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Dutch and French and maybe Latin! | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5468 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 15 24 February 2014 at 1:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm so glad you're been able to see a new side of your mother by learning Dutch!
For whatever it might be worth, back when I was around B1, I spent a fair bit of time trying to make progress with Engrenages and French films. After much frustration, I realized two things: 1. French films are typically much harder than French TV. 2. Engrenages is one of the most difficult series on French television. You can find lots of easier stuff out there. For example, we have a short list of French films and TV series with accurate subtitles. Or you might want to check out my big list of native French resources. If you're technically-oriented, you can also tackle harder materials using subs2srs. (For this, you need an mp4 video and accurate subtitles in *.srt format.) Buffy+transcripts is a certainly a fine choice (it's what I used myself), but I was always rather fond of the show. That's one of the problems with low-intermediate French: one of the best ways to make progress is to watch a lot of TV, but to get started, it helps to have either transcripts or subs, and the French almost never subtitle things accurately, if they subtitle them at all. So it's hard to find a really addictive series with good subtitles. This will get a lot easiest after your first series or two.
Lack of practice, mostly. In my experience, language stamina is sort of like physical stamina: the only way to develop it is to use it. To a certain extent, this is independent of level: if I stop reading for a month, even with ~C1 reading skills, I get out of shape and reading's a drag. (Fortunately, it comes back quickly.) But even when my reading was much weaker, I found that it got less tiring very quickly once I started reading (even if my comprehension was still dodgy). I took some online practice questions for the CLEP French exam. This looks like roughly a CEFRL B1 exam, but focused entirely on passive skills. Some of the sample questions, however, involved some relatively annoying vocabulary. For example, there was no way to answer one of the questions correctly without knowing the word guichet "ticket window", which I saw once in 10,000+ pages of French reading. Fortunately, you only need to score 50 (on a scale of 20 to 80), and random guessing doesn't count against you, so if you fill in the circles at random, it looks like you should typically score about 35. (Warning: this is based on a superficial reading of their site. Be sure to verify this yourself before relying on it!) In other words, no need to worry about a few annoyingly-difficult questions. But it would be worth going through your study guides and finding out what topics they expect you to know well, and doing a little bit of extra vocabulary cramming. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| plumbem! Groupie United States Joined 3569 days ago 44 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French | Message 10 of 15 19 December 2014 at 12:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This is such an amusing and motivating return. I tried to change the e-mail address for my "plumbem" account sometime around my last post a year ago and got blocked out. I tried several times to re-activate it but gave up. So I made a new account "plumbem!" to continue posting, now almost a year later! I don't know how I might ameliorate the situation.
What is so motivating and amusing is that I can look back at where I was with French a year ago and see the huge gains I've acheived and how minor those voiced frustrations now seem. Anki has really become a power tool for me and my vocabulary feels very adequate thanks to it. I also made the very concerted effort to go about writing out and speaking out loud the conjugation of one verb in all of its tenses every day, and I find myself using the imparfait, plus-que, futur, futur passe,conditional all pretty effortlessly. The next step of course would be creating sentences for each tense/person/number instead of reciting somewhat disengagedly. The subjunctive remains somewhat elusive and little used. One really starts to appreciate the relative simplicity of verb tenses in English! I finished the first five Harry Potters and then decided I couldn't stomach any more JK Rowling (After reading in English and Dutch too, well they started to seem really formulaic and thin. The fifth is so particularly bad). The irony is that I still haven't read the sixth or seventh. I am currently reading the Three Musketeers! So good. I found the courage to look grammar in the face and do something about it. I am mostly starting with smaller, winnable battles such as the use of "en + y", numbers and counting, rules for adverbs, and avoiding things like well, the subjunctive or the devilish and multiple uses of "a" and "de", or well, how about "prepositions" as a topic. I spent two months in the Netherlands this summer and worked the language much more conscientously. I also started writing my family in Dutch. I beat my uncle in scrabble! (he let me) I had been afraid to work on Dutch and French at the same time, having had a few very traumatic, stroke-like (slight exaggeration)experiences switching between them in spoken settings. But now I'm doing both (albeit as of two weeks) and, wow, switching is alot easier and I'm not getting confused! There may be some cases where working on two languages at the same time would be detrimental,but my fear was much more destructive than any French/Dutch mixing I've experienced. I also have been in France since September doing some WWOOFing and although it took a month to really get kick started, I am speaking French every day and having fun with it. Addmittedly, I still have difficulty understanding persons older than 60 or so, particularly as I've been in rural areas. Some of these Patois are thick! I also registered a week ago for iTalki and have had somewhat mixed results skypeing with people. I am not sure if it was something I would do if I was in a more populated area, but when I get around to learning or practicing a language I don't have direct access to, maybe I will be enthusiastic. I also decided to try a paid lesson, which is tomorrow, to see what its like, but I don't see myself doing it very much, prefering the empowerment of self-study. Its kind of like with my yoga practice too; you pay to go to a class because you don't have the discipline to sweat and suffer and come out better for it when left to your own devices. In the end its better for me to work on the will power and motivation. Lastly, my sister is finally going to learn Dutch! We are going to spend 11 weeks together in the Netherlands w also doing WWOOFing (three different farms making goat cheese!). This will be my first attempt at helping someone learn a language and I am really excited. I want to make sure to get some really good grammar work done before she comes over this side in April. As for Latin, I actually had a friend help me get started with it last summer and wow, did I find it incredibly fun. I have really fond memories of the subject from middle school. I love the rules, the clarity, and the fact that you don't have to worry much about the verbal aspect! It feels more like doing math homework than learning a language. Sadly the excellent book I was using, which I really want to work through, was very heavy and I've left it behind for my travels. Maybe that's for 2015 ir 2016. I also got put on the candidate list for doing the Peace Corps in Senegal! I won't know for sure until March but it would be incredible to be able to continue my French education there, and to learn the basics of one or two others as well Edit: I don't know if the wikia existed or as was developed a year ago but it is so useful! Edited by plumbem! on 19 December 2014 at 3:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4624 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 11 of 15 19 December 2014 at 1:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
Welcome back! I've been through the same love/hate cycle with Harry Potter several times myself. It's great for learning a language up through the strong intermediate level, but familiarity breeds contempt. It's also ironic that you particularly despise the 5th book. I've had the same reaction myself (although taken in sum, the entire 4th book was based on an elaborate plot that could have been skipped by a less-than-idiotic badguy, if you ask me). I was astounded to find that book 5 was often seen as the triumph of the series and fulcrum of the story arc, when I just saw it as an extended exercise in suspension-of-disbelief (which is saying something in a whimsical-wizarding-world-based story).I've somewhat overcome my initial problems with the story, however, and now I'm still re-reading it in Russian (I finished it in French early this year, and in Dutch maybe a year before.). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4643 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 12 of 15 19 December 2014 at 6:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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iTalki classes can be very personalized. I speak from experience because I am both a
teacher and student on there. It matters what you ask the teacher to do. I personally barely use any kind of textbook and use very free-form conversation exercises where I occasionally correct grammar and very often pronunciation. I've had classes where basically the only thing that we did were correct my blog entries, or where I rewrote older French in a modern register, or explained the earth's magnetic system to people who haven't studied physics. It matters how you use the language. I've had to review Russian comedy series. As for re-reading, I've re-read a few of the Harry Potter books a while back, but with the exception of Romanian, they were all languages in which I couldn't really read much at all (because I know the books so well, that helps). 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| plumbem! Groupie United States Joined 3569 days ago 44 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French | Message 13 of 15 19 December 2014 at 10:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
1.These sound like incredibly experiences really. I think I am going to get a lot of use out of italki but its apparent that it takes some initial investiment time to find good practice partners. I was already thinking of trying to play word games like "twenty questions", but might try and develop a playbook of activities/protocols similar to ones you mentioned. 2.I find that I am at the end, a pretty bad judge of my holes and weakness with my Dutch and French and I do hope to use payed tutors to help me identify what my needs are. I guess its also that I don't have an incredible amount of funds for this.If I did I might do a few sessions a week! Thanks for the comment! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4643 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 14 of 15 19 December 2014 at 10:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Good teachers can provide you with them. My Romanian tutors, for some reason, are
EXCELLENT at this. Finding the correct tutors can be a chore and in some cultures they're not yet used to this open-ended solution. The strangest thing happened for me when I was studying Romanian and because it's a) fairly close to French b) has lots of Slavic vocabulary c) is a language that I have history with, after four months of study my teacher told me to read Caragiale in the original. He's a classic author in Romania and not easy to read. That's when you feel stumped. I got a short story to read. You need a teacher that can gauge this sort of thing. Edited by tarvos on 19 December 2014 at 10:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| plumbem! Groupie United States Joined 3569 days ago 44 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French | Message 15 of 15 20 December 2014 at 11:17am | IP Logged | |||||
I am so lucky that this very thing happened this morning with my first tutoring session on italki. He quickly diagnosed me at a B2-C1 and presented me with a political cartoon which I had to analyze. Knowing nothing about French politics I had to work and think and struggle and it totally changed the way I am thinking about where to go with my French in the coming months. I am going to meet with him again next week! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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