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Vanthie Learns French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Vanthie Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4327 days ago 38 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 1 of 57 18 January 2013 at 2:54am | IP Logged | |||||
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So, some quick background information—
I took four years of Spanish total, one in middle school and three in high school. It's been three years since then but I think I stopped studying at a point of familiarity to the extent that I'll never lose the language entirely, and when I listen to Spanish radio I can easily understand most of the dialogue and get plenty of vocabulary nostalgia ("I know that word!! I forget what it means but I know it!!") The foreign language department at my high school was one of the best in our district, but there's only so much I can learn in a classroom of twenty-or-so other non-native speakers, and consequently I have relatively proficient receiving skills (reading and listening) but poor creation skills (writing and speaking). With this in mind, my self- imposed curriculum for French has a larger emphasis on speaking, creating my own thoughts, and conjugating not with charts but with practice. Both of my parents are fluent, non-native speakers. My mother is from Canada and her parents transferred her to a Québécois school without any prior knowledge of the language when she was fifteen. My dad learned in school and was able to speak it so well that Parisians couldn't tell he was American. So I have a lot to live up to. I started with Pimsleur, sticking with audio-only to refine my pronunciation and subvert what I call prejudice of literacy, with the idea that after completing unit IV I would then start learning to read and write with Assimil. But after progressing through the audio-lessons, I then changed that schedule so that I'd start Assimil after I completed unit I of Pimsleur. Goals for this year > Go from A1 to B1 > Be able to understand the main topic of a French radio segment > Read three novels with accompanying audio-books in French Resources Learning materials: > Pimsleur French I-IV > Assimil New French With Ease Native materials: > French Radio > French Let's Plays on Youtube I'll add more materials as the need arises. Edited by Vanthie on 18 January 2013 at 3:06am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Vanthie Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4327 days ago 38 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 2 of 57 18 January 2013 at 8:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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> Pimsleur II lesson 1
> Assimil lesson 1 The first time I ever listened to French radio it was back when I was sorting this whole self-education thing out and trying to find suitable resources to practice with. Obviously, I couldn't understand a word of it, so listening in only got frustrating and eventually I just stopped and left it on my bookmarks tab for later. Then, 20-something Pimsleur lessons in, I went back to it and was amazed that I could actually recognize an odd word here or there, and kept it running in the background while I goofed off elsewhere on the interwebs. Suddenly a woman said a word which I knew from my lessons— peut-être—but I had been having trouble remembering it and frequently mixed it up with parce que for some reason. So for the next five minutes straight, I was pulling out my hair trying to remember the meaning of this word. Wait a minute. I'll just consult Google translate! I thought triumphantly, and pulled it up in another tab. Anyone who has ever tried to phonetically write French words without actually knowing how to spell any French can probably predict what happened next. It wasn't helped by the fact that Mistress Google becomes very confused when dashes are involved with words, and that there is apparently the phrase peut être which means something /entirely different/ from peut-être. Then once I figured it out, I slammed my hands on the desk and yelled "PERHAPS!" and lived happily ever after. I tell you that story to tell you this one. Today, reading for the first time some of the words I've been learning through Pimsleur, I felt rather like I did when I was first learning to write in English and realizing that my language was spelled differently to how I thought it'd be. Without meaning to, I had imagined a lot of the words as being spelled a certain way because of the preconceptions that come with the Roman Alphabet as seen by an English-speaker. Spanish unfailingly spells exactly how it's meant to sound, but with French I'm glad I waited to start reading because I think my attention would have been on trying to reconcile the differences between text and speech instead of focusing on copying the sound. Discovery and amazement abounds! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 57 18 January 2013 at 10:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Welcome to the Language Log forum! It's great to see another student of French.
I was horribly confused by French spelling at first, too. :-) But Assimil really helped sort that out, somehow or another, just through sheer exposure. Good luck with your studies! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| fezmond Groupie Korea, South Joined 4924 days ago 72 posts - 78 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, French | Message 4 of 57 19 January 2013 at 5:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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Welcome
I'm a newbie too, two months in so far and using Assimil as my main source of study. I finished Pimsleur I but have yet to complete II. How do you find it so far? You are incredibly lucky to have two parents to speak with (I assume) whenever you want. Interesting that you mention French spelling, I've wondered if it would be easier for those of us using British English as we seem to spell things closer to the French (-re/er o/ou etc.) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Vanthie Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4327 days ago 38 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 5 of 57 20 January 2013 at 3:31am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm still in that bright-eyed shiny new stage where everything I learn to read is very fascinating and cryptic and wow so even if it's confusing it's an enjoying kind of confusing. Thank you!
Pimsleur II so far has been really focused on teaching grammar as opposed to vocab. Like I know that I'm still learning around four or five words a day but it feels more like I'm focused on piecing together previous material in ways I have to unfold in my brain like a riddle until I'm familiar enough with it that it becomes natural. Like in the beginning when I struggled with taking a phrase like Je sais and turning it into Je ne sais pas and how to maneuver a sentence around when you add more information to it. That's as far as I can tell after 2 lessons. I just have my dad to consult, but that's still extremely helpful when you have a pressing question (as I did almost every day in Pimsleur I) or in instances like today when he noticed I was pronouncing voyez incorrectly. I've never considered that different spellings in English could lend to different experiences in learning how to spell in French. For the most part I think it would be pretty much the same, since the differences aren't very extreme and certainly not so extreme as disappearing letters at the end of virtually every word and accents and the c with a tail and other such things that French has. Though perhaps the different ways of speaking between the US and UK add another dynamic to that, too. Thanks for stopping by! > Pimsleur II lesson 2 > Assimil lesson 2 I switched out my QWERTY keyboard with an AZERTY one a few days ago so that I could start to get used to the differences. It took me years to learn how to type without looking at the keyboard, and now I have to do that all over again or else ,y ,essqfes ,qke ,e look like Iù, q drunk person. I've mostly gotten the hang of where the A key is now, but without fail I always mess up the M—sometimes even when I'm looking right at it. I've also noticed that unlike the QWERTY keyboard, capslock activates the uppercase option for everything and not just the letters. In addition to the keyboard, I've also configured my systems to display French dates, military time, and Celsius instead of Fahreignheit. I can't think of a way to accustomize myself to metric measurements of length or weight or liquid volume, but they're not vitally important to me in any case. As with most things in my life, my basic understanding of military time revolves around when I get fed. 15:00? Three hours until food. 20:00? Two hours since food. 23:00? Too late for food, better go to sleep. Anyway, I used the scriptorium technique on the Assimil lesson today and then listened to the audio and tried to type everything that I heard, and I was actually open-mouthed in shock that I managed to get all of it right. I especially thought there was no way I'd remembered the spelling of il pleut dehors, and yet I did. I was expecting it to work, but I wasn't expecting it to work THAT well. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Vanthie Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4327 days ago 38 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French | Message 6 of 57 21 January 2013 at 12:57am | IP Logged | |||||
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> Pimsleur II lesson 3
> Assimil lesson 3 Both lessons happened to have taught the same word today: toujours. Pimsleur seemed to last forever for some reason, maybe because of the fact that new words are now being introduced in grammatically complex sentences instead of on their own or in simple phrases. I like to have some sort of visual stimulus, and knowing I'd be staring at nothing made starting on Pimsleur each day difficult, so I decided early on to play youtube videos I've seen before on mute to watch as I listen and speak. It definitely helps motivate me to get started for the day. If I'm not excited enough for French, I'm usually excited enough to watch a playlist of Minecraft videos that I can easily follow without sound. And Assimil still went a lot better than expected, even though I didn't type perfectly this time. I think I've become so wary of missing accents that I'm now putting them where they shouldn't be. Nothing to worry too much about right now—it'll no doubt be easier with time. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| microsnout TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Canada microsnout.wordpress Joined 5469 days ago 277 posts - 553 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 7 of 57 21 January 2013 at 6:53am | IP Logged | |||||
If you spent years learning how to type well, why risk messing up that skill, just get a French Canadian keyboard which just adds the accented characters to the QWERTY layout. You can get used to typing French in days. Edited by microsnout on 21 January 2013 at 3:25pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6083 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 8 of 57 21 January 2013 at 10:33am | IP Logged | |||||
Hey, that's not a bad idea. If it's anything like the Swiss keyboards, you have to get used to moving your ring finger back to get to that "ALT GR" key. (that shifts to the accents) I have to type German fast (I have a Ger. QWERTZ) and French is just recreation right now. I've discovered, ^ + e = ê ^ + u = û ´ + e = é Shft ´ + e = è If I'm in Word, I hold (Strg + ,) release, then (c) to get ç (online it doesn't work) ... Caps I haven't figured out yet and I'm still using codes for those (ugh), but it's better than guessing what accents are under what keys. I used to toggle between QWERTZ and AZERTY, q was a and ö was m and üu was û -- I will never do AZERTY again! If I ever have to type faster in French, I just have to practice here, but with a German keyboard^^ edit: okay maybe Swiss-German, depending on how much and how fast I have to type. Edited by Sunja on 21 January 2013 at 10:44am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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