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300 days for French B2 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| jayjayvp Tetraglot Newbie Netherlands Joined 4078 days ago 26 posts - 40 votes Speaks: English, Dutch*, German, Afrikaans Studies: French, Spanish | Message 1 of 35 05 October 2013 at 5:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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OK, so it's not quite 300 days anymore, day -300 came and went back on September 27th
last, but I`m not whinging overly much. I have decided on August 3 to pour as much free time as possible into turning my mediocre "je-me-débrouille" French into solid, filled- out independent-user-B2-awesomeness. I`ve set myself the goal to sit, and pass, the DEFL B2 on July 24 2014, or at least take it and go down fighting. I am taking on French accompanied by: - my Grammaire Progressives (currently stuck in Intermédiaire, hope to have well finished Avancé before next summer!) - the RFI, both the Journal en Francais Facile and regular emissions. - Sandberg's "French for Reading" which, though dated and dull, has actually brought me to a decent standard of passive French already. - a French Frequency Dictionary and a computer programme for randomly revising vocabulary. - the good folk at lang-8.com who wade through my atrocious stories about lost shipwrecks and people being almost eaten by climbing lions. So, I wonder where all of this will end up, hopefully someplace good, I feel I have learned tremendous amounts of French already over the past two months. I might get somewhere if I keep up the same amount of work. JJ 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5011 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes  Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 2 of 35 05 October 2013 at 5:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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Welcome to the forums, good luck on your journey. I wish you a lot of fun and success. :-)
How long have you been learning French? How far on the journey are you? A few thoughts towards your plan (some of them things I would tell myself if I could make a call to 2010 when I was taking my delf B2): Grammaire Progressive is an awesome series. Perhaps Vocabulaire might be worth your attention as well. The RFI (especially the regular things) should be good for some parts of the exam. But you might as well like TV shows or documentaries to get your overall listening comprehension up. It is one of the moments when you need to decide whether to go the "straight to the exam" route or the longer but better "get my skills up and the exam skills will just be part of it". Having good overall listening comprehension of various things is useful in many situations and it makes the exam like audios much easier to understand and less annoying to practice. But while the things like news and economy discussions are great when it comes to the exam and for you, if you are interested in such things, they won't help you much in manyother areas. French for reading does have good reputation. But if you are already striving for B2, shouldn't real books be more fun? There are many authors and genres perfect as a start. Many French learners have started with BDs and got to various things. Thing for random vocab review? Perhaps you might be more interested in an SRS (spaced repetition system). Such a thing (for examply anki) doesn't throw words at you randomly but in a pattern to make you encounter those more difficult for you more often. Would you share a story about a shipwreck or lions here as well, please? :-) When you are closer to the exam (at least a few months before), it might be useful to get one of the common exam preparatory textbooks. I passed my DELF B2 without but barely. Such a textbook is not necessary but can be very useful, especially as some of the tasks you find in your exam may have very little in common with relity or common reason, so it's good to get used to such assignments beforehand. (Such as writing 250 words about a CD you bought and it doesn't work). And when practicing speaking, get ready to speak for ten-twelve minute as a monologue. The exam descriptions say, if I remember correctly, that you should speak only a few minutes alone and then some kind of discussion or dialogue should follow but it isn't always so. In my exam, I was to speak for vast majority of my 15 minutes and the examinator just asked two or three questions at the end after letting me rot there (the topic would be hard to speak that long about even in my native language). So, be more prepared for that eventuality than I had been. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5534 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 35 05 October 2013 at 8:16pm | IP Logged | ||
Welcome to HTLAL! This sounds like an awesome plan, and great fun. I once did much the same, starting from a strong A2 and passing the DELF B2 after 4 months of full-time study. You can find the whole story in the first 20 pages of my log. Here are some random thoughts, based on my experiences. Note that all of this is colored by my personal biases, and you may find better ways. :-) Radio & listening skills. I listened to a lot of French news radio, and I think it was a relatively poor way to spend my time around A2. RFI Français Facile is OK if you're using the transcripts, but the overall problem is that news radio is too fast, the subject changes every 30 seconds, there are too many voices, and you don't get any visual cues. The good thing about radio is that you get lots of easy cognate vocabulary and professional news announcers. So in addition to radio, I would recommend searching out things with only one or two professional announcers, strong visual cues, and a fairly consistent topic. I had especially good luck with TV documentaries, the kind of thing where somebody says, very slowly and clearly, "The tiger is hunting the antelope," or, "The propeller of the ship must be replaced by a team of divers," complete with a closeup of a giant propeller, a slow pan towards some divers, and so on. At a slightly higher level, I had great luck watching several seasons of a dubbed TV series. I made much more rapid gains with this sort of material than I ever did with straight radio news. It's worth looking to see whether you can get France 2, 3 or 5, or a similar TV channel. You may be able to access these online or through a VPN. News & DELF B2 vocabulary. When it comes to vocabulary, however, the news is your friend. The listening comprehension section of the DELF B2 is usually a news broadcast. The reading comprehension section is usually a newspaper article or opinion piece. And the oral exam is typically about a news subject, too. I never saw them use anything about actual politics, but they love questions about environmental issues, the relationships between men and women, school, work, teenage issues, language learning, urban life, or anything else which is about one step removed from day-to-day life. So try to read the newspaper regularly, and look for some useful vocabulary about each topic. For example, it certainly wouldn't hurt to know lots of general terms like "global warming", "addiction", "traffic" and so on. Nobody will expect you to be eloquent or to sound like a college professor, but you should be able to defend a basic opinion on these sorts of subjects. Knowing 3 or 4 key words will make it lot less awkward! Extensive input. A lot of my biggest vocabulary and listening-comprehension gains came from the Super Challenge: 150 hours of movies/TV and 10,000 pages of reading in 20 months. This is fun, and I was surprised how quickly I got better. Even 2,000 pages and a couple seasons of a TV series will make a big difference for many people. The DELF B2. There are two major sets of language exams for French: The DELF/DALF exams, which are "diploma" exams, and the TCF, which is a skills assessment exam. The DELF/DALF are valid for life, just like a school degree. But they also assume that you're familiar with the format of the exams, and you've spent some time practicing some of the skills, particularly the oral presentation. I worked with an excellent tutor; PM me if you want contact info. Personally, I liked the DELF B2, because I really felt like they were testing my language skills. Anyway, I hope you find some useful nuggets of information buried here or there in my post. It's a fun plan, and if you dive into French for next ~300 days and really enjoy yourself, then your goals are definitely achievable. Edited by emk on 05 October 2013 at 8:21pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| jayjayvp Tetraglot Newbie Netherlands Joined 4078 days ago 26 posts - 40 votes Speaks: English, Dutch*, German, Afrikaans Studies: French, Spanish | Message 4 of 35 05 October 2013 at 9:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks! I've already gone through some of your linguistic adventures whilst being stuck
waiting for my account to be validated. I`m mostly watching TV5 at the moment, running reverso's online dictionary on another screen, quitting when I have a full sheet of new words. You can only learn so many of them at a time. I`m actually quite proud of myself watching TV5, as I`m usually allergic to TV and don`t actually own a set. I think vocab is my major bugbear at the moment. I have decent reading comprehension but still run into so much stuff I *don`t* know. It's amazing what you don`t know when you actually bother to find out! Yes, real books would be more fun than Sandford. But I`m keeping a lot of fun books on hold while I`m plodding through Sandford because (a) otherwise I`ll never get through it, (b) it's superbly structured and very educational (c) I might actually be able to toss the bastard in the bin by Christmas and by then (d) reading actual books will be less frustrating then it is now. I have an exciting book about the Battle of the Somme set as a reward for finishing Sandford. As a WW1 buff (one of many reasons for learning more French) that's a pretty big reward. I will have earned it too. I`m going to look into anki , I can do hard graft, but maybe "clever" rather than "sheer brutality" will get me places. Places like France. Hmmm... France.... I fell into the trap of niche vocab before when learning German. My degree was in philosophy and my uni very German oriented, demanding students read the German philosophers in .. you guessed it. I ended up being able to read Kant in German, but being stumped by a newspaper. "Tax-relief", "labour negotiations", Kant sure never wrote about those. Never again, I tell you, never again. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5534 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 35 05 October 2013 at 9:26pm | IP Logged | ||
I certainly encourage you to finish "French for Reading" if it's helping you, but I personally find it's really important not to think of the interesting books as a "reward." The sooner you dig into that stuff, the sooner you'll find your vocabulary exploding. The first 500 pages might take a couple of months of hard work, but it gets better very quickly after that. If you're a WWI buff, you might want to know about Jacques Tardi. His grandfather was gassed in WW1, and his father served in a French tank corps in WW2 before being sent to a Stalag work camp. Tardi writes and draws bandes dessinées about the two wars, some of them based on family memoirs. His stuff can be challenging, thanks to some old-fashioned military slang, but it's pretty incredible history. And hey, pictures never hurt. I also just started Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï and I'm really enjoying it, but I probably would have found it pretty challenging when I was studying for my B2 exam. I can't wait to hear about your Somme book; that sounds really interesting. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5011 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 6 of 35 05 October 2013 at 10:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, documentaries are great. About the common topics: fashion and food are quite popular as well (both were in my exam). And sometimes science. And too much enviroment/ecology.
Anki can be used for "clever brutality" :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jayjayvp Tetraglot Newbie Netherlands Joined 4078 days ago 26 posts - 40 votes Speaks: English, Dutch*, German, Afrikaans Studies: French, Spanish | Message 7 of 35 05 October 2013 at 11:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well. I installed Anki and tried to get my old files to export to anki. No luck. I
printed out what I had and am going to have to toss it into anki by hand. Luckily, we're only talking three weeks' worth of "twenty words a day", so in a week or so, I`ll have it all set up. I suppose the time has come for my "why I want to learn French in the first place" post. I've learned French before. I quit it twenty years ago at age fifteen after having suffered some spectacularly poor teaching by Miss French. She managed to convince me that French was a hateful language studied only by snobs and people entertaining dubious sexual inclinations (I wasn`t a very well bred fifteen-year-old either). I despised French. I hated the sound of it. And my not continuing French was one of my more stinging failures in secondary school. At university I vaguely realized French would be a decent asset, but being taken up perfecting my German and not actually being forced at gunpoint to learn it, I didn`t. When working on my Ph.D. I got hold of Sandford's French for Reading and made a decent start with it. However my resolve quickly collapsed as a string of family illnesses, an unplanned international move, a new job and having to finish my Ph.D. all coincided. After that I was tied up for two years working and after that I started seminary and had no time for studying any other languages other than Koinè Greek and Latin. Now that I have passed the final exams for both I find I have the time to pick up French again. In the meantime I found out my family (originally from the Belgian-French borderlands) had North-French kin as well, and being a WW1 buff I quickly found quite a few hadn`t made it through the Somme. Or the Champagne region, for that matter. Or Ypres. I managed to decipher, with great difficulty, a number of documents concerning my kinsmen who lived and died at the Western Front. However, stuff ground to a halt when I had finally stretched the limits of what little French I had to breaking point. I simply had to buckle down and learn French. Properly, this time. To get further than where I am and find out more about my French kin, especially during WW1, I need very good French, there's no other way. A great motivator was a summer internship at Lourdes, where few fellow interns speak anything but their own language. After three weeks, I was happily chatting with the French seminarians, and the one Italian who spoke something else than Italian (French, of course) That gave me the feeling that I could actually do this. I have academic reasons. Of course. A lot of medieval philosophy and theology, not to mention patristic texts are available only in French. For patristics, the only actual alternative to reading Koinè fluently is to pick up enough French to read the Sources Chrétiennes translations. I have personal reasons too, as outlined above. And a third reason would probably be, almost political: in the sense that I find Dutch society far too preoccupied with the anglosphere, even to the point where we have begun to completely ignore everything to the south or east of us. I begin to find this anglo- bubble increasingly stifling. French is already opening up more of the Middle-East and Africa than I thought possible. Thank you RFI. The fourth reason is that I`m a stubborn mule and will prove Miss French wrong. Even after twenty+ years. The fifth that I`m probably going to have to learn Italian at some point, and I'd rather do so with a proper Romance language under my belt. The sixth is sheer snobbery. With French teaching becoming a rarity to the point of extinction at the upper levels of secondary school, people who speak *actual French* are becoming rarer than hen's teeth in these parts. I rather feel good about being able to do something worthwhile that the rest of the country doesn`t seem to bother much with. I'd like to think I`m motivated enough, I might even catch the language bug and post- French wander off to study Lower-Icelandic, Upper-Voltan or Buganese. Or Italian. Or Scots Gaelic. Or whatever. Languages always make you hungry for more, I find. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| jayjayvp Tetraglot Newbie Netherlands Joined 4078 days ago 26 posts - 40 votes Speaks: English, Dutch*, German, Afrikaans Studies: French, Spanish | Message 8 of 35 05 October 2013 at 11:18pm | IP Logged | ||
Dear Lord. Fashion. I`m surely done for! :O 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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