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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 49 of 1317 29 March 2012 at 4:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm getting really frustrated with Anki decks that ask me to translate from French to
English (or vice versa). I do not need reflexive translations into English at this point; it messes with my listening comprehension and reading speed. And I don't care about cards more than a month old, because if I don't see the vocabulary every month or two at my current level of input, then I don't need it right now. It turns out that I really like cloze deletion cards with lots of context. They're a little harder to answer, but I don't need to use any English, and they force me to predict what word would be used in French, which is a useful skill for listening. I've gotten much more aggressive about deleting cards, too. And I often add multiple cards for the same word. For example, tricky multi-word connectors may get 5 or more cloze deletion cards. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 50 of 1317 29 March 2012 at 7:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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For a lunchtime listening exercise, I tried to understand and write down the lyrics to
MC Solaar's "Playmate", using a lot of pause & rewind. The video. It's a sad song about a women on the train, crying about her boyfriend. Here's the first verse, with the actual lyrics indented below my rough transcription. I didn't really bother with spell-check or accent marks.
That was a pretty fun exercise, and it wasn't totally disappointing—after all, there are English songs I've heard hundreds of time without understanding more than half the lyrics. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 51 of 1317 01 April 2012 at 5:21am | IP Logged | ||
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I went to a talk at the Alliance Française this evening. It took me 90 minutes to get
there, which gave me a nice opportunity to warm up by listening to podcasts. I was really surprised by how well I could speak this evening. A huge amount of my passive vocabulary "woke up" and it was right there at my fingertips. My accent and intonation shaped up quickly, and I spent very little time search for words. When I called my wife to let her know I was driving home, she said, "Wow, your accent is really good tonight!" This is the first time when I really felt that I could "interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party," as the B2 definition puts it. I mean, sure, I can usually speak with my wife without any great difficulty, but I never know how much she's compensating. But it's really remarkable to speak fluently with half a dozen people in one evening. Sure, I made mistakes, but I discovered that I really can socialize in French without any problems. Wow. There's clearly a difference between the partial immersion that I have at home, and the full immersion that I would get from living in France. There's something about being surrounded by a social group that uses French almost exclusively that makes a huge difference. Maybe I need to get serious about setting up some Skype chats. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5210 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 52 of 1317 01 April 2012 at 5:27am | IP Logged | ||
Wow indeed. - That's fantastic and inspiring news! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 53 of 1317 03 April 2012 at 4:31am | IP Logged | ||
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My French was doing great for a couple of days, but things got a bit strange today—I
blew through a Werber novella on the Kindle with no great problems, and my listening comprehension is still very strong, but my output crashed hard. I'm stumbling all over my tongue, and I can barely get a sentence out. Basically, the part of my brain that's good at matching prosody and accents wants an evening off. If I force myself to use a strong French accent, things get noticeably easier. But it's a struggle. I'm not especially worried, and I know it will come back. But right now, I can barely carry on a conversation with my wife, and it's rather frustrating. I need to leave the radio on in the background tomorrow. I try to record the ups and downs, in hopes of encouraging other folks who are hitting a wall. :-) And I've got some great study ideas lined up for the next 3 weeks or so. More on that later. For a kick, I wrote a short diary entry in the passé simple on lang-8 this evening. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 54 of 1317 03 April 2012 at 6:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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The radio is on in the background today, as promised.
I've been listening to talk shows on Europe 1, with 3 or 4 speakers talking at machine- gun speed, interrupting each other. I've got no context, and I'm not actually paying much attention. Occasionally, I can follow the discussion for 20 seconds before I loose the thread. Some advertisements actually make sense. But even when I can't get everything, it feels close: Sometimes I'm missing too much vocabulary. Other times, I can get most of the words, but I don't quite have enough bandwidth left over to get sentences. Or I can choose to get 1 sentence and miss the next 2. The words are getting clearer and clearer. It's a good feeling, almost like I could turn around a corner and everything would suddenly make sense. I know that things will get harder, soon enough. But today, at least, I feel like I'm going to eventually make it. I started this journal 45 days ago, a week or two after resuming my French studies in earnest. At that point, I could get maybe 80% of RFI Français Facile by the 3rd listen, except for the harder correspondents. I've come a long way, very quickly. And I have 70 days to go before the DELF exams. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 55 of 1317 07 April 2012 at 10:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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I just finished 30 straight days of writing practice at Lang-8! And I've definitely
gotten much better. This was a great exercise, because it forced me to really master some tricky points of grammar. And I can now write several paragraphs on a familiar subject with under a dozen errors. Going forward, I have several goals: 1. Improve my speaking abilities, so that I can communicate abstract ideas to my wife in French more reliably and fluently. Right now, if we're exhausted or stressed, I stumble all of my tongue, and produce various kinds of horrible word salad when we try to discuss (say) education options for bilingual kids. I don't like it when my ability to communicate effectively is fragile and dependent on circumstance. (Of course, we could always switch to English, but well, I'd rather push through this now and use French for the rest of my life.) Tools: - Lots more practice at home. - Shadowing? - Other conversation partners? 2. Take a serious run at DELF B2. Among other things, this means I need to be able to write semi-coherent 250-word essays defending an idea. Tools: - Lang-8. - Essay connectors. - French business letter templates. - A list of sample or previous topics? I also need to do another round of vocab SRS. I'm currently looking at some custom Anki plugins and the following books: - French: Key Words and Expressions, The Combined Book - Routledge's frequency dictionary for French. 3. I want to boost my listening abilities until I can mostly follow news radio and TV. Tools: - Listen to French - 3 seasons of Engrenages (on the way) - Subs2SRS? Subtitle ripping software? - L/R with LingQ at Intermediate 2 and Advanced 1 levels. Hmm. To many things to work on, not enough time. :-) I'll experiment this week and narrow down to a few useful choices. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6086 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 56 of 1317 08 April 2012 at 2:24pm | IP Logged | ||
Your log is inspiring as always! I'm also trying to prepare for June and I have a suggestion. To prepare for writing there are a few things that make good writing topics on exams: l'environnement (préservation), technologie, santé, relations entre les femmes et les hommes, conditions de l'éducation ou travail, to name a few. Right now I'm searching through articles in journals like Le Monde, Le Figaro, le nouvel Observateur, Le Point, France Soir for topics and their related vocabularies. It's a good idea to start a vocabulary list for each debate topic and then practice making sentences with those words. "Le Grand Journal" is not bad to watch to see how different speakers interact with eachother, but because the presidential election is coming up in France, they aren't talking about much else at the moment! I'm willing to bet that politics won't be on the test, but since everybody's talking about it anyway, it might be good to know how to say a few words about the election and its candidates. (I only know two of them myself) edit: these are all just ideas, and since you're already on the right track I'm sure the exam will be a cinch for you :) Edited by Sunja on 08 April 2012 at 2:28pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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