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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5209 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 25 of 243 03 September 2011 at 3:50am | IP Logged | ||
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Have come down with a cold/flu. And, although I managed to watch Amazing Grace, in its French version, and do some Assimil and flashcard work, I can't say my concentration's the best.
More unhappy news: on September 1st, as TV stations here in Canada changed over to digital signals (la télévision numérique), I found that I can't get a signal from my mainstay, Radio-Canada. - I'd bought a digital to analogue convertor for my analogue TV, and that works for CBC (English), as well as TV Ontario, but my indoor antenna's (les oreilles de lapin) evidently not strong enough to get the French channel. Will have to mull on my options. But in the meantime, it'll have to be online, non-captioned, sources for my French news. I don't understand why TV stations don't add the closed captions as an option for their online new feeds. After all, they already have the captions - they appear on the TV; would it cost much more to add it to the online versions? Edited by songlines on 03 September 2011 at 3:52am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5209 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 26 of 243 04 September 2011 at 3:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, here's one way to listen to French-language broadcasts spoken at a manageable pace: listen to interviews with NATO Secretaries General who are speaking it as their Nth (fourth? third? fifth? sixth?) foreign language:
I happened upon an interview with Anders Fogh Rasmussen on "France 24", and was gratified to find him speaking French quite slowly. A couple of times, he caught himself making Anglo-oriented mistakes in pronunciation and phraseology, and quickly corrected himself. Although he handled himself quite capably during the interview, I wondered how much more fluid, and wide-ranging the interview might have been if it had been conducted in Danish. Does anyone on the forum know what other languages Rasmussen speaks, and in which order he learned them? The online bios I've seen mentioned his "language and social studies" concentrations at school, but don't specify which languages they were. I'm guessing, though, that French may have been a later addition to his repertoire, after English, other Scandinavian languages, and German..? Inspired by that, and remembering a Radio-Canada interview with his Dutch predecessor, I then found a "France 24" interview with Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who is married to a French-language teacher, with whom he shares a love of the French language and culture. De Hoop Scheffer's interview was much longer (a two-parter totalling 30 minutes), fluent (no hesitations), and (allowing for the fact that it was dated 2008) quite interesting. As a bonus, it also came with a transcript! So, wondering if the other interviews on the same show "Le Talk de Paris" were likewise transcripted, I did a Google video search, et voilà: "talk de paris" site:www.france.24.com - Almost three dozen 30-minute interviews, with transcripts! Some of the interviewees don't speak in French (Vaclev Havel speaks in Czech, with a voice-over interpreter), and the Americans all speak in English, again with French voice-overs. (My hopes were briefly raised when Bill Bradley started with "Bonjour...", but dashed when he then switched to English after the opening greeting; the English-language interviews sometimes have transcripts in English, other times no transcripts at all.) However, all of the interviews seem to date from a few years back; is this excellent programme no longer on the air? Edited because a full line of embolding seemed a tad too "loud". Edited by songlines on 05 September 2011 at 3:33am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5209 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 27 of 243 05 September 2011 at 2:53am | IP Logged | ||
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Listened to a couple of the "Le Talk de Paris" broadcasts, as a follow-up the to Jaap de Hoop Scheffer one mentioned in my previous post:
One with an inspiring fellow Canadian, Madame Justice Louise Arbour, on the occasion of the end of her term as the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights. And another with Bono , on Europe, and aid to Africa. Bono spoke in English, with a French voice-over interpreter. English transcript only. (The link on that page to the Bob Geldof interview doesn't work. ) My online feed for Radio-Canada's Telejournal is very choppy, stopping and starting in a most irritating manner, so I used France 24 again for the daily news. Edited by songlines on 05 September 2011 at 2:56am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| microsnout TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Canada microsnout.wordpress Joined 5471 days ago 277 posts - 553 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 28 of 243 05 September 2011 at 6:22am | IP Logged | ||
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Hey thats a great find, those "Le Talk de Paris" interviews with transcripts !! Thanks.
If you seek Canadian source audio with transcripts (which can be harder to find), forum member s_allard told me of this collection of videos with transcripts from the recent Bastarache Commission in Quebec. There is many many hours of it here and it can get a bit boring but he assures me there is some lively verbal 'jousting' in there somewhere during Jean Charest's testimony. Bastarache Commission I also have a collection of 600 short audio files of 30 sec to one minute each, reading news stories. It features 20 different speakers, all from Quebec, 10 men and 10 women, and with complete transcripts. The speakers all have a strong Québécois accent but as news stories, the text is very standard French. It is great for getting accustomed to the accent without the added difficulty of the slang/joual. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5209 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 29 of 243 05 September 2011 at 9:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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You're welcome, Microsnout. And thanks for your suggestions. I'll try listening to some of the Bastarache Commission; I followed some of the Gomery Commission footage, which is probably equal to it on the "excitement-meter", so I stand forewarned.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5209 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 30 of 243 06 September 2011 at 4:08am | IP Logged | ||
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Listening to a trio of the Le Talk de Paris interviews.
Bob Geldof English with French voiceover, but unremarkable from either a language-learning perspective, or as an interview. No transcript either. Vivian Reding, at the time the EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media. Nicely transcripted. Reding's from Luxembourg (but went to the Sorbonne for her degree), so while fluent in French, doesn't speak it quite as quickly as many of the French themselves seem to. Topics included films and film-making (Reding's apparently something of a cinéphile), the Internet, and telephone roaming charges. Hérve Morin, interviewed when he was the French Minister of Defence. Not transcripted, but - although I wasn't able to catch everything - I nevertheless listened to the full broadcast. Among other topics, it covered Afghanistan; what made it notable was that both Ulysse Gosset (the interviewer) and Morin were fully engaged in the conversation: it wasn't one of those dry interviews in which the interviewer has a set list of questions which he trots out after consultation of his notes. It was definitely a lively exchange; at times they spoke over each other, Gosset trying to interject a question, Morin continuing his line of thought. Morin presented his arguments articulately, with seeming conviction and passion. We won't go into the merits of his arguments or of French/NATO actions here... (lest the thread devolve into une grande bagarre), but it was certainly an invigorating interview, one that I thoroughly enjoyed. - As I suspect the two principals also very much did. Not related to language learning, but for forumites with an interest in French education or culture, an article in the New York Times on the Sciences Po Paris. It seems to have been a highly controversial, challenging, and forward-thinking change in direction for this august institution. Edited by songlines on 06 September 2011 at 4:36am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5209 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 31 of 243 06 September 2011 at 4:24am | IP Logged | ||
Microsnout, I opened the first PDF (of many) of the transcripts, to discover that it's over 94 pages long! Mon dieu! Qu'est-ce que vous avez envoyé? I look forward to finding the promised "lively verbal jousting"! [ahem] I don't suppose you have a link to just the livelier sections...? [smile] Edited by songlines on 06 September 2011 at 4:38am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| microsnout TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Canada microsnout.wordpress Joined 5471 days ago 277 posts - 553 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 32 of 243 06 September 2011 at 5:34am | IP Logged | ||
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I have listened to a small portion of this but have not found those lively sections yet but here is a quote of some
comments by s_allard about this:
These comments are from the thread "Text memorization and imitation" pages 6-8. Edited by microsnout on 06 September 2011 at 5:35am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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