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TAC ’15 French Spanish Celtic Adv Study | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| 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 265 of 336 21 May 2014 at 6:49am | IP Logged |
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So I'm now fully-immersed in the Super Challenge. So far I've been reading French history books and I manage about 50 pages or so a day between my commute time and breaks. At some point I want to rack up the pages in Irish and Spanish. Irish will be very slow-going (unless I make huge upgrades in grammar and vocab). I tried about a page of Harry Potter reading it as a bilingual text and it's just too much for me right now. I'm waiting to get the Spanish bug again as I feel that I'll make huge strides in the language with the Super Challenge. I think with Irish, 3 full reading Super Challenges is a bit over-ambitious. But we'll see what I'm able to accomplish later.
The SC is already having some good effects on my behavior and decisions. Last night I finished watching Le Petit Journal and felt I might as well get more listening/watching in. So I dug out Kaamelott which I haven't watched in a long while (I think over a year now). I don't know if it was just my perception but I felt like I could follow it better than I had before. I don't have listening comprehension tests to be able to confirm that, but if true, it means that all of my podcast listening and LPJ watching has been doing its magic. Speaking of podcasts, I wasn't sure how/if I would count them for my SC. I log a lot of listening hours, but I'm not paying full attention all the time - if anything I'm just flooding my brain with something that's not English while I go about my day. It would be dishonest to count all of this time for the SC. But sometimes I do pay attention and given the difficulty/density of many of these podcasts, I really ought to credit myself with that time. Well, while logging today, a podcast that I had fully listened to previously was nagging me to be counted. So I did. The encouragement of seeing my time go up plus the fact that I'm at the slow part of my monthly work cycle motivated me to concentrate more on what I was listening to so I could log more time. I've decided on my rule for logging podcasts: it doesn't count if I'm multitasking (unless the other task is truly mindless - like my filing/sorting work from today) and it doesn't count if my attention cuts in and out every few minutes. Some of the long, dense ones from France Culture are impossible to concentrate on 100% of the time but if I manage to focus for full periods of 5-15 minutes at a time (the length of a full argument, for example) then I can count it with a discount. My reported times will be a bit fuzzier with these but I'm not aiming to be on top of the leaderboard (and I couldn't anyway - too many are way too far ahead) so I'm not looking to fudge my times. We'll see if this has noticeable impact on my French. Though I'm sure it can do big things for my Irish and really big things for my Spanish. 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 266 of 336 26 May 2014 at 9:24pm | IP Logged |
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Got my first star in the Super Challenge! I've been spending much of my holiday weekend marathoning trash television in French which boosted my film count. I also attended a conference/debate on the subject of secularism given by two French students at the Alliance Française. It was pretty interesting but challenging as the first speaker who was covering the historical background from the Revolution until 1905 was speaking really quickly to pack in as much into his allotted time as possible. For those already very familiar with the historical events covered (the French, for example), this wouldn't have been as hard to follow but for those who don't have this period down, it was pretty difficult.
I have to come up with a presentation for my lesson this week and I still haven't decided on a topic... That's what I'll be working on! 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 267 of 336 02 June 2014 at 6:34am | IP Logged |
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Just a quick update with my stats for April (since I didn't post them yet)and May. Neither were record-breaking months for me but that's ok. I think the quality of the work I did was satisfactory even though I'm disappointed that I haven't gotten over my perpetual writer's block. If anyone wants to go in on some kind of challenge for that, I'm game!
April Weekly Hours 
Broken Down 
Total Hours: 191:54 Daily Average: 6:23:48 French Listening: 120:39 Speaking: 2:01 Reading: 20:51 Writing: 4:23 Course/Grammar: 6:16 Irish Listening: 7:43 Speaking: 0:21 Reading: 2:02 Writing: 0:06 Course/Vocab: 22:15 Spanish Course (Duolingo): 1:38 Meta language learning: 3:38 May Weekly Hours 
Broken Down 
Total Hours: 240:54 Daily Average: 7:46:15 French Listening: 136:45 Speaking: 8:53 Reading: 39:48 Writing: 4:58 Course: 5:28 Irish Listening: 9:46 Speaking: 1:21 Reading: 5:39 Course: 20:11 Spanish Speaking: 0:06 Meta language learning: 7:59 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 268 of 336 04 June 2014 at 5:52am | IP Logged |
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Just got back from Irish study group - I was actually able to participate in a conversation with full sentences! My speaking eventually broke down when the subject moved from what languages I speak to what methods I prefer (obviously) but I was holding it down pretty well until then. And I found that I could use some sentence structure patterns that I haven't formally learned yet but have heard and practiced in the GGGS dialogues and in Aifric (such as constructing a sentence with two verbs - one a verbal noun). Which means my materials are working their magic!
I'm also about 5 pages away from having my first book read in Irish for the SC so I'll probably do that soon :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6907 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 269 of 336 04 June 2014 at 6:57pm | IP Logged |
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That's great to hear! I haven't done anything decent in Irish for the past six weeks, but that will change in a week or two.
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 270 of 336 06 June 2014 at 5:25pm | IP Logged |
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I'm currently wearing the yellow jersey in the SC! I got two, count 'em TWO stars now -
one for each portion of the challenge! I wasn't really aiming for the top but once I started closing in, it gave me a little push and I ended up staying up rather late watching French TV and reading articles. It helps a lot that I'm already advanced in French - reading will be much more slow- going for Irish. And I've already been fitting a lot of immersion activities into my daily routine. I have French podcasts going almost all day at work (obviously I'm not paying full attention all the time but when I do, I count it for the SC). When I get home I watch my shows. And during my commutes and breaks I read (about 50 pages a day). None of this seems very hard for me so it's really good that I have some effortless immersion set up. I got some more new books from the library at the Alliance Française while I was there for a history seminar. This is what I'll be working on next: In addition, I asked the prof about suggestions on major French historians and he led me to another room where he found a journal for me that discusses the study of history in France since 1945, complete with excerpts. I'll share what I find from it (for anyone interested in history). I'll work on adding more stuff to the wiki. I was going to try Persepolis but of the 4 tomes they had, the one that was checked out was of course the first one. I gave my exposeé on the book La femme aux temps des cathédrales by Regine Pernoud. Lord, was I stressed out about this. I've spoken earlier about my writing anxiety - well I had the same problem only worse. It's plagued my academic attempts in English as well so this is a general problem for me, not just a language learning problem (while I have the interest and capacity to pursue an advanced degree I would absolutely crumble under the stress). I even put it off a week and still agonized over it, was dragging my feet, and started oversleeping a lot (my usual stress defense mechanism). I was pretty sure it was going to be horrible but it ended up being quite decent. My teacher was really impressed and even suggested that I should propose to do a presentation at the Alliance Francaise (lilke the one I attended on la laicite). That's certainly something I could try... But I definitely need to work on making this not such an arduous process. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| SomeGuy Groupie Germany Joined 5098 days ago 56 posts - 75 votes Speaks: German* Studies: Arabic (Written), Turkish, Mandarin | Message 271 of 336 06 June 2014 at 6:27pm | IP Logged |
correct linked image :D 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 272 of 336 06 June 2014 at 6:32pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks :) on Chrome and it's too much of a pain to open IE from this computer.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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