439 messages over 55 pages: << Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 49 ... 54 55 Next >>
Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4898 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German
| Message 385 of 439 12 January 2015 at 2:29pm | IP Logged |
Great update, Luke. Reading your post makes me sad that Assimil Business French has gone out of print. Grrrr.
2 persons have voted this message useful
| Mohave Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Mohave1 Joined 3996 days ago 291 posts - 444 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French
| Message 386 of 439 12 January 2015 at 4:17pm | IP Logged |
Luke I continue to be "Bouche Bée" at how much you accomplish each week -- and all with such great
resources!
2 persons have voted this message useful
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7194 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 387 of 439 26 January 2015 at 10:16am | IP Logged |
Le Rouge et Le Noir - I'm on chapter 23 with the nice recording and a parallel text. It's a 20+ hour novel.
FSI Basic French Hard Core FSI review. Unit 8.3. So far, so good, doing the hard core approach. Most of the tapes in unit 7 have taken more than one review. A few have taken several reviews for me to be pretty automatic. The jury is out on whether I will use the hard core approach for every tape in units 8-11. Part of me is itching to get on to the second half of the course.
Syntopic Reading - One of my Great Books could be considered the core of a syntopic group of about 5 or 6 books. I've started going through the primary book with a combination of listening, reading without the audio, and looking up unfamiliar words with wordreference, and writing the appropriate French translation help in the book. E.G.
provenir de: avoir pour origine
There aren't a lot of unfamiliar words, since I know the book quite well. It's really at the perfect level for extensive reading, about 98% known words. I'm taking an intensive read of the book though and enjoying that.
Anki Mot 1600 est parfait. This is the perfect way to control how many new cards show up each day...
Anki > Deck > Option > New Cards > New cards/day
I've currently got it set to 30. I know most of the words. I add 100 words on the weekend, and they trickle in throughout the week. Adding 100 words creates 200 cards, which is why 30 is a reasonable daily number. So far, my daily reviews have been 10-13 minutes, but I'm only a couple weeks back into it.
Assimil New French with Ease - My transcription wave is on lesson 6. This is helping me notice a few orthographic fine points. I check each sentence as I do it and mark the errors with a magic marker to highlight things to review. The highlight process has made for fast reviews.
Assimil Business French - My most thorough wave to date, I'm on lesson 4 of 40. One lesson per week is my high level goal.
Assimil Using French - Is in a listen wave in the car.
Perfectionment Espagnol - Has the bathroom study slot (Using Spanish with a French base). I'm on lesson 23 of 60 in this listen/read wave.
Lingvist - I quit using Lingvist for a week or so because the daily reviews were taking a lot of time and I seemed to be seeing too many words I got correct the day before. A few days back, I started again and there was a queue of about 750 words to review. Over the next four days I got caught up. 4721 words (they've added 6 since I first completed the Memorize section) in about 88 hours. I have done about 5 more audios from the Listen section.
Philosophie Vivante - I'm on lecture 34 in this series. This is mostly done at the gym, so it isn't really studying.
French Without Toil - I'd started a "look away and repeat" wave a couple months ago and then aborted the wave at lesson 21. My translate wave only made it through lesson 1. I have to come up with another approach. I'm doing enough writing with NFWE for now. Not sure what to do here. Four Assimils at once is probably too many to juggle and make progress on other studies. Perhaps a slow, gradual, "back to front" wave wouldn't be a waste of time.
CLE Grammaire Progressive - I have Niveau Intermediaire. I haven't done much with this lately. It doesn't seem to capture my imagination.
I rearranged the sections above to roughly match the effort I've put into them over the last couple weeks.
Edited by luke on 26 January 2015 at 10:24am
1 person has voted this message useful
| PeterMollenburg Senior Member AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5465 days ago 821 posts - 1273 votes Speaks: English* Studies: FrenchB1
| Message 388 of 439 26 January 2015 at 3:24pm | IP Logged |
Salut luke,
Tu aimes les 'vagues' ça c'est sûr. Et tu les fais à fond même. Alors, bon travail
luke. J'espère que un jour je utiliserai Assimil Using French, French without Toil, et
Business French aussi. Et il paraît que tu as choisi des bons livres avec lesquels tu
peux apprendre des nouveaux termes plus ou moins facilement peut-être. Maintiens le cap
monsieur ! Je suis en train de vous chasser !
-----------------
You like the 'waves' that is certain. And you do them very thoroughly even. Well, good
work luke. I hope that one day I will use Assimil Using French, French without Toil,
and Business French as well. And it seems that you chose good books with which you can
learn new terms more or less easily perhaps. Hold your course monsieur! I'm in the
midst of chasing you!
PM
3 persons have voted this message useful
| fortheo Senior Member United States Joined 5025 days ago 187 posts - 222 votes Studies: French
| Message 389 of 439 26 January 2015 at 10:59pm | IP Logged |
I have no idea how you are juggling all your resources; it's both impressive and intimidating. I really wanted to use FWT too because of the continuous storyline and the songs, but the audio quality—while useable—was just unpleasant to my ears.
Anyways, keep up the good work!
Edited by fortheo on 27 January 2015 at 11:26pm
2 persons have voted this message useful
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7194 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 390 of 439 04 February 2015 at 11:16pm | IP Logged |
fortheo wrote:
Anyways, keep up the good work! |
|
|
Et vous aussi !
A little update and some thoughts ...
I'm on tape 8.6 and 8.7 in the Hard Core FSI review. I'm close to moving to the next tapes.
Today I listened to tape 13.2 with truncated silence at work and it gave me an idea on how to bring some life
and vivacity to my FSI study. This is a variation of "
Tape 2
Magic". Tape 2 is one of the easier tapes in a unit. It is variations on the dialogue. What I did today
was
review the grammar points in unit 13 and listen to tape 13.2. The variation is to do that and more with the
following units to bump into unit 23, which is the penultimate. \
I could put the dialogues and Hard Core FSI versions of the second tape in a folder on my memory stick and
make that another FSI track, in addition to the gruelling Hard Core review. That, along with previewing the
dialogues and supplementary vocab as well as a look at the grammar points will give me another anchor into
the course and give me a sense of progress, since this review has taken and will take longer than I'd
anticipated.
I am reading some other books and making French only notes on vocab. These are relatively easy books
that I know well.
I'm on chapter 26 in Le Rouge et Le Noir.
Oh, for Anki, I've lowered the "new cards per day" setting to 10. This is using the freq dict. I'm thinking I
should put words from the wild in there. That might be helpful.
Edited by luke on 06 February 2015 at 8:25pm
1 person has voted this message useful
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7194 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 391 of 439 16 February 2015 at 6:08pm | IP Logged |
I've been mostly doing my syntopic reading and listening and FSI for the last week or so. Hard Core FSI
review is on tape 9.4.
My reading is all over the place. I have several books and read a bit handful of them. My listening has been
scattered a bit as well. I have been focusing on an interesting subtopic in the grand topic.
I was thinking about some high level ways to organize my study this morning I came up with some
categories. They could be mixed and matched. I'll give some of my examples.
Learn Approach (studying)
Foreign Service Institute (FSI) drills
Assimil Business French listening and reading, etc.
Anki 5000 - frequency dictionary flashcards
Assimil French without Toil done according to the directions
Assimil Using French listening and reading
Assimil New French with Ease dialogue transcription (writing)
French in 3 Months - advanced level.
CLE Intermediate Grammar
French in 3 Months - beginner level
Skills Approach (practicing to be able to do something specific - also has some measure for when the skill is
fully functioning.
Syntopic reading and listening. End up being able to read, listen, and possibly speak on the topic.
Radio French International - News in Francais Facil - End up being able to keep up with the news by listening
to RFI.
Petit Nicholas - book reading, listening to audiobooks, watching cartoons - ends up being able to enjoy new
cartoons or books.
Interest Approach (hopefully this is not entirely distinct from the previous two approaches, but this means to
focus more on the interest, rather than the language).
Interesting YouTube videos in French (Sizen recently posted some great channels in a YouTube thread)..
Podcasts
Great Books
Delineating approaches as above led me to another approach.
Best Tools Approach (use a variety of approaches, but focus on those that seem best for the milieu) This
could also be integrated with the above approaches.
If interesting and comprehensible video is available, watch it.
In the automobile, focus on FSI speaking drills.
While working out, listen to interesting podcasts.
Background listening - listen to audio from books that I want to understand at a very deep level.
Bedtime - read.
Bathroom - read.
Grocery shopping - podcast or audiobook listening.
Back to the original three categories:
1) Learning
2) Skills
3) Interest
I need to keep a strong learning component in my program to continue making progress. Limiting that to FSI
doesn't seem like skimping on learning at the moment. For Skills, syntopic reading is useful, since I'm
interested in the topic and it's relevant in my life. The Interest Approach is the most intriguing. I'm still
intermediate enough that I thing limiting myself to the most intellectually interesting material would undermine
my base, which is still forming.
I'm hoping by 2016, I will have done enough learning and basic skills that I can focus primarily on the Interest
approach. It's a way of delaying gratification and should make the fruit a little sweeter because I'll be a little
hungrier.
My biggest takeaways from this exercise is to:
1) Keep learning.
2) Add some structure to syntopic studies so progress is more measureable.
3) Look for interesting video channels and podcasts as supplements, breaks, breathers, and rewards.
P.S. I've lowered my Anki New Cards per day to 1. Part of me thinks I was almost tricked into Anki by some
posters on another forum who weren't entirely on the up and up. I don't want to drop it, as I've invested a
bunch of tme in my current deck and do plan to ramp the Anki Frequency Dictionary up when I'm closer to
finished with my original path. That original path was to use the four Assimils, FSI, a few other courses with
audio, as well as audiobooks I've been through, and then use frequency dictionary as a "clean up" before
going almost total "Interest Approach".
Each time I add cards to Anki when I get caught up, I start to regret it. By lowering the "new cards / day" to 1,
my current backlog will last over 2 months. By then, the total cards per day should also be quite low. The
main thing with Anki is I think it is more useful for targetted study at this point, rather than the less contextual
environment based on frequency. Also, I think the context of a podcast, video, book, or lesson helps more for
integrating the language.
Edited by luke on 16 February 2015 at 6:28pm
1 person has voted this message useful
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7194 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French
| Message 392 of 439 07 March 2015 at 12:39pm | IP Logged |
Thanks to mrwarper for rescuing this post from the server swap:
Ideas over the last couple days:
Start part two of FSI Basic French with a very low bar. I.E. be able to repeat the dialogue, do the
lexical/vocabulary variations (tape 2), don't worry about the questions on the dialogue, get the Learning
(Exercices de presentation) part of new grammar points down, which is usually close to just listen and repeat
variations. For the "Exercices de verification" - if I can do them, cool, if they are over my head, just repeat the
prompt and the response.
Use morning study time to preview wherever I'll be in the FSI part two wave.
Keep the Hard Core FSI track going. I'm on tape 9.7. Use the morning commute for this, as it's more
demanding and it helps to go at it when I'm in top form. The afternoon commute can be for FSI part two with
the bar lowered.
Syntopic reading/listening is going well. That is where the bulk of my extensive/native material study is.
Anki continues at it's one new card per day rate. I hope to contain any misplaced enthusiasm for Anki until at
least July. Just catch up and get all the words into "mature" status.
The "avance francais" videos on youtube, which are mostly about 10-15 minutes long, will be a nice
supplement. That "real tv" series, if I can find it again will be helpful with "how people really talk", which may
come in handy.
1 person has voted this message useful
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum - You cannot reply to topics in this forum - You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum - You cannot create polls in this forum - You cannot vote in polls in this forum
This page was generated in 0.4531 seconds.
DHTML Menu By Milonic JavaScript
|