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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 377 of 1317 12 January 2013 at 4:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, this has been a long ugly day, between paperasse and urgent security fixes in other people's code (on behalf of multiple clients). I did have one fun moment this morning: a Skype chat in French with tastyonions. I'm impressed how much he's managed to get out Assimil by heavily supplementing it with native media. If you're doing Assimil for one of your major languages, you may want to pick his brain and find out how he did it.
Because we could all use some humor, here are some recent articles from Topito: Top 6 des lettres de non-motivation de Julien Prévieux (funny and sarcastic) Top 60 des étapes par lesquelles passe un accro à Facebook (I'm so glad I don't do Facebook) Top 10 des jeux vidéo les plus attendus de 2013 Top 10 des étapes par lesquelles passe obligatoirement un roman « thriller » Top 20 des choses qu’on pourra raconter à nos petits enfants I may have already posted the second of these already, but I'm really enjoying the writing at girls and geeks. This is the kind of smart, informal, and well-written blogging that I really like in English and can never find enough of in French: Lettre à M.Playskool (parenting humor) Nouvel an et come-back sur l’Inde (feminism and crime in India, in light of recent events) And one science link: L'astéroïde Apophis s'approchera de la Terre ce soir I've more-or-less placed an order on Amazon.fr, but my bank is having trouble convincing the credit card company that yes, I really buy things in France. Anyway, here's my big winter acquisition to keep my Super Challenge more-or-less on track, assuming the bank can fix things: L'étrange vie de Nobody Owens by Neil Gaiman. An excellent older children's novel, translated from English. Les frontieres de l'infini by Bujold. Three novelettes of smart space opera, translated from English. Aldebaran, tomes 2 & 3. More BD sci-fi goodness! Angel - L'intégrale des 5 saisons. The Buffy spinoff. I'm still leaning towards reading French translations of my favorite books. As before, I really love the little bit of extra context I get from knowing the story. But more importantly, I know the story is going to be worth my time. There's nothing like spending $12 on French paperback only to find out I wouldn't finish it in English. (Finishing books is hard when you're a parent, and doubly so in another language.) If all goes well, I may be making another short trip to Montreal this month. If so, I'll try to slip in to a Renaud-Bray and see if there's anything else I can't bear to live without. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4889 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 378 of 1317 12 January 2013 at 5:57am | IP Logged | |||||
If we ever do a Greatest Insights thread for HTLAL, this needs to be on it. I'm having the same experience now - with, of all things, the French subjunctive - and this puts so many of my half-thoughts into words. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4665 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 379 of 1317 12 January 2013 at 1:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
That's a really good idea. And also, if you still have the original, you can consult the English version if you really get stuck (probably not much of a problem for you anymore, but it would be for me). And thanks for the compliments again. Hopefully if the new tutor I just signed up for works out, we can talk again and I'll be able to contribute more to the conversation. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4688 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 380 of 1317 13 January 2013 at 4:12am | IP Logged | |||||
Ha! I know the feeling. I've had my card suspended and/or gotten a call from fraud services at least twice now (losing track), no doubt based on my charges to France. (It's always been easy to clear up, but my credit card and bank account are both with the same wonderful credit union.) Good luck! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4665 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 381 of 1317 13 January 2013 at 4:41am | IP Logged | |||||
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Ha, I just made my first ever orders from amazon.fr a few days ago. I hope my bank doesn't react that way! :-P Edited by tastyonions on 13 January 2013 at 4:41am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 382 of 1317 13 January 2013 at 5:22am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thank you, kanewai! I'm glad my post was of use. And, yeah, I love Amazon.fr. Where else am I going to be able to buy bilingual readers in Egyptian and French?
Today, while spending and hour and 40 minutes waiting in line at a government office, I amused myself by reading parallel English/Spanish posters. It's surprising how much sense written Spanish makes when I have sufficiently strong context. And it's almost like my eyes work differently now—I find the I'm automatically picking out genders and endings and systematic sound shifts. This is probably a side-effect of doing so much extensive reading in French. On giving and receiving advice Khatzumoto's recent post about the 10 commandments of AJATT has really stuck in my head, largely thanks to the following paragraph:
This is why it's so hard to give good advice, especially if you're already pretty good at something. Advice only works in a given context. That context might be a shelf of highly amusing DVDs and comic books, from which you haphazardly extract some cool sentences that catch your eye. And that was Khatzumoto's context when he first encouraged everybody to go find 10,000 sentences and stick them in SRS software. But let's change the context, and imagine a type A student (driven, obsessive, a future candidate for a stress-induced heart attack), and tell them they can learn Japanese by collecting 10,000 sentences. So our student grabs a grammar book and starts typing in every single example sentence, no matter how boring, and never spends much time with native media. But there's a lot wrong with those sentences. They don't have a surrounding story to provide context. They're not funny or awesome or even all that interesting. And most importantly, they weren't chosen. You can put some pretty dry, hairy sentences in your Anki deck as long as they mean something to you. Depending on the context, "10,000 sentences" could be pretty fun, or it could be horrifying. Which is why Khatzumoto now writes articles like The Ten Commandments of AJATT these days, and spends most of his time talking about the context:
There's a lot of interesting advice tucked away in those AJATT articles, but a lot of it only makes sense in retrospect, once you've actually run into the same problems. Again, giving advice is hard. But an observation like, "Intellectual junk food is broccoli-and-spinach-level good for you, if it’s in Japanese," is profoundly true in my experience. Similarly, Iversen's distinction between "intensive" and "extensive" activities has really inspired me, even though I find most his technical advice ill-suited to how I learn. Fortunately, I think the online language-learning community is slowly leaving behind gurus and flamewars and debates over the One True Methodology. These days, it increasingly resembles a big community swapping handy ideas back and forth. And everybody can get together and sing "Skype Me Maybe." And this suits me well, because I'm always happy to read other people's stories, and try out anything which seems like it might be useful and fun. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4665 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 383 of 1317 13 January 2013 at 12:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I like reading AJATT. Many of his articles are quite motivating.
I've definitely taken on board the "everything bad is good for you" philosophy lately. I probably watch at least thirty minutes to an hour of lowbrow YouTube videos a day, often more. Anything is fair game, even reality TV shows, because as long as it's in French it helps me work on my comprehension and find new words and expressions. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 384 of 1317 13 January 2013 at 9:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I read Tintin : L'Île Noire in something like a half hour list night. It's one of the easiest Tintin's that I've read, and the plot follows Chandler's famous advice: "When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand." My two favorite Tintin volumes, Objective Lune and On a marché sur la lune, are a lot more substantial.
I've been very impressed by all the cool BD images in Quique's log. Unfortunately, my flatbed scanner is hard on BDs, so I've only uploaded a few carefully scanned panels. But I recently saw DIY Book Scanner, and they have some cheap homemade scanner designs that look very promising. So here's the very first prototype, just to figure out what the major obstacles might be. The ingredients are a decent digital camera, a large sheet of glass to hold the pages flat, and a bright work light: 
Here's the first photo, from IRS All Watcher #4. 
This is a fairly generic spy thriller comic, sort of what James Bond would be like without gadgets and jokes. You can find more images on Google Image Search. This is neither an outstanding work of art, nor one my favorite guilty pleasures. But if your guilty pleasures happen to include spy movies, it might be worth a look. To improve my DIY scanner, I'm going to need several ultra-bright, adjustable lights to get even illumination, and I'm going to need to use my tripod to avoid the blurry text at the top of the image. Or maybe Quique will give me some tips. :-) And once I get the bugs out, I'm going to start uploading a few sample pages from some seriously sweet BDs. There's some great stuff out there. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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