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Going back to Europe TAC 2014 DE|FR|日本語 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5980 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 9 of 142 02 January 2014 at 9:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
No, I hadn't discovered that little treasure. So if I am not mistaken, is it simply a case that verbs of movement take avoir if they take a direct object? Or in other words être is used with intransitive verbs of movement and avoir with transitive verbs of movement?
Oh my. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| BaronBill Triglot Senior Member United States HowToLanguages.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4687 days ago 335 posts - 594 votes Speaks: English*, French, German Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Persian | Message 10 of 142 03 January 2014 at 5:02am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hallo und Salut!
I'm really looking forward to following your progress in both German and French. It definitely gets frustrating sometimes, but it's SO worth it in the end! Team Spaß! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5389 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 11 of 142 03 January 2014 at 6:25am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Sounds like you got it. Sortir can take a direct object and then take avoir as an auxiliary. Granted, I don't think all the French natives have all the agreement rules down either, which is why they have dictées.
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| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5980 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 12 of 142 05 January 2014 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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One thing that has been brought into sharp focus again this weekend is the fact that the relative strength/weakness of my reading and listening skills in French is the inverse of what it is in Japanese. If I could follow French films and TV shows with the ease I can Japanese, and read Japanese books and newspapers with the ease I can French, I would be a very happy language learner indeed.
When I learned French at school, I decided that I hated listening the most (because when I was 16 years old, I could not easily tell the difference between things I disliked and things I wasn't good at). Once I broke into Japanese TV shows, I decided that actually, I enjoyed listening the most. It was the one section of JLPT N2 I had nothing really to worry about! But coming back to French again, I can see the issue is not so clear cut. The aspects of the Japanese language which make reading particularly difficult have always been very obvious to me, however I am coming to the conclusion that there are aspects of the French language which make listening that little bit harder to get used to than Japanese or German. I guess I just need to continue my review of the pronunciation of the language and match this up with some study and shadowing of dialogues and as much exposure as I can find the time for. But interestingly, I feel about as motivated to work on my French listening as I do to work on my Japanese reading. It seems that I'm not very good at making myself work on my weak points, whatever skill set they sit in. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5980 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 14 of 142 06 January 2014 at 8:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I don't know, after a few days back at work my well-balanced plan is starting to feel decidedly off-kilter. It's much harder to spend significant amounts of time with my head in a textbook when I've already spent 8 hours at a desk and am slightly sleep deprived. It all started to unravel on Friday (only my second day back) when I was so tired in the evening I only managed to do about 10 minutes or so of Begegnungen before packing in for the day, without touching my French books. Then Saturday came along, but I was still feeling sluggish and sleep deprived and after doing various personal and non-language-related things it was already getting dark. I got in quite a nice study session on Le Nouvel Édito but once I'd finished that the best part of the evening was over and I'd run out of time and energy to do any German.
Sunday was a day of French and Japanese. I had a Skype language exchange which went a little better than previously, but I'm still not speaking as well as I did a few months back. The words and expressions I need are still in my head, but it takes longer to recall them and I find myself stumbling over longer, yet basic, expressions like ～なくてはいけません. On the other hand I sat and watched an episode of フリーター家を買う, my first Japanese TV for a few weeks, and at least I was able to understand most of it. As far as French is concerned, I did more of Le Nouvel Édito, this time a pretty substantial listening comprehension practice, and started work on the section about liaisons and enchainements in Les 500 Exercices de Phonétique. Actually, I'm pretty sure that this kind of work on pronunciation will be a huge help in my listening comprehension too. But after all that, it was 10pm already, too late to study German, so I went to bed with a book instead. I think when time and energy is limited, I feel more inclined to spend it on French than German at the moment. I'm also starting to think I should make more of an effort to maintain my Japanese. And so my plan is going off kilter. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5980 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 15 of 142 12 January 2014 at 1:23am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Since I started using Le Nouvel Édito for French, I've been keeping a slightly more detailed log of how I use it in order to help me plan. I always found it hard to plan a study programme for Japanese because I had unrealistic expectations about how much I could actually cover of any given course in any given time period, so it's been an interesting experiment to record things a little more closely. I've now reached the halfway point in the first unit, and since the second half follows the same format as the first, just with different material, it's a good point to stop the experiment and take stock.
Anyway, for such a relatively slim volume, Le Nouvel Édito has proved pretty demanding in terms of hours. It's taken me nearly 10 hours so far, which means that if I continue at the same rate it will take around 180 hours to cover the whole book. I studied on 12 separate days (so an average of 50 minutes a day) and these 12 days were spread out over a 20 day period. I found this interesting as I was sure I studied more intensely than this. I aim to study on 5 days in every 7, but it turns out I take 3 day "weekends" instead! Anyway, if I carry on at this rate, I could get the book finished by mid-December 2014. I totally didn't expect it to be a year long project but at least this has given me a more realistic perspective when it comes to making plans. So far I've been studying everything in the book in order, but I think moving forward I might experiment with tweaking things a bit, covering the vocabulary and grammar sections earlier and then doing the supporting exercises in chunks while I continue with the comprehension and production exercises that form the rest of the book. On the whole it's quite an interesting textbook. It's pretty much entirely based on authentic materials. So far it's provided a quote from an 18th century writer, 3 news articles (complete with references back to their source), 1 short passage from a novel, 2 references to French films (in the form of a poster and a still from a movie), and 1 audio extract from Radio France Info. There was another listening passage which I think may have been invented just for the course, it was read out loud by the same person who announces the titles of the various tracks. It was the first listening comprehension exercise which was quickly but clearly spoken, so it was a bit of a shock to go from that to the extract from the radio. Anyway, the great thing for me is that I can use these extracts of authentic French for intensive study, as they are the perfect length and accompanied by all the other textbook stuff to help you along the way, leaving me free to enjoy any other French material extensively. So far, I've finally finished watching Les Revenants. The ending was sufficiently frustrating that part of me can't wait for season 2, and part of me is dreading the writers will screw it up! I've also started reading L'élégance du hérisson, which was incidentally the book which provided the excerpt I studied in the textbook a few days ago. I decided to treat myself to a subscription to Le Monde Sélection Hebdomadaire. I love the idea of reading a real French newspaper cover to cover in order to improve my French, but I'm not fast enough yet to do this with a proper weekend newspaper every week. However, the Sélection Hebdomadaire just picks a few key stories from the previous week and fits it into around 10 pages. I thought this would be ideal, but to my shame I only managed the first 4 pages of the first edition I had delivered. I'll try to do better with the second one! I've also started working on production. My textbook gives a few exercises for spoken and written production. The spoken ones are a bit trickier, although some adapt well for self talk. As for the written ones, I've decided that I'll try and select the most appropriate ones to go on to Lang-8. My first attempt at this went up a few days ago. I've also found myself a Skype tutor and had a session, which seemed to go pretty well, even though my spoken French is very messy. Based on the feedback I've had from Lang-8 and from my Skype tutor, basically my grammar needs a lot of cleaning up. I think the most obvious serious problem is the correct use of prepositions, something I've clearly never spent enough time worrying about. I guess it's time I started worrying! Gender of words is an issue in spoken French but not so much an issue in my writing, since I made the effort to look up any word I was unsure of in an attempt to convince my brain that gender really does matter. There are also a few issues with verbs, such as not being able to find the correct conjugation for some irregulars when speaking, the occasional incorrect choice of tense, and the fact that I clearly need to reacquaint myself with the subjunctive mood (not a problem, it's covered in the next grammar section of my textbook). On the whole, I feel pretty positive about French, and am pleased I finally decided to pick it up again. But I'm really starting to get a feel for how much work it is going to be if I am to actually learn to use French properly, rather than just making do with good passive comprehension and terrible grammar. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5980 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 16 of 142 15 January 2014 at 8:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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So yesterday I skidded on ice (which was cunningly disguised as a normal road surface) and went flying off my bike. Fortunately I didn't seriously damage myself, but I now have a leg with a dubious colour and texture which I've been told to rest. Not that I really needed telling, since even walking across the room is a bit of a mission at the moment.
So I had to cancel my French lesson this week, as I wasn't sure that I would be fit to do it. I've also not been able to sit studying at my desk so textbooks are out for the time being. But on the plus side, I've had plenty of time for native input today. I watched an episode of Un oeil sur la planète, recommended on sizen's log, about the rapid economic development of South Korea, which was surprisingly comprehensible and rather interesting too. I'm also somehow ploughing my way through L'élégance du hérisson. The fact that I'd studied one of the earlier passages intensively in my textbook lulled me into a false sense of security. There are some sections of the book which have left me utterly flumoxed. Plus a few philosophical anecdotes which I don't really care for, not to mention the thoughts of a pretentious 12 year old girl who has already decided that adult life is probably not worth living, and references to Ozu films, which I don't really get (having found Tokyo Story thoroughly depressing), and references to Tolstoy which I do get, which has at least made me feel slightly cleverer than I felt when I went flying off my bike the other day. I am not even halfway through, so maybe the book will improve, but all in all I'm looking forward to finishing it and moving on to another Fred Vargas. Despite my complaints about the content, it is more clear to me than ever how important an activity reading is. I've noticed that those days when my head feels much more full of French than normal tend to coincide with days when I've read a lot more French than normal. Looking back to late 2012 when my Japanese felt on best form, in addition to study and TV I'd also made really good progress reading 村上春樹. It's not to say that study and TV is not important; I'm pretty sure that in order to progress a good mix of study, TV (or other audio exposure) and reading is required. But reading is the one thing I never seem to do enough of, and yet it makes the most obvious difference when I do make the time for it. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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