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TAC 2012 - acut - Freutsch | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Acut Tetraglot Groupie Brazil Joined 4525 days ago 53 posts - 101 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish, French | Message 1 of 18 13 January 2012 at 8:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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PRESENTATION
Hi! I have been following this forum for quite a while, but I decided to join only a few days ago because I thought the Total Annihilation Challenge was too good to be ignored. I've tried to learn a bunch of languages by myself (French, German, Esperanto, Italian, Galego, Russian, Greek, Turkish, you name it!) but I had a hard time finding resources and motivation for those languages. I would usually stop after the first few lessons and do something else. The two exceptions to this rule were English and Spanish, and I am fairly proud of my achievements on those languages - although I still see room for improvements in them. (BTW, if you find mistakes in my English, or some odd phrasing, I will be more than happy to be corrected!). I decided to give TAC a chance - I am definitely more mature than the 14 year old boy who was trying to learn Greek out of a whim. Now, unlike my early teen years, I do have strong reasons to learn languages other than English and Spanish. Hopefully, I will get admitted to college this year (the last college admission exams will be this week, and I will know if I got into the colleges I wanted in February). The colleges at the top of my want list offer exchange programs to other colleges in Europe - usually in France, Germany and Italy. Although it is not a requirement, in order to be competitive to apply for those exchange programs, you better speak the language of the country you're heading to. I would love to be part in those exchange programs and this gives me enough reasons (solid reasons, not the whimsical "I guess I will choose Turkish because it sounds fun") to learn French and German. PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE Not much, really. I went to France five years ago for a few days and I wanted to be able to speak some (good) French, so that my parents and I didn't sound like the typical tourist to France. I studied by myself for two months before the trip. It worked! My French wasn't the best, since I lacked a lot of vocabulary and most of the conjugations, but I could get around, talk to the hotel staff and get around the menus. It made our trip to France awesome! I found out that people in France don't hate the tourists and may actually enjoy a conversation, if you are willing to learn part of their culture. In our flight back to Brazil, the tourists around me were unanimous to agree that the French were rude - we were the only to have an entirely different view! When I got back home, I did the silliest mistake - I stopped learning French and decided not to join a French school just a few blocks from home (why I did it? oh why?). Now, I've forgotten most of it - five years were more then enough to atrophy my already incipient French. I can only understand some spoken words now and then, and my reading skills aren't in complete despair because I speak two other romance languages - which I think it's cheating and shouldn't be counted as knowledge. I studied German on and off many years ago. It was really stupid that I didn't actually take a German course, because I live in a city founded by Germans and which still has much of the German immigrant's culture. There are German-Portuguese signs in the town and I have friends whose grandparents speak only German, for example! But, if I get admitted to college, I will move to a different state! It just puzzles me how I could have learned so much, and I just let the opportunity fade away. All I know of German right now are mere residues - some loose vocabulary only. THE PLAN For French: I plan to use FSI, it seems to be a good course. I will also use French audiobooks, radio stations streaming online, online newspapers and Wikipedia (I owe much of my English reading skills to Wikipedia). I will stick to FSI, radios and the audiobooks first, and develop reading skills later, since French spelling isn't the most phonetic and may hinder my ability to pronounce words correctly (I had bad experiences with this when I studied English). I will try to reach A2 - B1 in French before I start German, since it is a bad idea to learn two beginning languages at once (as my early teens multi-language learning fiasco shows). Hopefully, I will reach that in a few months. For German: I also want to use FSI, since there are many good reviews about it at Amazon. I may also use the Deutsche Welle courses and resources. I would really appreciate any suggestions of links and resources! I don't know many of them. Suggestions of books and tapes (both for French and German) are welcome, but I'm in a fairly limited budget (as most Freshman college students-to-be are). THE GEARS FOR THE FIRST WEEKS * A French dictionary: I went to the bookshop today and bought a 20-dollar French-Portuguese/Portuguese-French dictionary (Larousse). It seems to be good for a beginner (40,000 words, conjugation of some verbs), which the other dictionaries didn't have. It bugs me that it's phonetic transcription does not contain the strong syllables - I have a vague memory that most French words are stressed in the last syllable, but is it always true? Should I return it to the store and get a different one? *A procrastination-blocker: I am a heavy procrastinator (who isn't in these days of Internet?). I was procrastinating yesterday and, paradoxically, found just what I need: an anti-procrastinating add-on for Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock/) . It works perfectly! I settled on a 20-minute quota per day for my favorite Brazilian news website, and for Portuguese and English Wikipedias. It automatically blocks me if I spend more than 20 minutes on those sites (and it also locks itself, so I can't change the settings or uninstall it if I got blocked. It reminds me of mom, somehow). Not surprisingly, I have already exceeded today's quota. The goal is, if I procrastinate, it will have to be in French or German. * FSI tapes and textbooks: From http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php The sad part is that sometimes the words aren't pronounced as clearly as it could be (which is why I bought the dictionary with the phonetic transcription, even though I wanted to avoid the written part of the language in the beginning). But the drills really work - I often catch myself repeating some of those sentences at odd moments. * Audiobooks: I found http://www.litteratureaudio.com/ awesome! Someone suggested it in this forum (I wish to say thanks to this person, but I can't remember who was), and I decided to try it. So far, I have more-or-less passively listened some of their books (again, reading and spelling properly are saved for later). I don't really believe in passive listening as a way of building the knowledge of a language. I want to listen in order to better my comprehension skills. It is also rewarding when all of a sudden I listen a word that was at FSI's lesson. What I want to avoid, again, is to become too reliant in the writing part of a language, like I did with English - it took me a long time to enjoy watching movies and series, even though I had the vocab necessary to understand it. So I will use it mostly as a review and for entertainment. Well, I guess this post is already far too long, so I'll stop here. I will take the last college exams next Tuesday, so I won't be able to post until then. But I should be back on Wednesday. Au revoir! 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ReQuest Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4857 days ago 200 posts - 228 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, German, French Studies: Spanish | Message 2 of 18 13 January 2012 at 11:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Bonne chance! Viel Glück! Boa sorte!
I'll follow you and the best if luck with your studies! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Acut Tetraglot Groupie Brazil Joined 4525 days ago 53 posts - 101 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish, French | Message 3 of 18 18 January 2012 at 3:33am | IP Logged | ||
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hanks ReQuest!
Now, back to my learning log: the past few days haven't been very active language-wise. The test entrance exams (which consisted of 3 four-hour long written exams - urgh!) really sucked most of my time since I last posted. I used the free time I had between the exams to listen to some audiobooks I found in www.litteratureaudio.com. I don't really believe in passive listening, but it seems that some words stuck, and as time goes by I can figure out more and more words (although I must admit that sometimes when listening to Sherlock Holmes, "Watson" is all I can understand). French radios online are also fun! I've been listening to France Info regularly in those days (in fact, I'm listening to it right now). But I didn't get ahead with FSI, so I can't really say I made solid progress in those days. My immediate goal right now is to immerse myself in as much French I can get before college classes begin (which means I have about 40 days in which I'll have nothing - or close to nothing - to do besides learning French!) I must admit I am struggling in pronouncing the French vowels correctly. Portuguese has a small set of vowels (and Spanish has arguably an even smaller set). I am puzzled when I read instructions such as "it is sound between e and o" - which helps me as much as saying "try to produce a sound between s and t". Does anyone know useful resources to help me with that? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5781 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French | Message 4 of 18 18 January 2012 at 7:37am | IP Logged | ||
Hi Acut, good luck with your studies. It seems from your past like you have a real facility with languages. About assistance with French pronunciation, this may be more elementary than you may need, especially with Romance languages already in your pocket, but perhaps the FSI French Phonology (rather than the Basic) course may be appropriate. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Acut Tetraglot Groupie Brazil Joined 4525 days ago 53 posts - 101 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish, French | Message 5 of 18 19 January 2012 at 1:03am | IP Logged | ||
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Hi!
Thanks Spanky! I followed your advice, and I tried the French Phonology course (which I found here:http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php?page=French %20Phonology). After listening to three tapes of that course I'm both satisfied and scared. I am satisfied because it is a good resource - it made me realize I was pronouncing some words incorrectly and it drills my ears to distinguish a wrong pronunciation from a good one. I am scared because at times I get hopelessly behind the tape. I take a long time to say things like "Non, de temps en temps seulment", while the voice in the tape says it in no time. It is also hard to pronounce correctly words that mix "e" and "eu", such as "dejeuner". Anyways, practice should make it perfect. I remember a few years ago I found it hard to say "dieciseis" and "diecisiete" in Spanish, because of the two /s/ sounds too close together, but now it is a breeze. I'm still a bit worried that I may be pronouncing the "eu" sound (such as in "déjeuné") incorrectly. And I am finding some inconsistencies between FSI and my dictionary. I shall return to those divergences in a later post, since they are beginning to confuse me. Anyways, if anyone knows any other pronunciation resources, I would be glad to hear! I guess pronunciation will be my main difficulty in the beginning, so any help is welcome. Besides that, I somewhat-passively listened FranceInfo for a few hours. Now I am coming to the point I can understand portions of sentences, not isolated words. It's not good to get new vocabulary (I know for sure that I could get more words by reading) but my goal right now is to focus on my hearing-listening skills. Au revoir! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Acut Tetraglot Groupie Brazil Joined 4525 days ago 53 posts - 101 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish, French | Message 6 of 18 23 January 2012 at 5:13am | IP Logged | ||
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So, on Jan 20th, 21st and 22nd I did nothing to improve my French - except for some hours listening to France Info and some dictionary look ups, but I don't consider this studying. I got laaazy, I must admit - I got no excuses. But today I told to myself I would not want to post in this log that I wasted 4 days. So I decided to act!
Now I'm on the third chapter of the French Phonology course. Again, it's a good resource, perhaps the best. My complaints are that it sometimes spend too much time on easy stuff (does anyone really need help in distinguishing the French and the English R? Pronouncing it might be tricky, but it is easy to tell them apart in a recording!) and too little time on complicated things (like pronouncing "un heure" correctly). This might simply be my linguistic bias (would Americans rate those tasks in a different order of difficulty?), but I need to rewind and practice, practice, practice a single sentence - and that sentence doesn't show up as often. Murphy's Law, I guess. Difficulties: Vowels. I'm having a love-hate relationship with them. Sometimes I seem to hit the nail, sometimes I miss it by a mile. Supposedly, nasal vowels should be a breeze for me, since Brazilian Portuguese is full of them, but I came to notice French's nasal vowels are somewhat different (and a lot tricky!). What's going well so far: I'm not having trouble with remembering the vocab, even the words that are not similar to either Spanish and Portuguese. Some words are just too funny to be forgotten. Also, FSI is based on repetition, and even the words in the French Phonology course seem to stick, even though they care more about pronouncing them correctly than actually memorizing them. Milestones: I first heard the news that Megaupload got shut down on France Info! I quickly googled it and found out that I actually had understood things correctly. I got amazed on how much I could understand, despite my procrastination on the last few days. I'm also beginning to absorb some random words, such as "Mars", "meteorology" and "goalkeeper". New tools: I began testing a Spaced Repetition Software (SRS). Originally, I intended to use Interlex (http://www.vocab.co.uk/), which may be configured so that you need to type the words, and that was amazingly helpful in making me remembering the differences in spelling between Portuguese and Spanish. But Interlex is not a SRS, so it could make studying more complicated. Thus, I decided to test Mnemosyne (http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/), using some Spanish vocab (In a nutshell, I was running away from studying a language (French) by studying another one (Spanish). Go figure.). So far, it's running smoothly, but I noticed one should not study more than what is assigned for the day, since this seems to skew Mnemosyne's schedule. Also, I don't like the fact one need to give a grade for a particular word, since it's too subjective and I tend to raise my grades when I'm happy - which shouldn't be the case, of course. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Acut Tetraglot Groupie Brazil Joined 4525 days ago 53 posts - 101 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish, French | Message 7 of 18 25 January 2012 at 11:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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Quick post:
I downloaded Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) and I have spent the past few days using it to slow down and analyze the parts in the French Phonology course that are giving me more trouble. I also begun recording myself reading some texts in French (the ones that are in FSI's textbooks) - again, using Audacity. I'm wondering if there's a way I could share them and get feedback on my pronunciation. I've practicing my Spanish flashcards on Mnemosyne. It is a good piece of software and I am liking its concept. So far, I got 300 Spanish words/expressions on it, and I've been adding from 18 to 70 cards a day. When I'm done with the French Phonology course, I'll begin adding French vocabulary. Edited by Acut on 25 January 2012 at 11:59pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Acut Tetraglot Groupie Brazil Joined 4525 days ago 53 posts - 101 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish, French | Message 8 of 18 28 January 2012 at 3:51am | IP Logged | ||
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I've hit the 400 cards mark on Mnemosyne. But all of them are in Spanish.
French is going really slow. I wish there was a way I could get feedback on my pronunciation, since this is the major factor slowing me down... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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