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Gary’s TAC 2014: Spanish, Italian, French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 17 of 138 03 January 2014 at 3:09am | IP Logged | ||
My wife and I were digging around SensCritique in search of TV series to order during the big sale, and we found this list that I just posted in sctroyenne's log: Top des meilleures séries françaises Quite a few dramas there, including some I've never heard of before. We're trying to decide what to get. :-) Edited by emk on 03 January 2014 at 3:10am 3 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 18 of 138 03 January 2014 at 11:38am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks again everyone! To be honest, half my problem is just keeping track; I've heard of most of these series before, and even checked out some clips, but then I forgot about them. There's a wealth of these short form comedies that sctroyenne mentioned; I loved the earlier episodes of Bref and I learnt a lot of idiomatic stuff from it when I first discovered it a couple of years ago. Caméra Café is great for when I have a few minutes to spare, and there's also lots of good comedy stuff on Youtube: Norman, Cyprien, etc.
I suppose I'm looking to complement these with something longer that I can get into, rather than 5-minute episodes. I've heard good things about Un Village français and Maison Close although I'd prefer something not set in the past. Fais pas ci fais pas ça sounds like it could be a good bet, and some of the others on Emk's list look interesting. It is a bit academic though: with the time I have to dedicate to French this year, I doubt I'll be able to get through very many series! 1 person has 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 19 of 138 06 January 2014 at 1:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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Spanish
I'm somehow still managing one Assimil lesson per day (usually in the morning before going to work) and one Destinos episode. I doubt I'll be able to sustain that for much longer though, but I hope to keep up at least the Assimil. And Assimil's definitely going to pick up a bit once I get into the "full circle" and past the shorter initial lessons. Destinos also gets a bit trickier after the first few episodes, and I'm not understanding 100% of the conversations, although of course you're not expected to! I both love and hate the beginner stage. It's exciting because your daily and weekly improvements are actually perceptible, but not being able to express myself is frustrating and it motivates me to get past the stage as soon as possible :). I'm hopefully going to try another conversation tonight. I feel like a lot of stuff has consolidated in the last week, but I'll wait and see how capable I am of actually using it. I'll report back. I had a quiet day a few days ago so I spent some time reading grammar articles on spanish.about.com, which helped answer a lot of the questions that had been floating around my head: the differences between por and para (seem logical enough), whether the object pronouns are really as easy as they seem (they are indeed!), why there are two forms of the imperfect subjunctive and which one I should use (apparently the second one isn't really used any more), and various indefinite adjectives and pronouns. So far Spanish seems a bit easier than Italian overall. Simpler pronunciation and in many ways the grammar is simpler even if there are more verb forms to learn. I don't want to speak too soon though! Accent improvement update I'm definitely seeing some improvements in my listen-and-repeat recordings, at least for Italian, but getting them into spontaneous speech is a whole other issue: the new improvements seem to go straight out the window as soon as I'm in a real conversation. I'm hoping some self-talk and maybe some reading aloud might help bridge the gap; really it's a question of improving bad habits, which is never easy! I also need to try to not speak too fast for the moment - accuracy before speed as always, although it's hard when I'm speaking with natives and feel the pressure to keep up. This is the same experience I've had with all my other pronunciation improvements over the years: it takes a while for the changes to sink in, and even after that, I doubt they're fully absorbed. I've also written in past logs that I think it's important to focus on getting pronunciation right from the start instead of letting bad habits sink in, and I still think that's the case for individual sounds, but now I'm not completely convinced as it seems a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem when it comes to prosody and accent. When you're a beginner, you're not yet speaking in sets of full sentences so it's hard to think about things like prosody. So for Spanish I'm trying to make an effort to speak with decent intonation and all the rest, but I'm fully aware that once I'm actually at the point of being able to converse, accent might need some proper attention. Edited by garyb on 06 January 2014 at 1:47pm 1 person has 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 20 of 138 08 January 2014 at 11:51am | IP Logged | ||
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I didn't manage to have a real Spanish conversation after all the other night. Not much anyway; I spotted one of the Spanish people from the previous week just as she was leaving and she said a few things. She seems to have an unusual and difficult accent (to me), a bit different from what I'm used to hearing and it takes me a bit of time to process what she's saying; I'll need to ask where she's from.
I did however speak lots of French, although mostly with other learners as usual. I've listened to a couple of Notes in Spanish podcasts after seeing them mentioned in a couple of logs (Stelle, LeadZeppelin). Straight away I have to give them massive kudos for creating an "inspired beginner" series that's designed to complement the usual courses/classes and teach a few more idiomatic/different things as opposed to just making yet another normal beginner course when that area's already very well covered. Although the second lesson was just plain revision of "tener que" and "ir a". I think it's going to be my gym listening for the next wee while. I finally bought a smartphone a couple of months ago. One benefit of it, aside from the obvious things like being able to do Anki reps on the shitter, is that it makes following podcasts a lot easier: instead of downloading them to a computer then copying them to my phone, I can now find and download them directly on the phone. Plus the player on the new phone actually remembers the current file and position when I pause and then come back another day, unlike the one on my old Nokia, so it's handy for long recordings. I've been using an app called BeyondPod and it does the job quite well, although I know there are others. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| agantik Triglot Senior Member France Joined 4636 days ago 217 posts - 335 votes Speaks: French*, English, Italian Studies: German, Norwegian | Message 21 of 138 09 January 2014 at 7:24am | IP Logged | ||
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I admire you for not mixing up Spanish and Italian. I've always wanted to study Spanish at some point but I
refrain from it: now is not the right time since my main focus is Italian. How do you do it? Which language did you start learning first? 1 person has 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 22 of 138 09 January 2014 at 12:23pm | IP Logged | ||
Let's not speak too soon! I've only really had one proper Spanish conversation since I started studying it, and there was definitely a bit of Italian interference. But I think it was much more to do with not having much knowledge and experience of Spanish and so my brain "falling back" on Italian than anything else. I had the same thing with French when I first started Italian, but after some more study and practice it pretty much disappeared, and I expect/hope that the same will happen for Spanish. I started learning Italian about two years after I started French, and in turn I started Spanish two years after starting Italian. I think the important point is establishing a "core" in one language before starting another. I've written before that my (very unscientific) theory is that your brain has a "new language area", and once you get to an intermediate level and establish a core, that knowledge becomes a "French area" or "Italian area" or whatever. For that reason I think that studying more than one language at once as a beginner is a terrible idea, since they're both competing for the "new language area", and that's a much bigger issue than similarity between the languages. These days I actually get a bit of Italian interfering when I speak French, even though my French is technically more advanced, and I think it's because I practise Italian more and like I said a few posts ago it's a bigger part of my life. So even if my "Italian area" isn't as developed as my "French area", the fact that I use it more means that my mind can access it a bit more efficiently. 1 person has 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 23 of 138 14 January 2014 at 11:51am | IP Logged | ||
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French
I think I've finally found a serious and reliable exchange partner; it only took me 4 years! We've been meeting once per week and doing an hour in English and an hour in French. It's helping me as it's pushing me to talk about things in more detail rather than the usual superficial Meetup conversations. I still can't tell how much effect the accent improvement stuff is having; at any rate I think it's going to take a long time because accent and pronunciation are so damn hard for me in French. It has made me aware of a few things I often do wrong (in particular, making syllable groups too long - I often say a phrase as one group when a French person would use two or three) which is a good start. I spoke a fair bit of French last night, and as always I noticed that as soon as the bar got a bit quieter, my fluency, usage, and pronunciation suddenly went up a notch or two. The noisiness of the environment seems to be the single biggest factor in my ups and downs in ability, with tiredness and stress a bit behind. Italian I had a Skype chat at the weekend with a new contact (let's see how long this one lasts!) and a brief conversation last night. The improvements in pronunciation in terms of the mistakes I was making before (open vs. closed Es etc.) are starting to make their way into my speech, but it's hard to say whether my prosody is improving as it's something that's hard to pay attention to in conversation. I'd probably have to record myself to get an accurate idea. Italian's pronunciation is definitely much simpler than French's so I'm not surprised that the results are appearing much more quickly, and I think a good accent as opposed to an OK one might actually be a realistic goal. Spanish Some conversation last night, but it was a bit of a mess. I just didn't know enough vocabulary to say most of the things I wanted to say, and even when I did I was stumbling all over the place, struggling to remember verb forms, not understanding well, making a lot of Italian-influenced mistakes. Especially tempo instead of tiempo: I was making that one todo el tem...eh...tiempo. Also ma instead of pero, and I mixed up en and a a lot; Spanish seems to use these much more like English than French or Italian, in that you use a for going to a city or country and en for being in it, but my inclination is of course to use them the French/Italian way. But the person I was speaking to was so amazingly patient and helpful. Spanish people haven't disappointed me so far; maybe the grass really is greener on the other side! There were other Spanish people there too but I decided that that conversation attempt was enough for one day. Like I said I'm still not sure about the whole "speak from day one" thing; I can't tell whether this experience means that I should focus on studying for now and wait until I'm more ready for conversations, or on the contrary that it was bad exactly because I haven't spoken enough and I'm not used to conversations yet. My gut feeling is that it's not really important, and how early I start seriously conversing isn't going to make much of a difference to my level six or twelve months down the line. So for now I'll keep the same strategy of not actively looking for conversations but still taking the opportunities when they appear. I also think a bit of self-talk would be really useful to help bridge the gap between study and conversation. But overall, I've only been learning it for a few weeks! It's early days and there's no need to worry about anything, and my Italian is much more of a help than a hindrance even if the current interference is a pain. I just need to be patient and the problems should work themselves out over the next few months. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5210 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 24 of 138 14 January 2014 at 2:09pm | IP Logged | ||
Congratulations; that's super news! I know it's been quite a long haul for you; I've really admired your tenacity. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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