another film-related accomplishment that I’m much more proud of is that I watched a native French film that I’d never seen before and understood enough to follow along and I even got some of the puns. :) I’m nearing the end of Le Petit Prince and I’ve ordered Le Petit Nicolas to start reading once I’ve finished it. I also finally forced myself to watch some more French in Action but only two episodes because that’s all I could take of Mireille’s pouting and Robert’s sulking. Dolle Dinsdag Dabble Dag! I think I’ve used this term before but let me just explain it to those who may not be familiar wit it. Dolle dinsdag means ‘mad Tuesday’ in Dutch and it refers to Tuesday September 5th 1944 when the Alied forces were rumored to be about to free the Netherlands and millions of people flooded the streets to greet them, only to hear that they had barely crossed the border and were too few in numbers to attempt advancing further north. Aaaw, imagine all those disappointed orange-painted faces! Anyway, what does this have to do with language learning? Absolutely nothing. I just like the alliteration and a lot of my dabbling takes place on Tuesdays because that’s when I have my Greek lesson and I usually work on Esperanto in the morning. Greek I haven’t actually had a Greek lesson in a couple of weeks because my grammar class keeps getting cancelled (I’d normally be overjoyed about this) and this has made me decide to start studying Greek a bit more seriously. I’ve searched every bookstore and library in Amsterdam that I have access too for a half-way decent Greek course but every time I think I’ve found something worthwhile it turns out to teach Ancient Greek. I did find a “Grieks zonder moeite” online, which I’ve ordered, and apart from that I’ve been reviewing verb conjugations in Anki and consuming unhealthy amounts of Greek yoghurt, which counts as studying because it’s “exploration of target language’s culture.” Esperanto Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been working sporadically on the Vojaĝu kun Zam course on lernu.net and so far I’ve travelled to Cairo, New York and Bejing. Next stop will be Stockholm, which I’m very excited about because I’ve never been there before. I’m really liking Esperanto so far, though I keep waiting for something difficult to jump out at me. It’s just so easy… The English-based word order in the course really annoys me but I’ve been told I can use any word order I want so when I write my own sentences I use French word order, which sounds much more natural. Arabic I finally found both the time and the motivation to take up Arabic again. Mostly because I was sitting between two of my Arabic-speaking colleagues at work yesterday and as I was listening to them speaking Arabic I kept thinking; “Well, lazy bones, if you’d put in a little actual effort you might have been able to understand some of this by now.” I’ve decided to ignore my book’s advice and go ahead and learn the alphabet anyway because it will make it a lot easier to look up vocabulary by myself. I downloaded a great Anki deck for this and it’s going very smoothly so far. EDIT: Typos and sentences that won't stay where I put them. Edited by ReneeMona on 06 July 2011 at 11:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Adrean TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member France adrean83.wordpress.c Joined 6169 days ago 348 posts - 411 votes Speaks: FrenchC1 | Message 72 of 198 29 March 2011 at 10:01am | IP Logged | |||||
C'est l'amour! I'm sure you've probably seen the last episode by now but if you haven't it's kind of a weird way to end the series. Don't get so hard on yourself for not doing enough. It seems to me and most people here that you're making mountains of efforts. It's always nice to read your observations! About French children, I think they say sound really cute as well... I hope you can get up and start using meetup or social groups to get your French active. It's great to read peoples hands on experiences such as with garyb and microsnout who get out there and are really active. I'm kind of in a position where it's not easy to meet and talk with French people or groups but not impossible either. I'm being all together(altogether?) antisocial these days...but this will change soon. Also I don't know if this counts, but I pretty much downloaded The Little Prince in German and L-Red in one go the same day. Probably not very beneficial but not harmful. I guess the idea is that I go over it several times...Hey and about Titanic I swear I heard in a French film just last night 'Je suis le roi du monde', don't they do subtitles/dubbing weird. All the best ReneeMona Edited by Adrean on 29 March 2011 at 10:03am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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