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TAC 2011 - Team Ohana – Le Cinéma Rex | ||
Tags: Dabbling | France | 6 Weeks Challenge (6WC) | Immersion | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | English | German | French | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Élan Senior Member United States Joined 5444 days ago 165 posts - 211 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Persian | Message 177 of 198 06 September 2011 at 11:50pm | IP Logged |
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I got lazy after the first week so your performance is amazing to me. :)
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5335 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 178 of 198 12 September 2011 at 5:26pm | IP Logged |
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Week 36 : September 5th – September 11th
School has begun and I am very happy to be back again. I'm still not done arranging all that needs to be arranged but the end is in sight and I'm quite enjoying my classes. I made a last-minute decision to only take six courses this semester (partly because I was not looking forward to all the trips to the student administration taking more than that would involve) so this semester will hopefully be less stressful than the last. French Week 36 (53): 8 h. 50 min. 2011: 650 h. 30 min. Now that the first lecture week is over, I am wondering how I could ever have been scared that the level would be too advanced for me. My French professors all seem to be afraid to speak French to us and most of the grammar and vocab we have to learn is already familiar to me. This is kind of annoying in some ways but because the workload promises to be huge, I'm sort of grateful for it as well. My week started with my French cultural studies class. I managed to oversleep and miss the first half of it (an excellent start of the semester, wouldn't you agree?) but apparently most of it was an introduction to the course and talk about Marianne and other symbols of France so I don't think I missed that much. At first I was really pleased that our professor (who is French) was speaking French to us the entire time until I noticed her strange habit of repeating shorts snippets of what she was saying in Dutch. I can't stand it when people do that because it's confusing. She speaks Dutch very well but with a French accent so I often did not notice she had switched to Dutch and thought I was missing something. What annoyed me most was that she allows us to answer in Dutch which may be a nice gesture to those who are nervous about speaking French in class but unfortunately it also makes those who answer in French look like show-offs. She seems to demand a lot from her students so I hope she'll soon drop the coddling. The same professor also teaches my listening/speaking class (for which I was also late) and my reading/vocab class is taught by another French woman who also spoke mostly French to us, though there was still too much Dutch being spoken for my liking. However, at least all these classes are somewhat challenging, which is something I cannot say for my grammar class. This is the only one not taught by a native French speaker and the simplicity of it had me unsure of whether to laugh or to cry. My professor started the class by explaining that it was to be merely a review of what we were already supposed to know and that it would easily be the most boring course we'd ever take in our academic careers, which he promptly proved by spending the next half our telling us about ....*drum roll, please*.... definite and indefinite articles! He also made us do exercises I would expect someone who studied French for six weeks to have no trouble with, let alone people who've taken French for six years in high school. To my horror, some of my class mates did seem to be struggling with them but my professor has promised that he will try to keep up a pace and that this will not be a case of the slowest students slowing everyone else down. All in all, I wasn't too excited about this class but I will reserve judgement until I see how next week's class on the thrilling subject of nouns turns out. Wow, I didn't mean to write that much about just my classes. I promise I won't write this much about them every week. In my free time I continued to watch Grey's Anatomy while entering all the words for my vocab class into Anki. We need to learn around nine pages of words every week which is perfectly fine with me. I also started reading Marius which I hadn't realized was a play. It's nice because it means there's lots of natural dialogue but I don't really like reading plays so we'll see if I can stick with it. --------------------------------------------------------- 6 Week Challenge German: Week 6 I had meant for this week to be a spectacular final spring but of course, nothing ever came of that. I also planned to reach one hundred hours hours but by Sunday I only had around 90 hours and I was too tired to try to squeeze 10 hours of study into one day. So instead I focused on bringing up my total score to 150 hours. I ended up in 13th place on the target language ranking and 9th on the total score ranking, which I consider an acceptable achievement though I plan to do better on the next challenge. I only clocked in around 40 hours during the last challenge so there's definitely a rising trend going on there. Week 6: 3 h. 30 min. Total: 93 h. I'm having a hard time remembering what I did this week because I was so busy with school and French that German was usually the last thing on my mind. I started reading Die Weiße Rose which is challenging but doable. I should really be looking up vocabulary as I go because I'm missing a lot of details but I'm too lazy to do that. Even though the challenge is over, I plan to keep reading and watch films occasionally to make sure I keep up what I've learned and to keep improving slowly. Basically, not much will change in comparison with the last two weeks of the challenge apart from the fact that I'll be allowed to focus on French without feeling guilty about it. EDIT: There was a truly unnatural amount of errors in this post. --------------------------------------------------------- @Élan: I think I got lazy after the third or fourth week and I'm in complete awe of some of the people who've studied close to 300 hours so I guess it's all relative. Edited by ReneeMona on 20 September 2011 at 2:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| joanthemaid Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5470 days ago 483 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, German | Message 179 of 198 13 September 2011 at 12:11pm | IP Logged |
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ReneeMona,
Welcome to university! I had pretty much the same experience in my first couple of years at Uni (in the third year I was in the US, and the fourth year was worse: half of the courses were spent reading out loud. That's right). I enrolled late into an English Literature and Civilisation curriculum (LLCE: Langues Littérature et Civilisations Etrangères), and thought it might be difficult for me to catch up with the courses in the middle of the first semester, but actually it was way too easy. The thing is, at that time I was already using my English in daily life (I started reading Harry Potter in English at 15 or 16, had been playing videogames in English well before that and by then read other things as well, watched shows in English, some without subtitles, etc... On top of a pretty week spent in England, but most French students get to do that). The professors were actually trying to teach in English, but at some point a group of people went to see them (more or less implying the represented the rest of us) to tell them their lectures were impossible to understand and ask them to speak French. And when I went to oral practice I understood why: most of the students had a level worse than the average level of my former highschool classmates, which is due to the fact that, in France, if you're a good student, you don't go to Arts and social sciences university (Fac de Lettre), much less English, you go to "Prépa". I don't know how things are in the Netherlands, but I assume languages aren't the most selective subject anywhere. So my advice for this year: find some friends in a similar situation to skip useless classes with and learn on your own. Just don't forget to go to the exams. Another possibility would be to register in courses in another language you don't know as well and pass both, just go to the classes that actually teach you something. Also, as a French person I can tell you (but you probably already know): Marianne isn't basic French culture. None of the "symboles de la République" are. The French aren't the French state. Better listen to music and watch popular movies. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| misslanguages Diglot Senior Member France fluent-language.blog Joined 4846 days ago 190 posts - 217 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: German | Message 180 of 198 14 September 2011 at 1:03am | IP Logged |
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Dude, don't listen to joanthemaid. That's very bad advice you just gave him. Don't skip
classes. Just don't. I'm being serious—it'll bite you in the ass sooner than you think. Keep studying French on your own, but don't think you're too cool for school. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Élan Senior Member United States Joined 5444 days ago 165 posts - 211 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Persian | Message 181 of 198 14 September 2011 at 3:27pm | IP Logged |
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Welcome back to school! :) Congrats on being close to the end.
I agree that you should go to your classes, but I'm sure you know that. Of course I skipped classes now and then, but never more than a couple per semester. I did, however, sneak an unrelated book behind my notebook on many occasions. :P I'm glad to hear you only clocked ~40 hours last 6WC. That bodes well for my next one being better! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5334 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 182 of 198 15 September 2011 at 7:24am | IP Logged |
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I trust your judgement when it comes to skipping classes, ReneeMona. I have always been very good
about going to all my classes, but even I found that there were some classes which were simply not to be endured. I'd give them a few weeks' chance though, before giving up on any, if I were you. Bring a more advanced book you can use in class if they are doing anything too simple, or look at it as an extremely thorough revision, which will make you remember the grammar to such detail that you will get the best grade of your class. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5335 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 183 of 198 20 September 2011 at 5:55pm | IP Logged |
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Week 37 : September 12th – September 18th
It's milestone time! I crossed the 800-hour mark for total study time this week: Total Study Time as of 18-09-2011 French: 668 h. 10 min. German: 93 h. Spanish: 38 h. 20 min. DDDD: 7 h. 10 min. 2011 total: 806 h. 40 min. Since the 6WC finished last week, I got to focus fully on French again and that combined with the fact that studying is even more justified now that I'm a French minor meant that I was really motivated this week. I'm very single-minded so I get confused and frustrated when I have to focus on multiple things and language learning has turned out to be no exception to this rule. I find that I work best when I have just one target language and don't have to worry about dividing my time equally or making sure secondary target languages get some attention as well. I'll have be extra aware of this the next time I try to introduce another language to my schedule. French Week 37 (54): 17 h. 40 min. 2011: 668 h. 10 min. I love being a French minor! Before the start of the semester, I was a tiny bit afraid that going to class, having to do homework and take tests was going to suck the magic out of French for me a little bit but so far it has done nothing of the kind. On the contrary, noticing that I'm probably one of the best students in my class has only made me more motivated. Most of this week's study time was spent in class or doing homework. I also watched some more Grey's Anatomy (nearing the end of season 2 now) and started reading Candide by Voltaire. One of my professors mentioned it in class this week and since I had it lying around (one of those classic books I buy because I think it's something I should have read that ends up gathering dust for the rest of its existence instead) I decided to give it a try. It's actually surprisingly easy to read and I even ended up underlining unknown words because there were only one or two per page on average. This is a book I once pretended to read back in high school when I got stuck somewhere on the first page and had no idea what was happening for the rest of it so it feels like quite an achievement to be reading it so effortlessly now. --------------------------------------------------------- @joanthemaid: Thank you. A university course spent reading out loud sounds like the most blasphemous waste of time to me (especially since you're paying tuition for it!). The only course I've ever taken where we had to read out loud was a course on Chaucer and the aim was to teach us to pronounce Middle English correctly so I could see the point of that. As far as I know, there is nothing comparable to prépa here in the Netherlands but you're right, language, and the humanities in general, is considered a “soft” field of study by many people, which in my opinion only goes to show how much they know. I'm not so sure if skipping classes is such a good idea for me because whenever I've done that in the past, it's always had rather bad consequences because I'm not self-disciplined enough to work in my free time, especially because the classes I skip are usually the ones I don't like. @Misslanguages: I'm a her but thank you. I definitely don't think I'm too cool for school, especially because people who seriously think that are usually not cool at all. @Élan: I definitely have experience with skipping classes as well but sadly I was not as responsible about it as you so since then I have a zero-tolerance policy for myself when it comes to skipping classes. Reading unrelated books in class is of course entirely justified if you're not learning anything you didn't already know. I read at least half of Le petit prince while my linguistics professor was explaining the difference between diachronic and synchronic for the fifteenth time. @Solfrid Cristin: Thanks for the vote of confidence, though I'm not sure it's entirely deserved. The problem with doing something more interesting in class is that my teacher has us making exercises and read out the answers for a large part of the class so I do have to pay attention. Thankfully, things got a little more interesting this week because my professors is a linguist who told us some interesting facts about the development of French and some of the other Romance languages (like why words that end in -al end in -aux in the plural) so I'm kind of looking forward to it now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5334 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 184 of 198 21 September 2011 at 11:49pm | IP Logged |
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Great, I am happy to hear that you are having fun and are motivated. University can be heaven or hell, all depending on the circumstances. I loved most of my studies, and spent 10 full years at the University of Oslo, but I know many who were miserable and hated it.
Make the most of it! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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