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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| rlnv Senior Member United States Joined 3949 days ago 126 posts - 233 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 985 of 1317 04 April 2014 at 7:01am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I read your entire log a couple of months ago, emk. And I'm actually now going through it again to mine the nuggets of information that are located here within. This time, I'm actually following along with much of the French.
I'd like to mention why I find this log so valuable, and why I think others starting down the road of learning an L2 for the first time may also. + There are many opinions on this forum and elsewhere on time to learn and commitment needed to learn an L2. Certainly it differs for everyone and their circumstance, but reading this log has given me the best overall picture of what is really required to reach a good level of proficiency. I have a better understanding of what I need to do from the information provided here. + The amount of helpful guidance here is really awesome. I have many links stored away, and a good sense of when they will be put to use in my future. I know many options are available from collecting information here. + The log is just plain inspiring and interesting to read. Thanks. 2 persons have 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 986 of 1317 04 April 2014 at 7:21am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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One of the main reasons I get so many hours of French listening is just to maintain a French environment. Of course I'm not able to focus on talk radio podcasts for hours at a time, especially while multitasking at work, but the fact that it's there means that I can slip in and out easily and it crowds out English. Though sometimes I worry that I'm training myself to regulate it to background noise...
I've never been into BDs though I've always meant to check out Maus (my AP English teacher recommended it to me and I've since seen it praised everywhere. I saw this magazine, DBD at the AF today and thought of you. Though I imagine you either already know about it or otherwise have other great sources of BD news. I just subscribed to Sciences Humaines magazine which I'm excited about. It's exactly what I'm interested in, I get access to all the archives, I get all kinds of different perspectives on a variety of topics, and most of the articles are followed with a key that explains important concepts/people/etc in a bit more depth for those who aren't familiar with the topic or area of study. I'm pretty excited! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 987 of 1317 04 April 2014 at 1:39pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thank you for the kind words, rlnv. My personal experience with learning a language is something like this: A1 & A2: The biggest challenge at these levels was not giving up. Once I learned to hang in there, it took surprisingly little work to more-or-less understand French text, and people who spoke to me slowly. B1 & B2: On the input side, this was tons of fun: Lots of reading and lots of TV, and some relatively amusing Anki sentence cards. On the output side, I needed a good month over at lang-8, and a couple months of actually speaking French. C1: This has been more of challenge. Certainly my French is far better than it was when I took my B2 exam: more idiomatic, with a far larger vocabulary, with much faster reading and better listening comprehension. But at heart, I love to talk about stuff: books, ideas, politics, the weather, and a hundred other things. And I've realized that if I want to open my mouth, and to have intelligent opinions flow out in French, I need to consume lots of intelligent opinions in French, or my "well" will be half dry. Honestly, if I were a "strong silent type", and not a natural moulin à paroles, this would be a lot easier. :-) On some level, what I really want is to be able to do is successfully run my business in a French-speaking country. That would involve two things: The actual programming, which I could do without much trouble, and the explaining, selling and convincing, which would still be a challenge.
Thank you for the link to the magazine! Maus is absolutely a classic graphic novel, and well worth reading. But if you're tempted by the idea of French BDs, let me suggest a few classics of undeniable quality. This is, if you will, the artistic argument for BDs: those tomes which demonstrate the potential of le neuvième art. Le Chat du rabbin 
A rabbi's cat learns how to speak, and because he's a cat, of course he's a shameless liar. But the cat adores the rabbi's daughter, and the rabbi forbids him to speak to her unless he can become a good Jew. So the cat asks study the Torah, and tries to become a moral being. Every page of this series shines with a love of Judaism and the Jewish experience. I think I heard about this in kanewai's log. You can find the series on Izneo as part of the unlimited plan, or in gorgeous full-color volumes. Persepolis 
Growing up as a young woman in Iran and emigrating to Europe. Available as a single volume on Amazon.fr. Paul 
Image from here. Books available from Amazon.ca. The is the great classic BD series from Québec, recounting the life of Paul. This is a wonderful slice-of-life story: quiet and personal, but filled with hundreds of little details about growing up in Québec. Paul au parc, in particular, is the story of Paul's summer in the boy scouts, during the era of la révolution tranquille. The are some great linguistic bits in these books, too: Snippets of informal Québecois, bilingual workplaces, etc. I also hear good things about Guy Delisle's BDs, including Pyongyang. I seem to remember that Arrekusu is a fan.
Very cool! I think I'm going to pick up a digital subscription to Science & Vie and read it on my tablet. Edited by emk on 09 April 2014 at 4:17pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5260 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 988 of 1317 04 April 2014 at 2:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I, too, can highly recommend "Maus". It didn't win a Pulitzer prize for nothing. I don't recommend reading it just before bedtime though. It is a quite powerful story.
Before reading "Maus" and "Persepolis" in Portuguese translation, my opinion about BD's was that they were for kids, not to be taken seriously. Since then my opinion has done a complete 180. For language learners, BD's seem to combine the best of reading and video. Reading gives time to digest the dialog and the pictures provide some context and clues. The language in BD's is conversational and colloquial. I am grateful to emk for inspiring me to make them a part of my language menu. "Maus" and "Persepolis" are at the highest end of the art form, but the lower end of the spectrum also has it uses. BD's really help me to solidify colloquial conversation. After having watched every episode to date of "The Walking Dead" series in Portuguese dub, now that the series is on hiatus, I am going through the comic book series on my tablet. The zombie apocalypse and language learning, go figure! Edit: Just found "O gato do rabino". Muito obrigado, emk! Edited by iguanamon on 04 April 2014 at 7:44pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 989 of 1317 05 April 2014 at 6:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yeah, those are some of the things I love about BDs: The pictures, the colloquial language, the high ratio of conversation to narrative. Another huge plus is that BDs are relatively short: it takes me 8 to 15 hours to read an actual novel in French, and I sometimes get bored. But a BD, or a even a series, goes a lot quicker. Students of French also have enormous variety and undeniable quality—either literary quality or trashy-but-entertaining lowbrow stuff. But the big drawback with BDs has always been the length and the price. It costs me $20 or $25 to buy a typical BD, and I can read all 48 pages in about half an hour. This is the reason I'm so enthusiastic about Izneo: 1,500 BDs for 9,90€/month is a ridiculously good deal. It's so painfully hard to get any kind of cheap digital media from France, and all of a sudden, somebody goes and releases over a thousand volumes, legally, with all-you-can-eat pricing, and a few thousand more at remarkably good prices. And now if I have a few hours to kill, I can read a 5-part series, about 240 pages of comics averaging 150 words per page. (French BDs seem to have a lot more text than the typical Japanese manga, and some of them are very wordy indeed.) How I study Egyptian (illustrated), or How to learn a language in 45 minutes per week This is for those of you who like lots of step-by-step details. :-) As previously mentioned, I study one lesson of Assimil's L'Égyptien hiéroglyphique per week. I bought this online at Amazon.fr. Anyway, here's my progress on Beeminder: 
Beeminder is in charge of letting me know when I'm in danger of dropping below my goal of one lesson per week. I find this enormously helpful, because at a rate of one lesson per week, I have no intrinsic momentum or habits to keep me going. The other problem is that one Assimil lesson per week is much to slow to "stick" naturally. And that's where Anki and AnkiDroid are critical. For this next step, you'll need either a digital camera or a scanner (I've tried both), or maybe—if you get really lucky—your course publisher will sell you an ebook. First, I copy and paste a section of the Assimil lesson into an image editor: 
In English, that reads:
Once I've assembled the image, I open the Anki Image Occlusion Plugin, and paste it in: 
The next step is to block out various unfamiliar parts of the text. Sometimes I block out the transliteration of the hieroglyphs; sometimes I block out half a word on both the hieroglyph and transliteration lines. Basically, I want these occlusions to be ridiculously easy. I've found that easy Anki cards work just as well as hard ones, and I can review them a lot quicker, and with a lot more pleasure, so why not? (This technique was inspired by Khatzumoto's MCD cards.) You can see that I can group two discontiguous occlusions into a single, larger occlusion. 
Now, I save the results to Anki (using the overlapping squares button). This will make a separate card for each occlusion. Here's a preview of the front and the back of one of the resulting cards: 
To pass this card, all I need to do is guess what's under the red bit. One nice thing about this process: I can easily make multiple cards from the same material. Making cards from exercises Assimil's exercises also make great cloze cards. These don't involve any hieroglyphs, so I just type them in by hand:
Anki will turn this into two cards. Here's a preview of the first: 
In this case, I'm dealing with a mostly-Roman alphabet, so I'm willing to spend some time actually typing. But if there were some way to copy and paste raw text from an Assimil ebook, I would do that in heartbeat. What about audio? For a living language, I'd do something very similar with subs2srs and fun movies. Or I'd buy the MP3 version of an Assimil course, which has subtitle text embedded in the MP3s, and look for a script to automatically generate Anki cards. Important simplifications A few things worth mentioning: 1. I spend as little time on data entry as humanly possible. 2. I make multiple, very easy cards from the same material. 3. I configure Anki to introduce no more than 5 new cards per day, and my daily reviews rarely go above 10–20 cards. 4. If a card is hard, boring or annoying, I just delete it. I probably have at least one other card made from the same sentence, plus Assimil's built-in repetition, plus any important words will appear in native materials anyway. 5. I don't stress out about the "right" way to cloze things. I try all sorts of different ideas. As you can see, I'm not using Anki to "permanently memorize" things. I'm using to amplify my natural memory considerably, but I still forget obscure things. And that's OK. So thanks to Anki, I have an unusually good memory. And thanks to Beeminder, I have an unusually good ability to study one lesson per week without that trailing off to zero lessons per week. And that's one way to learn the basics an obscure language really slowly, but quite pleasantly, over the course of a couple of years. :-) Edited by emk on 05 April 2014 at 6:50pm 2 persons have 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 990 of 1317 08 April 2014 at 9:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks for the suggestions. I saw that Pyongyang one while browsing Amazon and it looks
really interesting. I'll try to track down some of these (I'm sure the AF library has them). Listening to one of my podcasts, I heard about a BD festival in Aix-en-Provence which is going on now: Rencontres du 9e Art 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 991 of 1317 09 April 2014 at 3:08am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thank you, sctroyenne, I'll check it out!
Just watched: The French dub of Disney's L'Homme invisible cartoon. Nothing special, but the dialog is actually quite fast and idiomatic. In progress: Le Complexe du chimpanzé. Not sure if I have an opinion yet. Note for later: Check out Sang Noir, which won a bunch of prizes. I just purchased an inexpensive VuPoint Magic Wand scanner. It's basically a hand-held wand that you can glide slowly over a page to get a scan. It tends to produce slightly crooked and distorted scans, but with a little practice, it works. Sort of. La Trilogie Nikopol Let's pull some seriously weird stuff off the shelf. La Trilogie Nikopol is one of the stranger science fiction classics, combining a totalitarian state and Egyptian gods who need to refuel their spaceship. This trilogy takes the surrealist BD movement of Métal hurlant and Moebius, and pushes it to its artistic apogee. The author Enki Bilal was born in Yoguslavia, which seems to have influenced his creepy political dystopia. The book is filled with a sly humor. And did I mention the surrealism? Here, the renegade god Horus performs a little impromptu surgery on an injured astronaut: 
In this future, hockey is gladiatorial sport, often resulting in bloody deaths. And Horus, possessing Nikopol's body, plays to win: 
Believe it not, tome 1 of the trilogy is the least surreal, by a very wide margin. It gets much stranger than this. You can buy a gorgeous hardcover edition from Amazon.fr using your regular Amazon email and password. I'm so very glad I learned French. Edited by emk on 09 April 2014 at 4:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Eagle32 Groupie New Zealand Joined 6499 days ago 56 posts - 83 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 992 of 1317 09 April 2014 at 10:01am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I looked at those pages and they reminded me of a film Immortel, ad vitam, apparently with good reason, as the film is based on the first tome of the trilogy.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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