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TAC Team あ: Luai’s Climb to Trilingualism | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5829 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 25 of 68 28 April 2011 at 4:57pm | IP Logged |
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I really need to start updating more often!
I've had a lot of ups-and-downs the past few weeks. Everything's been very hectic, making it hard for me to stick to my plans. I ended up going on a trip to Assateague with my parents last week, even! I've kept up with my kanji reviews and anki reps, but not much else. I'm at kanji #710 and have given up on reaching 1000 by the end of the month. I was very unhappy with the more rapid pace I tried to set anyway. I'm returning to my 5-15 kanji per day rate. Besides that, I have been preparing for the beginning of May. I've arranged to participate in the 6 Week Challenge in May studying French. This is exactly the boost I needed to get my butt in gear and actually start this language (again). I've been gathering my materials and making plans. The goal of the 6 Week Challenge (6WC) is like a mini-TAC focusing on just one language. Naturally I'll continue my slow progress in Japanese, but the focus will be on really pushing my French to the next level. I'll be tweeting updates to the 6WC twitter bot to keep track of my hours. So here's the general outline for my French challenge: Materials - Assimil French With Ease - Michel Thomas French - French In Action - A Handbook of French Grammar - Books with audiobooks for L/R - Anki - French radio online Method I will start with 2 Assimil lessons per day, and adjust as necessary. I'll also start right out re-reading my grammar book straight through. The goal isn't to memorize the grammar rules, but to absorb a general idea of them, which I will be able to reinforce with the other materials. I'll also look up grammar points I'm having trouble with as I go through the other materials. Additionally, I will be playing French radio in the background as much as possible. I personally have always found I struggle to make progress without massive amounts of audio input, preferably both passive and active. I think this will be especially true with French, since I've struggled with the complicated and often subtle pronunciation before. Partway through Assimil, I will add Michel Thomas, doing several lessons per day, and FIA, doing one episode per day. I tried FIA before and gave up on it because I had difficulty absorbing everything in each lesson. This time around I'm changing my approach- I won't focus on knowing 100% of a lesson before moving on, I will move on even if I don't understand a lot. I will also put new vocab from the show into Anki to improve recall. I'll be doing the same with the other courses. After finishing Assimil's passive phase- or whenever I feel ready- I'll start L/R with French literature. The challenge here will be sticking to doing it for hours each day. Everything I've read suggests that you need more than an hour per day to get much benefit from L/R, and the more the better. However, I have trouble finding time for that kind of thing. I'll do my best though because I think this is what will really improve my fluency, even more than the actual courses. I already read French well because of my basic knowledge of the language and the huge amount of overlap with English vocabulary, so I think it will be easy to make progress this way. I'm really looking forward to starting this challenge! :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5829 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 26 of 68 04 May 2011 at 4:56pm | IP Logged |
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Today is the fourth day of the 6WC and I think it's a good time for a report. So far I seem to be hovering around
rank 22, which I don't really care about since the point is not to win but to learn! I'm really pleased with the amount of time I've been logging, I've never counted hours before and it's really helping me understand how much I do or don't do every day. French French is my main focus right now and according to the 6WC breakdown I am spending about 2/3 or 3/4 of my language time on it most days, which is a good ratio I think. I've gotten to lesson 8 in Assimil without any trouble so far. I think I'm going to want to supplement it with more extensive grammar study and drills, but I'm not sure exactly what so far. I plan to try Michel Thomas soon, from what I've heard it helps you get speaking faster, maybe it will help me with grammar. I'm pleased with the passive listening I've been doing as well. I very quickly reached a point where more French was buzzing around my head than Japanese or Esperanto, which I think creates a good mental environment for picking up the language. I've started repeating phrases from Assimil out loud whenever they come to mind, which I hope will help reinforce them. I haven't had enough experience yet doing anki for French to comment on it really, except that I think it will be helpful since the latest Assimil lessons seem to be adding a lot more words I don't already know. Japanese Still plodding away at kanji. I've reached #775 as of yesterday, I think today and a few more days I will only add five a day since I seem to be having more reviews than usual right now and am forgetting a lot of things. Anki is going well but I think I need to remove a few words I added that are probably fairly useless since they are pretty uncommon. I also haven't been adding new words fast enough. I haven't listened to a new podcast in a while so I have no new words from there to add. I will try to get back into doing this soon. I'm not really doing anything but kanji and anki right now, I will try to read some of my graded reader again soon and resume my podcast studies. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5983 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 27 of 68 04 May 2011 at 10:03pm | IP Logged |
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I'm glad that the 6WC seems to have motivated you so much, it has inspired me to jump into the world of Twitter and give it a go too!
Speaking as a fellow Anki-addict, try not to get too bogged down with Anki at the expense of everything else in Japanese. Reading and listening is so much more fun! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5829 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 28 of 68 09 May 2011 at 7:00pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks g-bod, I'm glad you got involved too! It's fun, isn't it? :)
The thing with anki is that I'm not bogged down with it at all- I haven't got enough words in it and I feel a bit silly using it with so few cards. I also feel that it's quite important for me to continue learning vocabulary. I'm very good at listening comprehension and for the time being my reading is limited to graded readers and the like due to the impasse of kanji, so besides kanji my only other big obstacle to comprehension right now is my limited vocabulary. However, I'm having difficulty finding a truly effective way to work on that. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5829 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 29 of 68 09 May 2011 at 7:15pm | IP Logged |
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It's now the beginning of the second week of the six week challenge, and I'm pretty pleased with my progress so
far. I've been taking the approach of starting slow and adding more and more; although I've been logging around 3 hours a day, a good chunk of that is passively listening to the radio. My actual active studying time is pretty small. I spend less than a half hour every day on Assimil, and about ten minutes on Anki, and I added Michel Thomas a few days ago which is another 20 minutes or so. I feel comfortable with this level so I'm going to amp it up. I'm adding FIA starting today, starting from episode 3 since I watched the early episodes before and remember most of it. I'm hoping to do two a day, which is a solid hour of study time. I'm hoping it will complement Assimil nicely. I finished the first disc of Michel Thomas already, so I don't expect to take much longer to finish the whole thing. I think it works fantastically as a supplement to Assimil; both feature the idea of sitting back and listening without actively struggling to remember what you hear, but whereas Assimil is- at this stage anyway- all passive and simply focussing on understanding the meaning, MT is actively encouraging you to use the language and learn to put chunks together in the correct way, building sentences out of different parts. I don't think I'd like MT as my sole study method, but paired with Assimil it is excellent. I can honestly say I have learned a lot of French this week. I reviewed a lot of vocabulary I already knew, but I also picked up a fair number of new words, and so far I've not been too frustrated by grammar and conjugation. Most importantly, I'm starting to develop a feel for the correct structure of a sentence, which is vital for speaking and writing. I also think my accent is improving by leaps and bounds. I'd like to learn at an even quicker pace, actually, which is part of why I'm adding FIA... but even continuing at this pace for the rest of the six weeks I think I would make a huge amount of progress. One thing I've noticed is that right from the beginning, it was never as hard to pick out words I know when listening as it was in Japanese. I think all my listening study in Japanese has taught me to hear sounds in speech more accurately, even when I don't know what they mean at all. There's still much to be gained by extensive listening, such as reinforcing the correct accent and cadence, and providing at least some reinforcement of vocabulary (lately I've started to pick out the word "rien" even when I'm passively listening). My Japanese is the same as ever... still plugging away at kanji and struggling to find words for anki, no reading or writing and just a little listening from anime. I'm frustrated with this but my Japanese classes start in a few weeks anyway so I've kind of given up for now. I'll wait and hope that being in class helps. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5983 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 30 of 68 09 May 2011 at 8:21pm | IP Logged |
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Ten minutes a day on Anki is fine - it seems a bit like Anki is a bigger part of your log than it is part of your study schedule! My personal 6WC goal is to make sure that Anki doesn't get the biggest share of my time!
I think the kanji/vocabulary and reading thing is a bit of a chicken and egg situation, and I have felt the same conflict myself, where you feel that you can't read because you don't have enough kanji/vocabulary but you can't learn enough kanji/vocabulary because you aren't reading enough. I'm starting to make a little progress again now, through a mixture of structured study, drilling lists from a textbook in kanji order, and intensive reading where I make the lists myself from a novel. I think you will probably find French pleasantly easy compared to Japanese, especially when it comes to reading. I can't remember how to string a sentence together at all in French, but I can follow French news websites without any trouble! Japanese news is another matter, however. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5829 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 31 of 68 10 May 2011 at 4:02am | IP Logged |
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Yes, French is a breeze compared to Japanese, but this is also due to the fact that I grew up with the language at
least somewhat- I was taught the same basics year after year in school, lending a certain familiarity to the sounds and feel of the language as well as the first 200 or so words- actually maybe more, I seem to be discovering that I know quite a lot more non-cognate vocabulary than I originally thought. I also am already capable of reading French and understanding about 80-90% of what I read (depending on the frequency of cognates), but of course that wasn't enough for me and I want to really be able to claim French as one of my languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Luai_lashire Diglot Senior Member United States luai-lashire.deviant Joined 5829 days ago 384 posts - 560 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto Studies: Japanese, French | Message 32 of 68 25 May 2011 at 2:22am | IP Logged |
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Well, it's been a while. We're now in the second-to-last week of the 6 week challenge. It's a bit paradoxical, but
I'm both pleased with and frustrated with my performance so far. I'm pleased because I'm finally progressing in French and the method I'm using is definitely working, unlike last time. But I'm frustrated because I'm not progressing as fast as I'd like and I know I'm going to have to switch to maintenance mode or at least very little studying soon. I've had several days where I barely did any french at all and I feel guilty about that, although I shouldn't really because I do have a life and need to do other things sometimes! ;) Anyway, today I feel I've made good progress towards getting back on track. I've watched multiple episodes of FIA to make up for days that I missed, and I started doing L/R with a bilingual text of Le Petit Prince, which I found actually quite fun. I also downloaded a pdf and mp3 of Harry Potter a l'Ecole des Sorciers, but a quick glance showed me I'm not quite ready for that. Even though it's a kids book, the language is a lot more complex than in Le Petit Prince. Hopefully I can read that next though. I feel pretty confident in my accent now, which is great. I'm both picking it up by listening, and learning actual rules of pronunciation. I also feel I understand the spelling system much better after realizing that most of the accents and extra consonants are there to distinguish homophones. I can't believe I didn't know that already, it seems obvious in hindsight! One thing I've noticed that's very different from my previous experiences is that I feel like I have an enormous passive understanding compared to my active ability. There's always a difference of course, but right now I can barely speak at all but I feel like I have this huge vocabulary just out of reach. I suspect it's just a matter of how quickly I'm moving along. I haven't had enough time to become accustomed to speaking. I am starting to reach a point where I can talk to myself a little in French, but I have trouble figuring out what kinds of things I do and don't have the vocab for at this point. I don't think this will change by the end of the challenge, but I'm not too worried about it since I think just giving it time is the solution. I'm loving the combination of FIA and Michel Thomas. Both of them are very easy for me to make myself do even when I feel crappy, which is vital for me. Assimil is definitely the most boring of the three courses I'm using. I do think it's useful, but I have to force myself a bit on most days. Of course, it's no where near as bad as Pimsleur, and I think I'll be able to stick it out to the end. I'd like to find some good TV shows to watch in French, to round out my studies, but otherwise for now, I'm pretty happy with what I've got. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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