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Speaking after B2, not in country | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5537 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 1 of 40 17 December 2013 at 1:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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I'm stuck. And I want to ask the experienced polyglots here at HTLAL for advice.
Where I am: - I've spoken French at home for almost two years. - I passed the DELF B2 oral exam a year and half ago. They required me to give a 10-minute presentation on whether Paris should impose congestion charges for driving in the city, and then they asked me questions for 10 minutes. I survived, made some jokes, and more-or-less defended my ideas. - My receptive skills are OK. For example, I know all the words in one of the sample reading passages for the DALF C1, and I can read it reasonably quickly. I can watch most TV series and many movies pleasurably, though some still give me trouble. - I can't always produce a steady stream of syllables, particularly when discussing books or professional subjects. This varies hugely, however: Some days I do pretty well, other days I suck. The problem is much worse in extended monologues or when I'm tired. - My passive vocabulary is pretty good, but I often pause to remember the precise word that I want. This also interferes with fluency. - I do fine at Meetups, during friendly language exchanges, and at social events where the only goal is to speak in French. The problems occur when "speaking in French" is taken as a given, and the goals are elsewhere. What I want: - Fast, fluid speech, even when discussing complicated topics. My immediate goal isn't to sound like a native, but I'd love to be able to participate in (say) a late night, dorm-room "bull session" with native speakers and to be able to hold the floor when it's my turn to espouse some harebrained theory about life. - Faster access to my borderline-active vocabulary. - The ability to speak casually about books and professional matters without asking native listeners to make any special accommodations. - A fully-internalized gender system where I can get it right consistently, at full speed, without ever having to think about it consciously. - Less variability, or at least the ability to consistently do what I can now do on my very best days. What resources are available to me - I speak French at home with my wife. We average under 15 minutes of total English per month. - I'm perfectly happy to pay for tutors. (If you're a French-speaking tutor, I'd also be happy to pay for your one-on-one advice.) - I'm capable of sticking to long-term plans for years at a time, if I can see how they'll benefit me. Unfortunately, there's currently no way that I can move to a French-speaking country and replace my entire peer group with French speakers. And that's the only way I personally know to reach consistently high levels of spoken fluency. So, for those of you who've reached a solid C1 or higher, or who have ILR 4 speaking skills, what worked for you? Were you able to do it without long-term immersion? How did you get from "I can talk about pretty much anything, given a little cooperation from my listeners" to "I can carry on educated, professional conversations easily, without asking my listeners to do me any special favors?" Thank you, as always, for your advice. You've all been enormously helpful and inspirational to me over the years. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| culebrilla Senior Member United States Joined 4002 days ago 246 posts - 436 votes Speaks: Spanish | Message 2 of 40 17 December 2013 at 1:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
Unfortunately, all your objectives just take time. As you know, progress really plateaus after you reach a certain level, B2 in my biased, personal opinion. After 1,000 hours, I think your progress is really good, but after that the hill gets really steep--at least for me. You are very fortunate to have meetups and a wife where you can practice in person. Do the people at the meetups have an adequate level of French or is it not that productive or efficient? I pay for skype speaking sessions. Not lessons but I just pay a native speaker to chat with me and to correct any mistakes that I make. Thankfully, it is relatively inexpensive (6-8 dollars an hour for Spanish speakers) for the romance languages, it seems. I'm sure you know about italki.com, right? Great website. About some of your specific questions: Do you have all the gender rules for French internalized where you don't have to think about them? If not, do you have the gender rules memorized so when you do come across a word with a specific ending, you can correctly use the right gender? I'm a big advocate of memorizing a very finite group of rules that can be applied to thousands of examples instead of just memorizing the gender of every single word. You will really always have to be accomodated for by native speakers at SOME level--unless you just spoken French exclusively for about 10 years right now. Just won't happen. Since you and your wife speak almost exclusively French, I would imagine that your French progress will be much better than that of most Anglos in North America. Good luck. Sorry, but it is just time and that dreaded word, repetition. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4873 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 3 of 40 17 December 2013 at 1:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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I have reached that level in English, but I did live in New Zealand for a year and study Anglistics at university. While I don't have any experience of reaching C1 without these factors, I still have a couple of ideas as to how I'd go about reaching advanced fluency if I were in your situation.
Actually, I'm not convinced that immersion alone does the trick. My immersion experience took place when I was 15/16 and back then I didn't have the kind of discussions you're aiming for. University also only helps with my subject (mainly interpreting literature) and I only occasionally say something in class. Maybe my leisure habits had more influence on my speaking fluency. You need to spend a lot of time reading and actively using French in the ways that you have defined as your goals. Do you read the kind of material that you are aiming to emulate - argumentative books, forum discussions, etc.? A lot of practice goes into being able to discuss any topic on a high level. All my writing and reading basically takes place in English and most of my thinking as well (although it's slowly being replaced with Korean). I would guess that your wife and you have reached a kind of plateau on which you communicate, something which lies within your comfort levels. People change their communication according to their audience and you get used to a certain way and level of speaking. I notice the same with my boyfriend, who is learning German and I've seen it with other couples. I simply don't push the conversation as much as I probably could, seeing how he is improving his German. Maybe what you could try is to have those "bull sessions" with your wife, as a kind of special date. If you can also regularly practice discussions with a tutor, that would of course be a plus. I think the more different people you speak to, the more your discussion skills will diversify. If you can do some more immersion, take that opportunity. Even if it's only a week or two among native speakers, I think it can help a lot to activate more of your passive knowledge. If you're already doing these things, you might simply need more time. The fact that you sometimes have C1-ish speaking abilities shows that you're moving in the right direction, I think. EDIT: Thinking about this some more, what I said about New Zealand isn't quite correct. I had an ESOL class five times per week where we learned to write argumentative essays and such and got an IELTS 8.5 by the end of my stay (C2). Just as tarvos mentions in the post below, writing practice of that type really helps. Edited by druckfehler on 17 December 2013 at 2:09pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4712 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 4 of 40 17 December 2013 at 1:51pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
What helped when I learned English to an academic level was patience, time, and exercising the skills you would normally use in tasks you would normally do in the home language. I haven't lived in an anglophone country since I was five years old, but the ability to rapidly speak English, present, switch on a dime and so on and so forth is honed by consistent practice. It depends on which skills you need, but one thing I do, like you, is to write and present essays on topics which I could use for work in Dutch and English, but not in French. In my case, that means I summarise my internship thesis in French, create newspaper articles on scientific topics in popular style in French, and so on, and have these corrected by a native speaker (my teacher is very good, but a little expensive. I would like to work with her more often but right now it's once every two weeks). These are C1-C2 academic skills you also use in your new native tongue. I have done equally as many presentations in Dutch as I have in English. So what is left to do is do them in French and find all the missing vocabulary bits as you go. Read up on "how to present academically" in French literature. I think the idea you had of taking a statistics class in French was very inspired. I think that is the road that will lead to results. I find that progress slows down enormously after B2-C1, because you have a very good level already and it's so easy to become complacent. Edited by tarvos on 17 December 2013 at 1:52pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5537 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 40 17 December 2013 at 1:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
I've definitely gotten better at French gender over the last 18 months. If I speak naturally, with no conscious intervention, and I don't try to speak too quickly, I will quite often say things like "les photos que j'ai prises" and "c'est une idée simple mais intélligente." And I often know the gender of words without knowing how I know it, even when those words are an exception to the usual rules. From what I've seen in French childhood linguistics papers, my unconscious command of gender is about on par with a native 3-year-old, but far below that of a typical native 6-year-old. If I actually think about gender consciously, I know all the common tricks for predicting word gender, and I know many of the exceptions. I do still regularly run into words where I don't know the gender. Normally when I'm speaking, I let the subconscious part of my brain do most of the work, and then I patch things up consciously when they feel wrong.
I'm quite happy to speak French for several hours a day for the next 30 years, if that helps any. :-) But I'm hoping that it's possible to improve faster than that. Edited by emk on 17 December 2013 at 1:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5537 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 40 17 December 2013 at 2:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
I have access to one excellent Meetup with a half-dozen C1 & C2 French speakers, plus several natives. But it only happens once a month, and the goal is still basically "let's speak French for an hour," which doesn't push me the same way as when the goal is, say, "Ask the nice clerk at Librarie Planète BD which science fiction BDs would appeal to my tastes, and talk about them in detail." I don't know if this makes any sense, but there's a big difference between being evaluated as student of French, and being evaluated as an actual speaker of French. I do OK when judged by the former criteria.
As far as discussing books goes, I do spend a fair amount of time reading reviews on SensCritique and reading blogs about science fiction. But I could certainly do more in this area, and I don't write as much as I should. Professional subjects are a lot more difficult. As far as I can tell, French Ruby and JavaScript programmers spend most of their day reading English, not French. And on the business side, a lot of the vocabulary related to starting a software company is blatantly borrowed from English. So I can't just go on Amazon.fr and order a half-dozen books about my specialty with a few clicks. Studying statistics in French has been useful, because I've picked up a bunch of basic mathematical vocabulary.
Yup. I've definitely hit this plateau. As a busy parent, I can talk about all the subjects we need to discuss on a regular basis. (Seriously, when a 3-year-old girl in Montreal started throwing my kid's toys across the room, my French was terrific. I can totally persuade other people's toddlers to play nicely.) And by the time the kids are in bed, neither of us has much energy to discuss what we think about the books we're reading. As for business stuff, I think my wife would just as soon that I not discuss the finer points of software companies at home, in any language. :-) But you're right, we should make time for longer and more demanding conversations about more abstract subjects.
This summer, I was working with my old DELF tutor to help her advertise her business online and write a website that would appeal to students of French. This was a fun exercise, but then she had to move, and we had to stop for a while. We need to start doing this again.
Congrats on the 8.5; that's seriously impressive. I've been neglecting writing, I fear, because I've been focused on speaking, which is my weakest skill. But maybe I need to come at it sideways. Thank you for all your excellent advice!
I'm seeing a few common themes here: - Writing seems to play a bigger role in advanced speaking than I would have guessed. - "Social" immersion among native speakers really does make a big difference for many people, perhaps even more so than academic immersion. And just one native speaker isn't enough, because adaptation runs in both directions. - Many people slow down considerably either at my current level, or maybe half a CEFRL level above it. - Nobody has proposed any "Reach full professional fluency in 6 months" plans with detailed instructions, at least for people who aren't immersed. :-( When I think back, my wife took a several years of round-the-clock immersion to get from where I am now, to where I'd like to be.
The statistics class is awesome, because I have to juggle complex ideas while one of the three professors mumbles quickly in a strange accent, but I can still always rewind and use the excellent subtitles they've provided. But the drawback with online courses is that they provide no speaking practice. Thank you everybody, for your advice. This is really helpful. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4538 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 7 of 40 17 December 2013 at 3:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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To be honest if you are speaking with your wife in French 100% of the time, and watching French TV/movies and reading French novels I am not sure how much more you'd get living "immersed" in a country. Maybe you'd get access to more native media, and maybe have somewhat different conversations, but I'm not going to make much difference, at least in my experience living in Berlin (of course if you are actually working in your language that's different, but of course you usually need to be C1 plus to get a job in the first place).
As you know I am about six months behind you in my L2, but I have talked to lots of people who have learned to C2-level English. All of these were at times living in a native environment, but all of them took years (not 22 months) to reach that level. The most consistent theme I get from all of them that apart for speaking the language a lot (because they were living in the UK, USA, Australia or married to an English speaker) was that they have very strong reading habits (e.g., my wife always reads the Saturday and Sunday editions of the Guardian, literally cover-to-cover, even now that she lives in Berlin, and at least half the books she reads are in English). I've watched a friend of mine here in Berlin go from C1 to C2 English over the last five years. His method was very simple: he started watching lots and lots of English language TV shows and movies (many pretty trashy) and read lots of books. He also recommended online gaming - he says his team's captain is a middle-aged Texan woman who he has learnt a lot of interesting slang from. This style is not really for me, but I can imagine he is clocking up lots and lots of hours of random conversations with English speakers from all across the World with differing accents and idioms. So I guess you could always consider WoW in French if such a thing exists. I have slowly been pushing the complexity of the books I read, but I am long way from the sorts of novels I take for granted in English, though I feel I am constantly (if slowly) improving. I found the Super Challenge really helpful this year, and thinking of doing a new personal challenge for myself -- 10000 pages and 300 movies -- over the next 12 months starting January 1st. Perhaps you'd like to join me - at least for the book part? I don't know if we'd get to C2 by the end of the year, but I would be disappointed if we didn't get to C1. Edited by patrickwilken on 17 December 2013 at 4:16pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4873 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 8 of 40 17 December 2013 at 5:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
Do you read any general non-fiction books? Reading novels usually doesn't immediately help to acquire the kind of skills asked for in language tests and needed in professional discussions. Many novels just don't have much of that vocabulary and sentence structure. Reading science fiction novels will mainly help you to one day write decent science fiction in French, if you're so inclined ;) The books don't have to be about your professional field either, that seems too specific for most discussions anyway. I simply read anything English I came across (probably around 100-150 books before I took IELTS) - when I think back, stuff like Schindler's List or John Grisham novels was helpful. Now I'd tend towards popular non-fiction books about society or cultural phenomena or maybe even about language learning...
Thanks! To be honest, it had a lot to do with test-taking skills. The ESOL class I took trained all the tasks that showed up in the exam. A friend of mine with far better, more idiomatic English got a slightly lower score, probably because she wasn't in the class. If you're interested in getting a C1 certificate sometime soon (in 6 months? ;)) I'll try and see if I can dig up the materials we used in that class, I'm sure that I still have them somewhere. It might give you an idea for a more specific study plan. We focused on things like connectors and sentence structure, as far as I remember. Aside from English, we learned about general essay-writing, argumentation and reading skills (skimming, scanning, how to find the main argument in a paragraph). Those are skills which probably help me with language learning to this day. It might be beneficial to read French books about such skills (even if you have them in English). There should be books about "how to write an essay", or "how to win a debate" or whatever. I'm sure you could trick a committee of language examiners into awarding you a C1 certificate in a year or 6 months or, who knows, maybe even less. But understanding everything you hear and read and being able to say everything you can want with stylistic choices and whatnot are very different even from the 8.5 in IELTS. For me that was 10 years ago now and my English developed a lot during that time. I hope that doesn't sound discouraging - after C1 you might stop caring about whether you're very proficient or speak and write almost like a native. Edited by druckfehler on 17 December 2013 at 5:18pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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