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TAC 2015 Wish I’d been a Belgian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Mohave Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Mohave1 Joined 4009 days ago 291 posts - 444 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 9 of 24 04 January 2015 at 1:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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Bienvenue et Bonne Chance! I'm also looking forward to following your progress in French on the log (and
perhaps Dutch)! Thanks for the recommendation on the Anki deck with vocab for modern life/politics. One of my specific goals is to increase my vocabulary size so I will definitely look into that deck and see if it is on target. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Elenia Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom lilyonlife.blog Joined 3858 days ago 239 posts - 327 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Swedish, Esperanto | Message 10 of 24 04 January 2015 at 2:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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I will be following your log, and wishing good luck. I'm currently studying French (at
university), and I hope to be able to pick up Dutch at some point this year. I admire your determination to take grammar to task, hopefully you'll rub off on me! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| plumbem! Groupie United States Joined 3635 days ago 44 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French | Message 11 of 24 04 January 2015 at 10:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks to everyone for the support! TEAM FRENCH!
I am going to write a recap once a week in evernote and post it if I have internet.Hopefully this won't be too much (!) but its as much for me to reflect on what I've done and what I need to do the next week. This week has gone absolutely not according to plan (as set forth in my first post) but was excellent nonetheless. It is the first time where I have put considerable work into French and Dutch at the same time and it has been interesting. It has also created some awkward situations with mixing, and slower than usual response time in conversation but, has also shown me some parallels between them and allowed me to get a little more meta with the sounds of each (in an experiential/experimental sense, no books yet). This is probably been allowed to happen because I have been walking four hours a day commuting to the goats, which has shifted things over to a lot of mp3 listening, talking to myself (switching mid sentence from one to the other), and interestingly, my first attempts at shadowing, which, were realy interesting. It (shadowing) feels a little bit like eating adderol, which I wouldn't know anything about. It is also fatiguing; I could only keep it up for five to ten minutes at a time. It was very wierd but also so surprising that here I was producing these really complex sentences, that I understood, the trick being that, I didn't create them! Yet it was very different than reading aloud, a tactic I really do enjoy (although my mouth always gets dry), even with a good book in English and even more so with a child by one's side. I felt like it connected a lot of different skills and I will keep messing around with it a little every day. FRENCH I have been a monster consumer; i.e. huge amounts of passive work. I got from start to 70% in HP 6, listened to The Stranger audio book, (read by Camus soi-meme!), listened to 7 hours of podcast, watched the first 6 episodes of Avatar, the first episode of Cowboy Bebop, of Avatar, of Miyazaki's Sherlock Holme's series and two tintin episodes. I poked around MT Advanced (I have been comparing it to the Dutch MT advanced) and got the idea of pausing, not to give the answer, but to translate all of his prompts/the dialogue into French. This has resulted in me saying a lot of stupid things outloud like "Tu veux dire, ca serait tu veux dire". May the mountains be my only witness.oh ya, No grammar work, no anki, oh god... Also a lot of French to the face, sometimes too much. A bunch of my host's friends from PhD school stayed at the house for three days surrounding NYE and talked about sociology. I had to really fight to get my words in and not annoy people. (For example by telling yet a different story of livestock (this time sheep) borrowed from a farmer, the municipal police of Lyon and the slaughterhouse regulations in France) DUTCH I have gotten through the first six chapters of the Routledge basic gammar and while not every chapter has given me some brilliant "aha!" moment it has still been great. I relistened to the entire MT Advanced and came to the conclusion that its not really going to help me and that it is far (too strong a word?) inferior to the MT French. I also found a podcast called "Vroege Vogels that I like enough and is perfect for listening reasons> I was able to get through one episode which was....3 hours long? There are a few things that make this podcast great for learning: 1. <A recurring and slightly changing (based on updates) news bulletin every 1/2 hour> 2. <A listener call in section where you get to rapidly here a lot of different accents as people report birds or wildlife they saw recently.> 3. Commercials every half hour. I would never think of this as a good thing but, since its a foreign language I do! 4. Classical music breaks for my tired brain while I can ask myself what motivates the Dutch to kijken kijken niet kopen. Also I wrote a couple emails in Dutch this week but did not get to Skype my mom >.> GOALS: For next week I would love to report that I have researched the employment of the subjective in depth, that I have gotten 5 chapters done in Routledge Dutch and that I have started Anki again (I should have never put it down for Christmas!) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Mohave Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Mohave1 Joined 4009 days ago 291 posts - 444 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 12 of 24 05 January 2015 at 12:39am | IP Logged | ||
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That is an impressive amount of work with some great resources! how was your comprehension level on
HP6, and L'Etranger? Keep this pace up and you will definitely see good progress! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| liam.pike1 Groupie Australia Joined 3756 days ago 84 posts - 122 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto, French | Message 13 of 24 05 January 2015 at 2:12am | IP Logged | ||
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Good luck teammate! I especially love the name of your log, very clever haha
Bonne chance! Edited by liam.pike1 on 11 January 2015 at 3:34pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| plumbem! Groupie United States Joined 3635 days ago 44 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French | Message 14 of 24 10 January 2015 at 10:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well again here to reflect on a week not gone to plan. I am changing course! Part of this is
due to being put onto the next stage of the peace corps filtrage , and the prospects of Senegal seeming brighter.(For another post, I might be looking at learning Wolof and having to speak it daily for two years) Also part of this was due to a frustration with slower than normal French production I think due to Dutch/French mixing, but also to a relatively unproductive December. To keep motivation up, I am going to focus exclusively on French while I am still in France! So for the next ten weeks, its only French except for talking to family in Dutch once or twice a week. To signal this to myself 1. I bought a French keyboard (arriving the 21st grrrr) and switched my system language to French. I am going to start writing my personal journal entries in French and do everything else I can in terms of written production, in French. 2. I have sworn off all English language resources. This is for immersion, and I'm ready for it, but also because I am finding that the French resources are better. I think by a lot. One example of this is a book I found in the attic of the house called "Difficultes de Francais". This book is awesome and goes right to the throat. I am not taking the time to read the whole thing yet, setting off on "Grammaire Practique du Francais en 80 Fiches" which is a nice simple "French" explanation of grammar basics with exercises, first. I will in the meantime use the "Difficultes" to learn the phonetic alphabet and start collecting problematic words in my pronunciation. As for this week, I finished HP 6, and read an issue of "Courrier International" a lovely assemblage of international press translated into French that I could see myself getting a script for stateside. I have listened to about 5 hours of podcast, 2 hours of the "Around the world in 80 days" audiobook (very good so far!), and continued shadowing 20 minutes once or twice a day, independently of that. I have been using a Terre a Terre episode on Le monde de teintures naturelles repeatedly and it gets easier and easier to produce the French and even to finish the sentences ahead of the speakers. I will continue with this audio for a couple weeks. I have watched 6 episodes of avatar, 2 of sherlock holmes, 2 Bebop, and 3 of Eva, which as it is my first watch, is...amazingly well made. I am following all of these pretty well, with Avatar definitely being the easiest and probably Bebop being the hardest. I did the first two sections of "Grammaire en 80 fiches and found them excellent. Also plenty of French to the face with my host family and around the village. I won't bother setting any goals for next week, it seems like bad luck! I do hope to switch to posting in French once I get my keyboard! Edited by plumbem! on 10 January 2015 at 11:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tomgosse Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3994 days ago 90 posts - 143 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 15 of 24 10 January 2015 at 11:38pm | IP Logged | ||
I seem to have the same problem. Bon courage, Thomas 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| PeterMollenburg Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5478 days ago 821 posts - 1273 votes Speaks: English* Studies: FrenchB1 | Message 16 of 24 11 January 2015 at 1:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hi plumben!
Welcome to Team français. I love the fact you're studying French and Dutch. I love both of these languages, cultures and countries- although close geographically they are so different. My wife and I spent some time in NL in 2011 and France too. I miss that part of the world a lot and am envious (in a nice way) of your position. I hope you get a lot out of it. So good luck in 2015 and also I hope you get the opportunity to study Wolof and go to Senegal. That would be very unique indeed. All the best! PM 1 person has voted this message useful |
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