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 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 57 of 1317 10 April 2012 at 2:53am | IP Logged | |||||
Oh, thank you for the list! I doubt that the B2 exam will be a "cinch" for me, unless I make a big breakthrough between now and then. But I might have at outside shot at passing it if I keep studying. This will be a slow week for French: I have too much work stuff to do, and I need to finish up my taxes. Today, for example, I only studied a little bit when I woke up, and I didn't listen to Europe 1 during the day. When my wife came home this evening, I figured that my French would have cooled off. But it booted back up in under a minute, and I've had no trouble all evening long. Happy news. Anyway, next week I'll have almost four full days of almost continuous immersion, with multiple native speakers. Right now, my two strongest areas are home life and current events. On any reasonably good day, I have no trouble understanding a cooperative native speaker. If I don't know a key piece of vocabulary, I just ask—and I expect to understand the explanation. Of course, I'm relying on the native speaker to speak clearly and use a simple vocabulary. Output is a bit more hit or miss: I can discuss familiar, simple subjects without great difficulty, but if I have to produce (a) entirely new output on (b) an abstract subject without (c) enough time precompose each sentence, I can get into serious trouble. The news and talk shows on Europe 1 and RFI are a different beast: An extremely high- speed, half-comprehensible firehose of native input. Sometimes it blows right by me; other times I can follow it for a while before losing the thread. And it always feels like a physical weight on my head. It's not N+1 input, but it's definitely helping. Movies, sadly, are still almost completely opaque, except occasionally when a senior police officer or government official shows up and speaks in clear, official French. Apparently B2 requires me to understand "the majority of films in standard dialect." At least in French, this seems massively harder than understanding current affairs on TV (one of the other listening requirements). Anyway, the Engrenages box set arrived tonight. Let's see how long I can watch before my brain goes into meltdown and hits the SCRAM switch. I watched Les Rivières Pourpres last night without subtitles, understood about 5%, and crashed hard after 15 minutes. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 58 of 1317 10 April 2012 at 4:04am | IP Logged | |||||
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Oh, wow, Engrenages is good stuff. The audio quality is good, there's tons of
dialog, and seasons 2 and 3 appear to have French subtitles. Most of it is still over my head, but not impossibly so—I could follow almost 50% of one or two scenes, especially where the vocabulary overlapped heavily with current events. Other scenes were harder, of course. If you're anywhere near B2, and you like police procedurals, check it out. I think I'll be able to work with this: Rip some subtitles, feed them to LingQ, make Anki cards for the vocabulary, and watch a couple a couple of episodes over and over. ... On an unrelated note, I'm working through French: Key words and expressions with Anki, and I'm hearing expressions from the book at least 5 times per day. Here's my new favorite card format:
Basically, the front of the card has 1-3 examples of a multi-word expression, and a definition or hint in French. So far, I'm happiest if I add multiple cards for each expression, with a different cloze each time. (This is, of course, khatzumoto's MCD format, adapted for French connectors.) These cards are time-consuming to make (even with the Anki plugins I'm writing), and they're hard work to learn. But connectors are just brutal, and this is working massively better than my old English<->French cards for similar expressions. Also, I know I mentioned this just an hour ago, but: Yay! Four days immersion! Soon! Edited by emk on 10 April 2012 at 4:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5392 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 59 of 1317 11 April 2012 at 9:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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And don't forget to note that au cas où takes conditional (except when it's thrown in at
the end of a sentence like the jacket example). Learning the connectors makes a big difference though, your comprehension in general should get much better, as well as your writing once you start to incorporate them. The "fun" ones are the ones that take subjunctive (though it's not so hard - anything with "que" that expresses an intention rather than a result/consequence takes subjunctive. Plus the opposition ones). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 60 of 1317 12 April 2012 at 7:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
Ah, thank you for pointing that out! This morning, I discovered de Tocqueville's De la Démocratie en Amérique, which is absolutely amazing—the style is clear and elegant, the vocabulary is accessible, and every paragraph is crammed full of parallel clauses, which provide very strong context. It's actually much easier to follow than a modern thriller like Cristal Défense. I've scheduled my first lesson with a professional French tutor this afternoon. We'll see how it goes. Recently, I spent a day hacking on a prototype of an Android app for reading French. Right now, I can load a single document (compiled directly into the program, alas), touch a word, and pop up a dictionary panel at the bottom of the screen. Unfortunately, I don't have a good dictionary yet. Wiktionnaire has the raw data under an appropriate license, but nobody has parsed it yet, and the best parsing tools require elaborate configuration and some bug fixes (in Scala!) before they'll work. If I had a spare week, I could build a decent reading tool. *sigh* 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 61 of 1317 13 April 2012 at 8:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The French tutor was OK, but I had trouble with his mild African accent. This forced
him to speak slowly, which in turn hurt my rate of speech. I might do a couple more lessons with him just for the accent practice. I had much better luck with SharedTalk, where I found a wonderful—and very dedicated— French speaker who chatted with me for an hour and 40 minutes. I think that's a bit long, and we were both fried by the end, but we were having fun. He mentioned that Scotch accents were really difficult, and I quoted him a couple lines of Robert Burns' poetry in Lowland Scotts. This first time, we made a weird choice for the format: we switched randomly between English and French. This was an interesting challenge in code switching, but next time, I think it would be better to split the time 50/50. I'm going to speak to another tutor next week (she specializes in helping students prepare for exams), and try to set up a semi-regular exchange or two. I plan to seriously increase my study time over the next few weeks. Oh, and if anybody around here wants to set up an English/French exchange, I am, of course, more than happy to do so. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 62 of 1317 14 April 2012 at 12:41am | IP Logged | |||||
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A quick note on CEFRL B2: It's a much higher level than it looks. The short description
says:
But if you go here and drill down into the semi-official self-assessment checklist, the listening skills get a bit hairy:
That's actually a pretty high standard: I would need to understand lectures, live interviews, plays and most films. This makes a sort of sense, because B2 is used for admitting FLE students to college in France, and they need to understand classes. But honestly, I suspect that it's possible to score 50% on the DELF B2 listening comprehension section without being able to do all those things. I'm really not sure if I can cover that checklist in two months of intensive study, even if I take off extra time off, turn it into a death march, and force-feed my brain like I'm making foie gras. On the other hand, I'm pretty confident that I meet the corresponding criteria for B1. I'm going to speak with a DELF specialist at the Alliance Française sometime in the near future, and get some professional advice about preparing for the exam. But if anybody around here has any insights into B2 listening skills, I'm all ears. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 63 of 1317 17 April 2012 at 1:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I just spent 3 days in Montréal!
As usual, when people speak to me in standard French, I can understand most of it, and successfully ask them to clarify the unfamiliar bits. But, as expected, I quickly get lost when two Francophones chat amongst themselves. The Québécois accent is still pretty challenging, but I'm slowly getting used to those "metalic"-sounding nasal vowels, and the hard /z/ sounds where I expect /s/. If it's spoken especially slowly or clearly, I'll actually understand something. :-) Some highlights: - I watched two documentaries on the new Explora channel in Québec, which is basically the Discovery Channel in standard French. I probably understood at least 80% of each, thanks to the professional dubbing and strong context. After two documentaries, though, I was completely fried. I'd love to get a bunch of DVDs of this stuff. - I had much more trouble with Intouchables in the theater. I was definitely well below 50% comprehension here. But I had more luck with interviews and advertisements before the film, even though most of them had a strong Québecois accent. - My brain is finally starting to produce en spontaneously in sentences like "J'en ai mangé deux." The process is it bit uneven—I often feel like "en" is hovering over the sentence, trying to wedge itself it. - My speech production is all over the map. When I'm warmed up—but not fried—I can discuss familiar subjects without any particular difficulties for me or my listeners. I even have enough spare cycles to use a decent intonation. But once I get outside of those parameters, well, sometimes I can speak acceptably, and sometimes I fall over my tongue. Still, I've won a very respectable beachhead here. My overall speech still shows a vast number of B1 features, but I can do better under controlled circumstances. - Endurance matters. - I've read 24% of the first volume of Tocqueville (out of the 4 volumes in this particular arrangement). This is gorgeous French, and it's more accessible than some modern fiction. - I'm slowly finding some interesting Skype partners. This is great, because my wife and I have pretty much reached a linguistic accommodation, and it's easier for me to get truly challenging input from strangers. I have 58 days to go before the DELF exam. It looks like I can take either the B1 or the B2, but not both. So my plan is to pour on the study hours, and decide as late as possible to take one or the other. I'm going to have some free time in my consulting schedule soon. I think it's almost time to tackle season 2 of Engrenages with the rewind button, subtitles, and a ton of Anki work. (And maybe the French version of Buffy?) And if I can get some of those lovely dubbed Explora programs, I'll be very happy indeed. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5392 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 64 of 1317 17 April 2012 at 3:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I still have trouble when French people talk amongst themselves quite often - when I have no idea what
they're talking about and/or when they use a lot of informal language I don't know yet. Buffy was one of my first dubbed series :) There are transcripts for many of the episodes on hypnoweb.fr 1 person has voted this message useful |
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