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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Roman Diglot Groupie Spain Joined 5453 days ago 42 posts - 52 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: German, Italian, French | Message 257 of 1317 19 October 2012 at 11:04am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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First, great log with many tips!
Now, a question: How can I convert your .apkg files to be able to use it in my Anki desktop? If it is possible I want to give it a shot... edit: even your readme file I can't open :) Edited by Roman on 19 October 2012 at 3:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5392 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 258 of 1317 19 October 2012 at 7:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
While emk's log is an excellent, detailed log of how to get to basic fluency and now working to get from intermediate to advanced, oh what I would give to see one just as detailed with someone successfully getting to C2. I think I'm still on the low side to getting there where some days I surprise myself with how well I pull everything together but paired with many days of disappointment where I feel really discouraged. I notice breakthrough moments when I start slipping more and more idiomatic expressions and more precise, varied vocabulary into my natural conversations and having people who know me notice and when I can watch a whole native movie with maybe only one or two unknown words. But there are many times that it is just not this easy and I still feel clunky and awkward. It feels a long way off. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4890 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 259 of 1317 19 October 2012 at 9:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I've enjoyed your log, and it's the only one I've followed in detail that focuses on the
B2 > C1 stage. It's nice to know what lies ahead! I've read that each stage takes an equal amount of time and effort. Has that been your experience with French? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 260 of 1317 21 October 2012 at 5:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thank you everyone for your comments and additions!
In the desktop version of Anki 2, just use the Import button. If you're still using Anki 1, it would be necessary to recreate the cards using the raw TSV files and media clips with your own template.
I've seen web pages at language schools that claim that each level takes a little longer than the one before. For me, at least, B2 required greater focus and intensity than the earlier levels in order to get off a nasty intermediate plateau. Plus, if you learn to slowly, it might be almost impossible to see your progress through the usual day-to-day swings in ability. … An excellent toy for people who know a tiny bit of JavaScript: Wiki language switcher. If you catch yourself browsing the English-language Wikipedia, this extension will tell you if you could be reading the page in one of your target languages. To customize the list of target languages, see steps 3 and up in this tutorial. (You want to find the script.js file (which requires a fair bit of digging), and edit the following line to list your languages:
Then deactivate and reactivate the extension using the regular extensions manager. And now you have no excuses! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 261 of 1317 22 October 2012 at 11:42am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I know the question's directed at emk, but as another advanced French learner I'll give my two cents :). Personally I've found that it's more like each stage takes as much time and effort as all of the previous ones put together, if not more. I've been somewhere between B2 and C1 in French for about a year and I still feel a long way off, whereas going from my high school knowledge (A1-ish) to B2 took perhaps a year and a half, even despite my learning methods not being particularly efficient during most of that time. However bear in mind that I've not done the exams so these levels are just estimates, and there's a lot of variation in my abilities - my listening comprehension is a strong point and I'd say it's been at C1 level for some time now, whereas my speaking has always lagged behind a lot since I don't get as much chance to practise it. My experiences with Italian so far have been similar - getting from zero to B1 was relatively quick and painless but reaching B2 after that is turning out to be a far bigger effort. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 262 of 1317 22 October 2012 at 7:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I've also heard this, and I agree that the upper levels have been getting harder. Still, this table from ILA France is interesting:
For those who don't speak French, "heures à partir du niveau Débutant" means "hours starting from beginner level." These are fairly aggressive numbers, and as with most such lists, they probably include only classroom time. ILA claims they can get beginners to C1 with roughly 26 weeks of instruction, and to C2 with 32 weeks. These numbers are roughly consistent with the usual FSI tables. There's probably a couple of things going on here: 1. Most of these lists only count classroom hours, and not homework hours or actually using the language. Many of the most successful intensive programs seem to combine 4 or 5 hours of study per day with homework and with fully immersive living conditions. 2. What's the right mix of study time and actively using a language? At least in my experience, you need both to make rapid progress. 3. What do the upper-level exams actually measure? It's certainly not raw language skills, even at the level of the DELF B2, which already demands a few basic academic skills. And when you look at the DALF C1 and DALF C2, these exams are as much about doing college-level writing and discussion as they are about speaking French. A native speaker with a sufficiently weak academic skills could flunk either exam. 4. Self-learners clearly have many advantages over the average classroom student. But how do self-learners stack up against the ideal classroom student—somebody who works very hard, who faces major consequences if they fail, and who has at least decent aptitude for learning a language? And if we put that student into a very serious and professional program, how might that speed up reaching C1 or C2? I don't have any answers here. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 263 of 1317 01 November 2012 at 8:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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The Super Challenge continues! We have now finished 6 of 20 months, which means that we're 30% of the way done. This will be my numbers post.
Here's my personal breakdown: Reading: 24.7% (of 10,000 pages) Films/TV: 47.8% (of 150 hours) Overall: 36% What I'm reading and watching You'll see that there are no timeless classics here. The books are mostly translations from English of science fiction and fantasy, mostly good stuff that I've read plenty of times, and the TV is mostly Buffy. And yes, I really did spend 5 hours this month watching video game walkthrough videos in French, for a video game that I don't even play. Oh, and I read more VDM and Topito than I'd care to admit. Mostly, I'm OK with being the lowbrow French student. But I'm not religious about avoiding the classics: I've just started L'Etranger, which is surprisingly easy and short. I'm still 530 pages behind on my reading. My daily target is 10 pages, which takes about 20 minutes if I don't bother to look up too many unknown words. This means I need to pick up an extra 200 pages per month during sudden bursts of enthusiasm. This is the big tradeoff of being a parent: I get a ton of French exposure for free, but I'm delighted if I can find 5 hours per week for the Super Challenge. Oh, and a progress report on subs2srs: The cards are great, especially if you make them from a movie like Amélie where every other line is witty and marvelous and practically worth memorizing. But do you remember the occasional flashes of fast, fluent speech that I was having? Those don't occur on the days where I only do my subs2srs reps and my reading, but rather on those days where I get enough sleep and I leave the audio of French films playing on shuffle in the background for 5+ hours while I do other stuff. So that obsessive AJATT listening thing? Well, there might be something to it. Seriously, the Super Challenge is only 150 hours of movies, and some AJATT folks rack that up every two weeks, albeit mostly in the background. And this reminds of a number I saw in a linguistics paper: native children receive something like 4.2 million sentences of input before reaching "fluency", whatever that means. This seems a little high to me, but it still gives you an idea of just how crazy native fluency really is. If you take two 1-hour French classes per week, and you spend another hour on homework, you don't get to talk about how adults can't learn languages. The Super Challenge is a rounding error compared to the effort that the average child puts in even before the start of kindergarten. Then add 13 years of school and 4 years of college. When you think about it, adults learn languages miraculously, impossibly fast. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4689 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 264 of 1317 01 November 2012 at 8:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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If you want to say, arbitrarily, that our fluent child happens at 10 years of age, and then assuming 8 hours of input
a day (also arbitrary), that would be 2.4 sentences a minute, 8 hr/day, for ten years. With TV and school-teachers and the like, it's not impossible, but I agree, the number seems a bit high. I totally buy into the "obsessive AJATT listening thing," fwiw. I'm doing it right now, in fact... 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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