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Gary’s TAC 2012 - The Romantics | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 167 15 December 2011 at 11:56am | IP Logged | |||||
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My TAC 2011 summary (at bottom of page)
In brief, I mostly worked on French during 2011, going from intermediate (~B1) to advanced (~C1 knowledge and understanding, B2 speaking), with a particular focus on trying to improve my pronunciation. With French being my first foreign language, learning has been quite slow and I’ve made a lot of mistakes and done a lot of things wrongly or inefficiently, and so I hope to apply the lessons I’ve learned to future languages. So my plan for TAC 2012 is to continue with French and start on Italian, a language that I’ve been wanting to learn for over a year but, aside from a couple of weeks of study before a trip to Italy in 2010, had been postponing until I reached a decent level at French. If I reach a satisfactory level in French and Italian then I’d like to start Spanish, but that is very dependent on how much I get done and how much time I have so it’s absolutely not guaranteed and could well have to wait until 2013. All things considered I think Spanish would be a much more beneficial and useful language for me to know than Italian, but I just have a thing for Italian and find it hard to resist, and I want to finish what I started. And knowing French and Italian to a decent level will give me a massive head start in Spanish when I do come to it. French My speaking still needs work, in terms of both expressing myself well and easily, and of pronunciation and accent, so I’ll continue working on these by: - Having lots of conversations and going to meetups and conversation groups whenever possible - Solo pronunciation and articulation practice, shadowing, recording myself, imitation, etc. - Speaking and writing to myself. As well as that I’ll continue watching TV and reading, but speaking is the big priority. My goal is to reach fluency with a good accent by June, when I’m planning on going to France. As well as the Hellfest music festival that is always a major feature in my logs, I plan to spend a few days in Paris afterwards, including la Fête de la Musique. As a goal, “a good accent” is hard to measure but I’ve heard enough French to recognise one, and “fluency” is similar - you know it when you see it. Italian I have just over 2 weeks off work starting this Saturday, which is a perfect opportunity to make the start on Italian that I’ve been looking forward to for so long. As I say I already learned a little bit of Italian in 2010, so I’ll be revising and building upon that. During my time off I plan to study it fairly intensively, a few hours per day: - Work on pronunciation. My first priority is getting this right from the start to avoid some of the pain I’ve gone through with French pronunciation. I need to at least get all the basic sounds down and get a theoretical understanding of how the stress and intonation etc. works; putting it into practice is probably best worked on in parallel with other learning. The biggest lesson I’ve taken from French is that simply listening and imitating isn’t enough, and I have to learn pronunciation explicitly so I exactly what to listen for and imitate. The FSI Italian Programmed course, combined with all the phonetics knowledge I acquired last year, looks good for this. I’ve seen many bad reviews of that course on this site, mainly saying that it focuses too much on pronunciation; I’m not sure whether people dislike it because it focuses on pronunciation to the exclusion of all else, or because it’s just simply bad, but I’ll find out soon enough! - Work through Michel Thomas Basic and Advanced to build a good foundation. I did the first two lessons a while ago and it seemed like a great course. Despite the criticisms, the MT method’s ability to pack so much language into such a short amount of time in a way that makes you remember it well is quite amazing. - Finish Pimsleur to build upon MT and pick up some more useful phrases and constructions. That was my main material in 2010 and I found it very useful, and I got to somewhere around course 2 lesson 10. Again it gets some criticism but in my experience it does its of drilling basic, useful, adaptable language into your head very well, and thanks to my local library I won’t be spending a penny on it or on MT. And because of the native speakers on Pimsleur it’ll be a good source of pronunciation practice material for the good old record-and-compare method. After my time off I plan to keep up the effort using a combination of Assimil l’Italien sans peine (which again should be a great source for pronunciation practice) and having conversations with my flatmate and other Italian friends. I think that between the similarities with French, the language learning lessons learned, the conversation opportunities at my fingertips, and my enthusiasm, I should be able to pick up Italian fairly quickly. But at the same time I realise that it’s a whole language of its own with its own difficulties and particularities and large vocabulary to learn, so even if I pick up the basics in a few weeks I’ll still have a whole new learning adventure ahead of me to get to a conversational level. As with everything I do, my lack of spare time will be the main limiting factor, but having Italian friends will give me the luxury of being able to combine language practice with socialising that I’d be doing anyway rather than having to go out of my way to get practice like I do with French. In theory at least; if that doesn’t work out or isn’t enough then I’ll have to look into conversation groups and language partners; I know that these exist and there's a reasonable Italian community in my city. My goal for the year is to reach this conversational level - B2ish. If my Italian in a year is around the level of my French now (but with better pronunciation of course!) I’ll be very happy. I won't be starting any actual work until at least this weekend, but I'm getting the preparation out of the way for now. Next I'll write a post about my specific plans for the holidays. Edited by garyb on 17 December 2011 at 1:01am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 2 of 167 15 December 2011 at 12:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Holiday plans
So, from this Saturday I have a total of 17 days off work, and as I said in my first post, it's the perfect opportunity to kick off my Italian studies. As well as that, I'm planning a French pronunciation bonanza. Outside of language studies, I've also started learning to sing; would like to spend some time improving my speaking and self-expression in my native language English; and will probably spend most of my nights in noisy bars, clubs, or parties. So overall there's going to be hell of a lot of work with my voice. I'll be starting every day with some vocal warm-ups and exercises (the exercises to improve singing voice, the exercises to improve speaking voice, and the exercises to improve French pronunciation are all very similar!), which should perhaps be followed by a prayer to not get a sore throat like I often do at this time of year. Or more realistically an effort to maintain a healthy lifestyle and go easy on the booze. French pronunciation bonanza Most of my French studies in the next few weeks will be very focused on improving pronunciation. It'll basically be an experiment with various techniques, and in particular, seeing if shadowing is all it's cracked up to be - I plan to shadow my way through Assimil Using French, and maybe some podcasts or LingQ material after that, or if I'm feeling adventurous some episodes of Bref. For some sort of measure of progress, I'll make some recordings before and after, and in the interest of comparing my "normal" speech as well as my "reading from a page" speech, the recordings will include: - Reading a paragraph from a book (careful, focused speech); - Part of a Skype conversation (spontaneous conversational speech); and - Talking about an article I just read (a mixture of the two). I'm not normally one of the people who writes "Today I did 1.5 hours of LR" type logs (nothing against that at all of course, it's just not my thing) but during my holidays I think it would be useful and interesting to frequently log what I do and for how long. Afterwards the usual weekly rambles will resume. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 167 17 December 2011 at 1:19am | IP Logged | |||||
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And it begins! Times are roughly estimated to the nearest half hour since I don't tend to set a timer or check the clock.
16th December French 0.5 hours repeating-and-recording with French With Ease (also some TV watching and writing, but I'm only logging the pronunciation stuff). Italian 2.5 hours on FSI Italian Programmed - got through the first 5 lessons, including recording myself repeating most of the parts to be repeated. Despite all the bad reviews of FSI Italian I'm finding it amazing - exactly the painstakingly detailed examination of the language's phonology that I had been looking for. Even compared to the FSI French Phonology course, it moves at a faster pace, which keeps it interesting, yet explains things better in less time. In particular, the comparisons highlighting the differences between Italian sounds and similar English sounds are great for us native English speakers. I haven't learned any more vocabulary or grammar than I already knew, but I have learned some good pronunciation habits, including: not aspirating consonants (something I need to keep in mind for French too), fully articulating vowels even when unstressed, and the rising or falling intonation for short statements and questions. Small yet important things that I just wouldn't have picked up on had I started with Pimsleur or Michel Thomas. Edited by garyb on 17 December 2011 at 1:20am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| pesahson Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5729 days ago 448 posts - 840 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: French, Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 4 of 167 17 December 2011 at 4:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi Garyb,
we'll be on the team together starting from 2012. I was wondering what French TV do you watch? I used to watch France 5, but not it seems blocked for IPs from outside of France and it's a pity. I watch TV5monde, most of the programmes are concerned with politics but that's alright for me. I'd be grateful for some ideas. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5010 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 5 of 167 17 December 2011 at 8:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Garyb, first of all, congratulations to your progress during 2011, it looks really great. I wish you all best during the 2012 and similar progress in both languages.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 6 of 167 18 December 2011 at 3:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
Hi! Yeah it's a shame that a lot of the videos can't be accessed from outside France. I mostly watch episodes on the CanalPlus website. It has a lot of comedy and satire, which I find more challenging and useful than the news.
Thanks! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 7 of 167 19 December 2011 at 12:37am | IP Logged | |||||
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Sat 17, Sun 18 December
Italiano Finished up to unit 18 of FSI; there are more units but the audio for them isn't available, and probably just as well - the course is getting quite dull and, from skimming through the rest of the PDF, it seems like it only gets worse. Most of the important pronunciation stuff is out the way so it's going on to teach other things like grammar and vocab using contrived examples and boring drills. Now I understand the bad reviews; they should have just kept it as a short phonology course. I'm sure I'll be going back to the better early lessons for revision, especially the intonation practice, but apart from that I'm done with FSI and will start on Michel Thomas tomorrow. I think I have just about enough time to do them in the "Michel Thomas weekender style" of four lessons per day, if my brain can absorb that much at once. (The "weekender style" refers to discussions on the forum saying that the courses were recorded over a weekend, four lessons per day, therefore that might be the most effective way to work through them). There's a few sounds I'm still trying to master: gli (especially when on its own or at the start of a word) and the tapped and trilled Rs. Français Only done a couple of hours, if that, on French pronunciation in the last two days. I guess my excitement for Italian is taking priority. Also, the sore throat that I was dreading is starting to make an appearance, so I'm trying to take it easy to some extent and have breaks between activities to make sure it doesn't get worse from all the talking. Haven't managed to fit in a skype chat yet, but I'll hopefully do that tomorrow then go to meetups on Tuesday and Wednesday. Last night I was at a party where at one point people started saying things in various languages to see who'd understand. There was a fair bit of Japanese and German along with appearances by Gaelic and Irish. Not much in the way of Romance languages, but I still appreciated it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 8 of 167 20 December 2011 at 4:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Mon 19 December
Productive day! Italiano Worked through MT Foundation lessons 2 to 8. So pretty much the whole course. It was fairly easy going and even after all that I felt like I still could have learned more had I wanted to, but it was enough Italian for one day. I used VLC Player's option to speed up the audio while retaining the pitch to get through them more quickly. I doubt that this strategy of going through the whole course at high speed would work for a language that you're not already somewhat familiar with - back when I did some Russian last year, one MT lesson at normal speed was more than my brain could absorb - but for reactivating and building upon my Italian it worked nicely. I also don't think that speeding up would be a good idea for a course where copying native pronunciation is important (Pimsleur) but for MT it's a non-issue. Started the Advanced course today. It's a bit faster paced, with a ton of verb conjugations being thrown out in the first lesson, so I'll probably have to go through it at a more sensible rate. Français Just over an hour of shadowing, and a Skype conversation. Which I completely forgot to record. French meetups tonight and tomorrow night, looking forward to them. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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