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5 years of 日本語 TAC 13 桜/Schnitzel | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5983 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 233 of 436 10 June 2013 at 9:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
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A few days ago I refreshed my Sharedtalk account to add French to my profile and get rid of the other languages. I then spent the next couple of days logging into text chat and completely wimping out of answering any requests to chat from French speakers! Well, tonight I decided this had to change and managed to hit my first important milestone and have had my first text chat with a real French speaker. I'm not quite ready for a voice chat, but I hope to cross that barrier very soon. On the one hand I have surprised myself at some of the sentences and expressions I've been able to use, but on the other hand I have struggled to recall some really basic things. But on the whole I'm very happy with my effort.
I've noticed some weird but important gaps in my knowledge though. Those moments where I can't find the French quickly enough and the Japanese (or even worse, the German) comes flooding into my head instead. One significant problem which should hopefully be quite easy to fix is all those important conversational fillers. I need equivalent crutches in French to things like そうですか, そうですね etc! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4666 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 234 of 436 10 June 2013 at 10:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
I took French to O-level at school (i.e. to age 16). Since then I've tried a few times to improve it, mostly by reading books that I find in the library. I can get the jist of TV but that's about all. I really do need to work on it properly sometime. The Italian helped at school: mostly because the grammar isn't hugely different and I pretty much knew that it wasn't going to be a word-for-word translation of English :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4666 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 235 of 436 10 June 2013 at 10:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
It was 2 or 3 years ago and I don't remember the title, but it was pretty obviously a section of the site that was designed to teach. The format sounds exactly the same. I either never realised or had forgotten that it changed on a regular basis. I remember being impressed at the time that they made an effort to provide teaching materials for free (where as TF wanted a subscription if you wanted to watch their programmes at all).
That's how I feel about my French too ... but that will change one day :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| yuhakko Tetraglot Senior Member FranceRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4633 days ago 414 posts - 582 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishB2, EnglishC2, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Korean, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 236 of 436 12 June 2013 at 6:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'd say the equivalent to そうですね would be something like "pas vrai?"、and for そうで
すか, something like "vraiment?". It really depends on the situation and there are actually tons of similar expressions in french! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5983 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 237 of 436 15 June 2013 at 6:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks yuhakko, that's really helpful. I guess vraiment might also work for 本当? If there
are any other good conversational expressions you can think of I'd be very interested. I haven't had so much energy for intensive study this week but I've been listening to French radio every day. I also caught a documentary about Corsica on TV5 a couple of days ago. For the first few minutes I couldn't understand anything and nearly turned it off when suddenly it started to make sense. My listening still veers between understanding almost everything and understanding next to nothing, which is a weird and slightly disorienting experience. I think I just need to keep listening! I'm also making the effort to read something from le Monde on a daily basis, with variable results. There is, however, a nice synergy between reading the news then listening to the bulletins on the radio too. I haven't managed to study Assimil every day, but when I do study it I tend to cover 2 or 3 lessons at a time. Given my background in the language this is working out just fine. It does make me smile how on the one hand Assimil tells you that you will get the hang of what sounds right in time, while at the same time insisting you must memorise gender. I actually prefer the way the German edition treats noun gender (though admittedly the issue is a little more complicated in German). Anyway, my approach to gender right now is to pay attention to the gender of nouns in texts and try to train my brain that it matters. I also discovered that the Grammaire Progressive niveau débutant textbook I have is already too basic for me. I donated it to my husband and made a start with niveau intermédiaire instead. I love the format of the book and wish that something similar existed for Japanese. Edited by g-bod on 15 June 2013 at 6:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5983 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 238 of 436 16 June 2013 at 11:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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So after wanting a bit more information about liaison than is provided in the first few
Assimil lessons I spent today doing a bit of research on French pronunciation. And I made a terrible discovery. French has more vowels than I realised! I have had 8 years of French classes, 3 of which were under a native speaker, and yet it's only today I discovered, for example, that the verb endings -ais and -ez are pronounced differently. I have a lot of work to do, I never realised my French was quite so broken. On a more positive note, I've started reading Le Petit Prince. I soon realised I wouldn't get far without a review of the passé simple and managed to find on my shelf a grammar book which did the job (Schaum's, which was a recommended purchase for the course I dropped out of last year). All I needed to do was take a quick look through the conjugation tables and common irregulars (être becoming je fus etc is the weirdest), and I had enough information to go back and read happily. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kraemder Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5185 days ago 1497 posts - 1648 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 239 of 436 17 June 2013 at 12:00am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm curious, what's the difference? It's been a while since I looked at
french but I would pronounce those the same. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4666 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 240 of 436 17 June 2013 at 10:24am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm not sure that I pronounce "allez/aller" and "jamais" the same way that (say) wordreference.com thinks a native French speaker would pronounce them, but I think I pronounce them differently. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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