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Vanthie Learns French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Vanthie Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4331 days ago 38 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 9 of 57 22 January 2013 at 5:05am | IP Logged | |||||
Oh! I'll definitely look into that, if for no other reason than I sorely miss playing WASD flash games. Thanks so much. *u*
I don't think my browser quite understands what the Alt Gr key is for. It always makes a noise of protest as if I'm holding the Alt key, yet it still types the character as intended... Back in my Spanish-learning days, I memorized the alt codes for all the upside-down punctuation, so I'll really never need a Spanish keyboard as long as I have one that can efficiently produce the accents. It's definitely better to have everything you'll need in one device. > Pimsleur II lesson 4 > Assimil lesson 4 Pimsleur continues to be filled with grammatical enigmas. I think I might review the last couple of lessons tomorrow just so I'm not learning brand new words in the context of barely-remembered words. In Assimil I did a bit of deduction in the written exercises, since I always read the English explanation of the lessons last. The English explanation today happened to give instructions on the gender/quantity agreements in adjectives, which I completely neglected to read before doing the exercise on it. Pluralization I didn't have too much trouble with, since it's essentially identical to the Spanish rules. But I didn't realize immediately that the different gender rules applied as well, and at first I was only changing the adjectives to be plural. So halfway through, the thought occurred to me that adjectives were always different in Pimsleur when women or men were involved, and I went back over to revise the feminine words with e's. Edited by Vanthie on 22 January 2013 at 5:14am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Vanthie Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4331 days ago 38 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 10 of 57 23 January 2013 at 3:59am | IP Logged | |||||
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> Pimsleur II lesson 5
> Assimil lesson 5 My dad says my accent is getting better, though I haven't noticed any change myself. He also said to focus on one thing at a time in Pimsleur and not worry about remembering a word and where it goes in a sentence at the same time. Sounds simple enough in theory. I guess it mostly counts as a success if I manage to get out the words when prompted, even if they're out of order or in the wrong tense. I learned the word hirondelle in Assimil and it's probably one of my favorite words so far, right next to the word for "unfortunately" as taught in Pimsleur. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Vanthie Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4331 days ago 38 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 11 of 57 24 January 2013 at 3:37am | IP Logged | |||||
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> Pimsleur II lesson 6
> Assimil lesson 6 I ran through the first five Pimsleurs of volume II. At this point, it's just easier to shadow a line I'm totally lost on instead of trying to echo the sentence in its entirety. The sentences are getting longer and I tend to focus on one trying phrase and then ignore the rest of the sentence. It makes it much less frustrating and gets me to say all of it out loud instead of cradling my head in my hands and resigning myself to a life of failure. I learned in Assimil when to use de instead of du or de la or des (after flunking the exercise on it). It's amazing how you can hear and use something like that a hundred times but it doesn't ever hit you until you read an explanation on it. Also: I don't know what I expected aujourd'hui to look like, but that was not it. Edited by Vanthie on 24 January 2013 at 5:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5534 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 57 24 January 2013 at 3:52am | IP Logged | |||||
This is a fun and slightly weird word. It comes from au jour d'hui, where hui comes from the Latin hodie, meaning "today". But hui has completely disappeared from French, leaving only the compound form. Just to make things even stranger, some authors occasionally write au jour d'aujourd'hui. The Académie française says, "The essential thing is not to abuse it, but in itself, this turn of phrase isn't incorrect." 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Quique Diglot Senior Member Spain cronopios.net/Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4684 days ago 183 posts - 313 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: French, German | Message 13 of 57 24 January 2013 at 8:56am | IP Logged | |||||
I've been told that this happened because oui and hui are pronounced the same. To avoid confusion, there was often a need to clarify: au jour d'hui, and finally it was left like that even when there was no ambiguity.
But that's not exactly the same. We have same idiom in Spanish («a día de hoy»), it rather means `as of today'. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5383 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 14 of 57 24 January 2013 at 6:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
There aren't pronounced the same, so the story doesn't work. oui is [wi], hui is [yi] (a front, high, rounded semi-vowel, a short version of y -- the real symbol is more like an inverted h). The same distinction exists in Louis/lui, enfoui/enfui, etc. On another note, we use the QWERTY keyboard in Québec, so there is no need to change to AZERTY! Edited by Arekkusu on 24 January 2013 at 6:28pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Quique Diglot Senior Member Spain cronopios.net/Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4684 days ago 183 posts - 313 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: French, German | Message 15 of 57 24 January 2013 at 7:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
Maybe the semi-vowels [w] and [ɥ] were close enough to cause confusion, or possibly the story is apocryphal. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Vanthie Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4331 days ago 38 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 16 of 57 25 January 2013 at 4:21am | IP Logged | |||||
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> Pimsleur II lesson 7
> Assimil lesson 7 Pimsleur was significantly easier today. I'm glad to finally start learning the days of the week so that I can read the date on my computer and iPod properly. Assimil was a review lesson so that was also pretty easygoing. Good French days are the best days. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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