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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5207 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 529 of 1317 26 April 2013 at 10:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
I too would be interested in a pop-up dictionary for my French E-Pub format books. But for the i-Book format, the built in dictionary gives me access to French (monolingual) definitions with French books. It also gives me English ones for English books, so I don't think it's just because I have my language set to "French" in my iTunes account. - Have a try and see if it works for you..? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| conroy Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5072 days ago 36 posts - 51 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 530 of 1317 26 April 2013 at 11:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
For a bilingual pop-up dictionary the Kindle Collins French-English dictionary works fine here. You just need to set it as the default dictionary for French. Edit: it has been pointed out to me this option is available on the Kindle but not (currently) on the Kindle app. Edited by conroy on 27 April 2013 at 11:03pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 531 of 1317 27 April 2013 at 2:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
Merci ! Il y a des remplacements que je trouve très marrants, dont « clavardage ». Et je n'ai aucun problème avec les mots comme « ordinateur », que tout le monde utilise. Mais je n'utilise pas les replacements officiels comme « ordiphone » qui ne sont pas courants chez les Français. Si j'utilise un mot et personne ne le comprend, ça sert à quoi ?
Félicitations ! Ça va devenir de plus en plus facile avec chaque livre. Si j'ai un peu de temps ce weekend, je veux faire une liste des livres et des films que je j'ai lus et regardés récemment. Mais il faut m'occuper de mes deux garçons ce matin. Edited by emk on 27 April 2013 at 2:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 532 of 1317 27 April 2013 at 8:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Recently finished:
- Dune. The science fiction classic, translated into French. Lots of fun, despite some translation problems in the first half. And now I have a lot of passive desert-related vocabulary. - Les Mondes d'Aldébaran : Bételgeuse, volumes 1 through 5. Another great, fast read in Les Mondes d'Aldébaran series, with lots of suspense, colloquial dialog, and cool alien wildlife. This episode centers around a panda-like alien species which might have human-level intelligence. There's also a small colony of human settlers which seems to believe that women should be barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen, and these settlers aren't too happy about the arrival of the female protagonist with her mission. (Worth noting: Despite the fact the story seems to be written for a "young adult" audience, it contains enough nudity and sex to earn an R-rating in the US. But then again, so would quite a few street advertisements in Paris.) - L'Incal, volumes 3 and 4 (of 6). This series inspired the film The Fifth Element. The art was drawn by Moebius, who was internationally known for his work with Les Humanoïdes Associés and the magazine Métal hurlant, which collected BD work from a variety of well-known authors starting in 1975. Métal hurlant was published in the United States as Heavy Metal, and it eventually led to a very strange animated film of the same name. An number of English-language graphic novels owe a substantial debt to this French heritage even today. But despite all this history, L'Incal isn't necessarily a good match for everybody's taste—it's deliberately strange and over-the-top. In progress: - Ulysse 31. A classic children's science fiction cartoon from the early 80s, with a nice mix of registers and voices. I'm nearing the end, and I've grown quite fond of these short, 23-minute episodes. I need to order more cartoons—maybe Captaine Flam, or perhaps something more modern. We'll see. - Salut et liberté by Fred Vargas. This is a really great detective story, about 50 pages long. The characters are all marvelously eccentric, and the humor arises naturally out of their personalities. (The French seem to be really good at this—think of all the odd background characters in Amélie and you'll get the idea.) The mystery starts when the police receive the following anonymous note:
Seriously, how can you not want to know what happens next? And the author has written a good number of novels and won a stack of prizes, so if you're into detective stories, you might want to check our her other works. - Les puits des mémoires, volume 1, by Gabriel Katz. This is a French fantasy series that someone mentioned on HTLAL many months ago. I've only read a couple dozen pages, but it seems promising so far. To date, there are three books totaling over 1200 pages. I'm not in any rush to finish this, but it's nice to have laying around when I run out of other stuff to read. Since the kids are napping, I'm going to try and finish Salut et liberté. Edited by emk on 27 April 2013 at 8:24pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 533 of 1317 27 April 2013 at 8:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
À mon avis? C'est juste la principe...afin de retenir des mots plus marrants :) Moi, j'aime le mot pourriel (pour "spam"). Enfin, si personne ne comprend rien, ça sert à rien, mais, il y a parmi ces exemples beaucoup de mots courantes. Et moi, j'utilise jamais mél mais toujours courriel (par exemple). Et il y a parmi eux également des alternatives qui pourraient être popularisées, étant donné qu'on les promouvoit. Ils pourraient exister comme des mots justes; les francophones ont rétenu le logiciel et l'ordinateur, quand même. Et vous rappelez-vous des islandais, qui n'acceptent pas des emprunts du tout? Creez-les, et on verra quels mots survivront, et quels disparaitront dans le néant. On pourrait au moins faire l'effort ;) Edited by tarvos on 27 April 2013 at 8:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jhaberstro Senior Member United States Joined 4391 days ago 112 posts - 154 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Portuguese | Message 534 of 1317 27 April 2013 at 8:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
Unfortunately this option does not exist (officially) on the iPad Kindle app (which I was referring to since the previous poster was asking about e-reader options for the iPad). I believe there is some way to circumvent this limitation, but I haven't tried it yet. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 535 of 1317 27 April 2013 at 10:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
A small request: I don't mind people asking questions in my log (or answering them), but please try to avoid having multi-page subthreads which stray too far off topic. :-) These tend to clutter up my log, and you'd get much better answers elsewhere on HTLAL. Let's say a good limit would be about 3 off-topic posts in a given conversation? Thank you!
Oui, je l'aime bien aussi. Les Québécois ont un don pour ce genre de mot — pourriel, clavarder et j'en passe. Mais je ne tiens pas à apprendre le français aux Français. Si j'utilise un mot et on me répond « Un ordiphone, c'est quoi ? », je vais le laisser tomber. Je préfère parler comme ma belle-famille et mes amis français, même s'ils utilisent parfois les anglicismes courants. (La seule exception, c'est les anglicismes très moches. Et il y en a beaucoup.) L'Académie français a écrit un bon article à ce sujet. Comme ils disent, « Il y a donc un tri à opérer. » Review: Salut et liberté by Fred Vargas Another 46 pages for the Super Challenge. :-) This was a great little gem of a detective story. The back cover promised « les personnages décalés, les rencontres déroutantes, le ton si subtilement décontracté » which were supposedly responsible for Vargas' success. And the story certainly delivered on those promises. As I mentioned just upthread, this story has the same kind of eccentric, quickly-sketched characters which make Amélie such a joy. There's a really nice mix of literary vocabulary—enough that I could easily learn a couple of useful words per page if I wanted—with some very colloquial dialog. And there's lots of very colorful bits that stick in my head:
I think I'll add one or two of her books to my next order. And I still have the second story left in the current book, which I look forward to with considerable pleasure. This is one of the great joys of learning French: there's all kinds of fun works to discover. This is especially useful as a parent, because sometimes I have just enough energy at the end of the day to join my wife on the couch and watch Ulysse pilot his impressively cool spacecraft from one mythologically-inspired adventure to the next, or to read a quick bande dessinée and admire the aliens. Edited by emk on 27 April 2013 at 10:36pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 536 of 1317 30 April 2013 at 2:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Another Amazon.fr order
A few highlights: - Two more detective novels by Fred Vargas. I'm seriously addicted to these, mostly for the characters and the writing style. In fact, they may be my new favorite detective stories in any language. - More bandes dessinées, including the final volumes of L'Incal and the Aldébaran series. I'm also going to try the first volume of the Troisième Testament, which isn't available on Izneo, to my vast annoyance. - The first season of Avatar, le dernier maître de l'air. This is supposedly excellent in English, and it was the first item listed in Les meilleurs dessins animés actuels (2012 – 2013), so the French seem to like it, too. And I've grown exceptionally fond of having a good French kid's cartoon to watch in the evenings when I want to collapse, thanks to Ulysse 31. Mission : Activation This post is in part for patrickwilken, with whom I've been discussing active versus passive skills. As long-time readers of this log might remember, I sat my B2 exam last June after 4 months of full-time study. At that, point, I could discuss current events intelligibly at a solid B2 level. (I was obviously only B2, which meant I did this badly. B2 is essentially the "do everything, but badly" level.) Since then, I've spent a lot of time reading and watching French, and my passive skills have improved considerably. But my active skills have languished. Indeed, I now have a huge repertoire of useful French words and phrases just below the activation threshold. When I speak, there's always the temptation to pause for 2 or 3 seconds while my brain hunts for le mot juste. Or I can just plow ahead immediately and wait for my brain to tell me that I'm doing it wrong. Either way, speaking can be very frustrating and I often lack fluidity. I can overcome this by immersing myself in French for a day—perhaps reading 100+ pages of an interesting novel and watching some TV. This speeds up my memory recall so that all those 2- or 3-second memory lookups happen at conversational speed. If I do this, I can have some excellent conversations, and—for example—explain my business plan in detail to my wife with no prior rehearsal. It's possible that I might be able to fix this with another 5 or 10 million words of input. But I know from previous experience that I can tackle output directly. All it would take is perhaps a month with a college-style "bull session" every night, discussing the world at large and struggling to hold my own in the conversation. Thirty hours over the course of a month would make a real difference, just as it did for reading and listening. Unfortunately, Verbling doesn't seem to work very well on my new computer. So I'm going to try to hunt up as many old Skype friends as possible and do language exchanges, and maybe get back in touch with my amazing tutor. If there are any French speakers here at HTLAL who want English practice, please feel welcome to contact me via PM. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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