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French: Consuming Massive Input | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| rlnv Senior Member United States Joined 3950 days ago 126 posts - 233 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 17 of 31 20 September 2014 at 10:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've now completed 4 of the 6 books that I own from CPLI, Blaine Ray Workshops. These books are incredibly valuable and are thoroughly enjoyable to read.
The books in the entire series are: - Nouvelle 1 de français dèbutant: Les Aventures d'Isabelle - Premier niveau - Livre A: Pauvre Anne - Premier niveau - Livre B: Fama va en Californie - Premier niveau - Livre C: Presque mort * Premier niveau - Livre D: Le Voyage de sa vie (09/13/2014) * Deuxième niveau - Livre A: Ma voiture, à moi (09/15/2014) * Deuxième niveau - Livre B: Où est passé Martin ? (09/20/2014) * Deuxième niveau - Livre C: Le Voyage perdu (09/17/2014) * Deuxième niveau - Livre D: vive le taureau ! * Troisième niveau: Les Yeux de Carmen I own the books noted with an asterisk, and have completed the books with a date in parenthesis. The books are short adventure stories of about 60 to 80 pages each. The publisher provides an idea of the progressive difficulty of each book which is helpful as guidance for reading order. Separately available are audio recordings of the books on CD. I am finding the books very entertaining and engaging. They are a pleasure to read, not just for their obvious learning value, but simply because they are fun and heartwarming. With these books I'm starting to get a large dose of the future, imperfect, and conditional verb tenses, as well as sprinkling of subjunctive here and there. I've noticed that the authors seem to make clever usage of rewording certain phrases occasionally, providing emphasis to the story and repetition for learning. Overall these books are incredibly valuable to me. I'm looking forward to reading the remaining two that I have. Had I come across this series earlier, I would have certainly purchased the entire set. I highly recommend them without hesitation. They are a great series of books. I have the audio for Le Voyage de sa vie, and Ma voiture, à moi. The stories are recounted by single female voice, with a clear native accent. The speed at which they are read is slower than other audio stories that I have in my collection; however the speed suits me fine. I have plenty of other full speed material, and this gives me clearly enunciated vocabulary and is especially helpful for verb conjugations. Unfortunately the recordings sound like they were made in an acoustically live room, and may have had too much compression in the mix to compensate for it. I'm going to purchase two more of the CD's. Here are the books ones I have: 
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| rlnv Senior Member United States Joined 3950 days ago 126 posts - 233 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 18 of 31 20 September 2014 at 11:03pm | IP Logged | ||
I am definitely in agreement with you on the importance of all skills and how they can complement and reenforce others. I do have some ideas on what my approach will be for output and will increasingly be working on it in the coming months. If all goes well, I'd like to sit a DELF exam at some point in 2015, probably towards the end. For that I'll need lots of output. I suspect in addition to the FSI I'm currently doing, I'll soon start to write on a regular basis at Lang-8 or elsewhere (Edit: and here of course!). I also would like to work with a tutor at the local French Academy. I originally planned to do that earlier, but came to realize that for me, it would be best to get lots of input first. I will very likely start with a tutor this fall/winter. Edited by rlnv on 20 September 2014 at 11:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4532 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 19 of 31 20 September 2014 at 11:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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Cool. I've been doing pretty much the same approach for German for the last 2.5 years. It works. I am now a strong B2 (perhaps C1) for comprehension - less so for output.
A million words a year sounds great, but why no consider raising the stakes a little and aiming for 2.5 million or more? That's 10000 pages (with 250 words/page), which was the original Super Challenge. I found once you get to B1 that's a quite doable level - it's only 27 pages/day. I love the massive input approach, but as other's have said, it really does require massive input, which is great if you like reading and watching movies. I didn't see anyone else mention this, but you might want to consider getting a cheap Kindle with pop-up dictionary. You can jump your comprehension level up a bit quite quickly and it allows you read more interesting books earlier. I wouldn't recommend the Paperwhite, or any other with touch screens, as it makes looking up words much slower, and breaks the flow of reading too much. Looking forward to following your progress. Edited by patrickwilken on 20 September 2014 at 11:30pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5008 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 20 of 31 21 September 2014 at 12:00am | IP Logged | ||
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I like your strategy to get lots of input first nd output later. I am applying a similar one and I'd like to pass a dalf C1 in February. I agree it's better to save your tutor money for a little bit later and prepare yourself in other areas first in order to progress faster and further with the tutor later. I even dare to think no tutor is necessary for the lower levels but if you can afford one, it would be wiser to get them. But just make sure it's someone good, there is little worse when it comes to exam preparation than wasting time and money with a bad tutor.
However, if I can give a piece of advice based on my experience, continue with your FSI and later with a grammar book or something to build a solid base for your output skills. Which DELF level are you striving for? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rlnv Senior Member United States Joined 3950 days ago 126 posts - 233 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 21 of 31 21 September 2014 at 12:07am | IP Logged | ||
Good observation. I'm currently reading about 20 pages per day, and I'd like to get that up to a minimum of 25 per day averaged over the duration of the Super Challenge. If I do that I will certainly far exceed 1 million words. And if I would like a sharp knife (thank you Mooby), which I very much do, I better get my average up. Edited by rlnv on 21 September 2014 at 12:09am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| rlnv Senior Member United States Joined 3950 days ago 126 posts - 233 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 22 of 31 21 September 2014 at 12:20am | IP Logged | ||
The local academy have a couple instructors native to France with very respectable credentials, and they also specialize in DELF preparation. I'd would want to be reasonably confident of passing either a B1 or B2 before sitting an exam. I'm sure I'll be top heavy on input, so it will likely come down to output. But that's a ways into the future. I'm enjoying my current activities very much. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rlnv Senior Member United States Joined 3950 days ago 126 posts - 233 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 23 of 31 04 October 2014 at 1:37am | IP Logged | ||
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Putting the cart before the horse
I’ve finished my CPLI Blaine Ray books and am now almost half way through Le petit Nicolas. My typical day goes like this; (1) Read Le petit Nicolas, with my daily page count being down from the CPLI books. (2) Read/listen to one of the CPLI books, usually about a half to full book a day. (3) Do my Anki cards with sentences from various books. Last night I came to the realization that I don’t enjoy reading as much when I have to do too many dictionary look ups. But at the same time, I feel compelled to keep looking stuff up and putting it into Anki. And I know that Anki is helping me immensely because when I go back to earlier books, most of the vocabulary is familiar. I started wondering if perhaps I should put the cart (Anki) before the horse (me reading). That is to say, do the Anki cards from a book before I read it. I’ve decided to do an experiment. I downloaded a text copy of Le Mariage forcé play by Molière. I parsed the file into 590 basic cards Anki cards, each with a sentence from the book on the front and a blank back. I delimited the cards by periods or semi-colons within the text. My plan is to go through all the cards representing each sentence from the book, deleting any card that I don’t have to do a dictionary look up. If I need to do a lookup, I’ll add the answer to the back of the card. Anything that remains goes into regular space repetition rotation. After I’m familiar with all the cards, it will be time to read the book. From a quick scan of the cards, I’m thinking I’ll be ready in one to two weeks. This will be done in addition to my normal routine. Anki will handle providing me the cards in a random sequence. Looking at the ordered cards and keeping in mind the conversational manner of the play, it’s interesting to see how many patterns develop in the sentences. There is a good amount of repetition. Some garbage also to delete. 
 Edited by rlnv on 04 October 2014 at 1:44am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4908 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 24 of 31 04 October 2014 at 11:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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I made a similar decision to you, a few months ago. The only output work I do is responding on Pimsleur and FSI. I keep feeling bothered that I was not doing any "live" output work, and feeling like I ought to get a skype partner or something (EDIT: and I seem to remember encouraging you in the same direction). Then I decided that I enjoy the way I've been studying, and I finally realized that "input first" is the way I like to study. I have no need to speak French, so getting to output can wait. In the meantime, I'm content with my films and books, and not stressing about the rest.
I have an idea that at some point I'll start writing on Lang8, writing texts to memorize and use as "language islands", and then see if I can find any victims to try them on. Edited by Jeffers on 04 October 2014 at 11:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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