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Gary’s TAC 2013 - PAX | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5205 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 49 of 160 25 March 2013 at 1:56pm | IP Logged |
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Italian Super Challenge
Films: 58.5 done, 41.5 to go. Conversation hours: 100 done. Films: Still continuing the Muccino theme, I watched Come te nessuno mai. It was a bit more difficult than some of the others but I still think I got most of it without subtitles. I might watch it again with them though, to see how much I actually missed. I also watched the first half of Manuale d'amore, and I can't decide whether I like it or not, overall it's too much "cheesy unrealistic romantic comedy" for my tastes (although what did I expect?), particularly the first story, but yet again it's great for language study... the sacrifices that we make. I also think I've watched more than enough video clips on Youtube and Repubblica.it in the last month or so to add another film to my count. I had quite an interesting weekend. On Friday I went to watch a film (La fille de Monaco) with the French meetup group. Afterwards I got into one of these challenging conversations where you have to interrupt and talk over people just to get a word in, after which you have a split second to make your point. I found myself making a few stupid mistakes as I tried to keep up, but I'm not convinced that anyone was really listening to me anyway. Interestingly, none of the participants were actually native speakers, but they all spoke pretty fluently and most had spent some time in France. These advanced non-natives do exist after all. On Saturday, I was on a night out for a friend's birthday, but I bumped into my Spanish ex-girlfriend who was with two Italian friends. Semi-drunken trilingual conversation ensued. I guess one of the guys was from Rome; he spoke just like some of the characters in all these films I've been watching recently. The French exchange on Sunday went ahead. Despite being tired and a bit hungover I thought I was speaking quite well and it was mostly coming naturally to me, although the conversation skill side of things felt more difficult than usual. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5205 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 50 of 160 29 March 2013 at 12:08pm | IP Logged |
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Another week, more practice:
Français Café on Monday, meetup on Wednesday. The Café was interesting, the crowd was back at its usual size and there were a few new people. I got a good bit of French practice, although once again I just missed a few Italians. They always seem to go home just before I join the group they had been in. I think I know who they are now so I'll attempt to accost them next week if they're there. I started talking to a woman who I thought looked Italian but she turned out to be Moroccan; she spoke French but she was already in another conversation so we didn't talk much. At the Wednesday meetup I had a fairly long conversation with a Frenchman and an Italian woman who spoke French quite well. I've also started watching the film Il y a longtemps que je t'aime, which so far seems... good but strange. I still haven't found much French drama that's not heavy and serious, although Les Infidèles sounds like it might fit the bill so I'll check it out soon. I've also been getting a bit of exposure to Quebec French: I listened to a France Culture podcast about Montreal, which had a lot of the locals speaking. I found it quite easy to understand, although I suppose they maybe toned the accent down a bit since they knew they were speaking for a French audience. My only other real experiences with Quebec French were watching the film Starbuck last year, in which some characters were easy to understand and some near-impossible to understand, and hearing a friend-of-a-friend from Quebec speaking French a few times, whose accent seemed fairly "standard", almost European apart from the Quebec-style vowels. I'm supposed to be meeting a Franco-Canadian woman for an exchange this weekend so I'll see how that goes. I've recently met a few people who've spent time in Montreal. Apparently in Montreal, French speakers will often keep speaking French even after realising that the person talking to them isn't a native French speaker. Which is unlike my experiences with many people in France, where after the slightest pause, mistake, or pronunciation giveaway on my part they tended to immediately switch to English. Maybe it's to do with the whole linguistic pride thing in Canada. That fact alone makes me quite keen to visit sometime! Italiano I watched the rest of Manuale d'amore. Overall I'd say it's pretty good apart from the cheesy start and end. You can see that it's taken some influence from the classic 1960s Italian comedy films, although it's more accessible and modern which is nice for us non-Italian people. I may even check out the sequels. I also started watching L'ultimo Bacio again, and it seems a bit easier the second time round, although still challenging and I'm still using the subtitles - I might as well since they're available. I checked out some stand-up comedy on Youtube too. I met an Italian guy for an exchange last night. We chatted in English for a wee while then in Italian. Surprisingly I didn't feel too out of practice and I was expressing myself quite well, although to be honest it wasn't exactly a difficult conversation, but I don't think my accent was great. I've noticed generally that when I'm talking to one native speaker, my accent is often a bit dodgy, but when I'm with a group of them, like at the Italian meetup, it improves a lot. This is the case for French as well. Italian Super Challenge Films: 60 done, 40 to go. Conversation hours: 100 done. Edited by garyb on 02 April 2013 at 11:24am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5205 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 51 of 160 04 April 2013 at 1:35pm | IP Logged |
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Français
The exchange with the Canadian was good... it took me a few minutes to get used to her accent but after that I was fine. A few strange words and expressions but nothing I couldn't work out easily enough. She did say she was trying to speak in as much of a "standard" way as she could. Café as usual on Monday. I was speaking quite well at the start, but as it got busier and noisier, my ability and my accent got noticeably worse. I wonder if it's just because I felt more relaxed and comfortable at the start and less so later when it was harder to have conversations and hear people. I was also feeling more tired later on, although maybe even that is partly because the whole situation was more tiring. Lots of factors as usual. Italiano There weren't any Italians there this time round, and I haven't heard back from the guy I met last week. I'm mostly back at square one in terms of finding Italian speaking opportunities, so I'm glad I got in all these conversation hours when I was able to! I found some episodes of a comedy/satire show called Satyricon on Youtube. It seemed good but difficult, as the jokes often come so fast that I miss them. I've got plenty films to keep me busy now but I'm still looking for things like TV shows that I can watch freely (and legally!) during lunch hour. For French, the Canal+ site covers that perfectly, but I haven't found much for Italian. Plenty of stuff on the Rai site but I don't really know what to look for other than news and politics. I suppose Un Posto Al Sole is always an option... Italian Super Challenge Films: 61.5 done, 38.5 to go. Conversation hours: 100 done. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5205 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 52 of 160 08 April 2013 at 2:28pm | IP Logged |
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I've not heard back from any of the exchange partners (surprise surprise!) but I met another Italian guy yesterday. All these films I've been watching recently seem to be having an effect, as I noticed a definite improvement in my speaking ability despite not having had a conversation for a couple of weeks. Maybe the "lots of input helps activate your passive skills" idea isn't just a myth after all. Or maybe I was just having a good day; too many variables as always.
On the subject of films, I watched Manuale d'amore 2 and started on 3. I'd say that 2 is actually better than the first one, and I'm enjoying 3 as well. These Italian romantic comedies are definitely becoming a bit of a guilty pleasure! They quite often have quite similar stories, characters, and general clichés, but that in itself can be interesting from a cultural point of view. Linguistically speaking, the first part of 3 has some nice Tuscan accents, and 2 has an interesting bit where a doctor in Barcelona speaks half-Spanish-half-Italian, something like "es muy importante che tu venga domani". Both sequels have Italian subtitles, although they're not exact. On the French side of things, I watched Trois couleurs: Bleu, a film that I've known of for a while but not gotten round to watching. It's a well-done drama, and not quite as heavy and serious as I thought it might be. It also has two sequels so I'll check them out. It had English subtitles, which can actually be useful even at my level where I understand just fine without them, as it's interesting to see how idiomatic expressions have been translated. At the weekend I had a brief Spanish conversation with a Polish guy. Or at least my idea of speaking Spanish, which is just speaking Italian but substituting in the Spanish words if I know them. Kinda the opposite of the Spanish doctor from the film I suppose. This week's going to be a busy one but I'm hoping to make it to a couple of meetups. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5205 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 53 of 160 12 April 2013 at 2:54pm | IP Logged |
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I made it to the meetups. Not much to report, but I was thinking and I realised something: nobody seems to compliment my French any more. A year or even six months ago, I heard "tu parles bein le français !!" from almost every French person I spoke to, but now, very few say anything about my ability. As much as I enjoyed the ego boosts, I'm sure I've read here that once you actually get good, people tend to stop telling you that you're good, so maybe that's true. And I do see a lot of compliments like that being thrown out to people whose French, to be blunt, doesn't really merit them, so I think it's often just encouragement as opposed to real compliments. Not quite to the same level as for Italian of course, in which being able to slowly string together a semi-correct sentence makes you a genius in the eyes of native speakers. I do feel like I've been getting more and more fluent recently, so I don't think it's a case of having gotten worse. So I suppose this is a very good sign!
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| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5007 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 54 of 160 15 April 2013 at 9:29pm | IP Logged |
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It's great to read your log, nice progress in the Italian SC.
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| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5205 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 55 of 160 22 April 2013 at 1:47pm | IP Logged |
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Français
A couple more meetups, and a couple more films. I saw Quand j'étais chanteur (drama about a singer in a dance band) at a meetup and Les infidèles (episodic comedy about men cheating on their wives) on my own. My speech still seems to be getting more and more fluent but I'm at that point once again where I really think my accent needs yet more work. Prosody in particular - I think I pretty much have the individual sounds nailed by now, although I do make mistakes sometimes. This coincides with what I've been reading in okjhum's posts and paper about improving prosody by listening and chorusing short phrases many times. The idea's that you do it in a group with a teacher, but he's also discussed how you can approximate it alone with recordings. I took a recording of a conversation with a young male speaker from the Prononciation française pour de vrai discs and cut out some phrases/sentences that I thought would be useful, and I'll probably make a few more from TV and films. I've not tried the actual listening/chorusing yet, but I'll hopefully find time to do so soon. I'm hoping it works as well as he claims. I do think that you can pick up prosody eventually from exposure if you're attentive enough, especially if you're surrounded by the language (hence my usual example of all the people I've met who've lived in France for a year who don't speak amazingly well but do have great accents) but anything that could speed up the process, especially for someone like me who isn't surrounded by the language, would be amazing. Someone else said they thought my accent sounds a bit Canadian. I wonder if Canadian speakers would say that I sound French... I think it was Benny Lewis who once said that people in Latin America think he's Spanish and people in Spain think he's Latin American. Italiano Two more films: Che ne sarà di noi and C'è chi dice no. The latter was quite difficult for me and I'll need to watch it again with subtitles since I missed so much that I could barely follow the story. I think the accents were a big part of why I struggled: I've now watched so many films set in Rome that I've tuned in to the accent, but this one was set in Florence. It might be worth seeking out films set in different areas of Italy in order to hear more accents. I've decided that my hundredth film, whenever I get there, will be Benvenuti al Sud. I've heard that it's very difficult and requires a good knowledge of different accents to fully understand, so it seems like an appropriate choice for the end of the Challenge. Italian Super Challenge Films: 66 done, 34 to go. Conversation hours: 100 done. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5205 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 56 of 160 25 April 2013 at 4:14pm | IP Logged |
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I went to a French meetup last night, and overall my French was terrible: it felt like I had regressed a good year or two, to the point where I struggled to find the words to explain all but the simplest things. But hey, if you're going to talk about your language learning you have to talk about the bad as well as the good, and my log's been a bit too positive recently. I've been particularly busy and stressed these days and not sleeping enough so that's probably the main reason, as well as the normal highs and lows. Also, one of my conversations was with another relatively advanced learner who shares my enthusiasm and desire to continually improve, and I think he was deliberately trying to challenge me and get me to talk about things in detail, which of course isn't a bad thing! For example, instead of just asking if my work is going OK as most people would, he was also asking about what exactly I was working on, how I felt about it, how I was dealing with the problems I'm encountering in it, what my attitudes are towards it...
As for pronunciation/accent, while I'm not improving much, I seem to be becoming slightly more aware of the "dynamics" of my pronunciation, i.e., when it's good and when it's bad in terms of prosody. Which is a foundation I suppose. I've not done any of the prosody work I wrote about yet, but maybe just the fact that I'm thinking about it more has made me more aware of it. I had a very short Italian conversation and it felt really difficult and unnatural, but I'll put that down to having spent the previous couple of hours speaking French and of course the tiredness and all. Being out of practice doesn't help either of course. As usual, setbacks like these just make me want to work harder, but at the moment I think I really need to address the more important things in life first (work, sleep, etc.), then I should be able to approach languages with a clearer head and do it better. All that motivation is a waste if more important things are stopping me from making the most of it. Films: last night I watched L'affittacamere, a 70s Italian comedy. Good fun and not too difficult. Edited by garyb on 25 April 2013 at 4:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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