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| Aeroflot Senior Member United States Joined 5600 days ago 102 posts - 115 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 9 of 18 13 August 2009 at 9:31pm | IP Logged |
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Gosh, lesson ten is a killer, maybe even more so than nine. The first week was easy enough that thirty minutes would have been enough time to learn a lesson quite well, but there's no way in Hades that you can absorb everything in lesson ten. I'm beginning to have to really focus on the individual sentences since they're becoming more complex. And the differences in prepositional usage between English and French and Spanish are becoming more apparent, though not so hard. But it would be nice to spend more time addressing the differences in a compare & contrast form, yet the course says just to allow the information to sink in first, and I want to go by the course's rules as close as possible to see how effective their method really is.
So far today I've spent maybe twenty to thirty minutes listening to the lesson, and barely any time looking at the reading. One thing I found out is that it's not very difficult to spell French if you read through the dialogue once or twice, and if you give yourself the chance to transcribe the audio without looking at the dialogue text that much, whatever spelling mistakes you make will stick in your head so you won't forget so easy. For instance, I wanted to write dérangé but it came out déranger. Now I know not to do that again. Another word is Lavevaiselle which I spelled Lavaveselle. The worst words are the ones that are exactly the same as English or Spanish, but maybe there's an E at the end or an accent mark. Intéressante is one of those cases. But it's fun to have to memorise these little differences. One of the things I've always wanted to do is learn English. You know, from an foreigner's perspective. It must be the most difficult language ever because of all the prepositions, inconsistent spelling, and the auxiliary verb "do". Because how do you explain how to use "do"? --Does the car run on electric? --Yes it does. You could say, "yes it runs on electric", but that would be usually when you're replying sarcastically, like "yes... it runs on electric. Gosh." This is exactly why I like French, because it has horrible spelling and it has little things that truly distinguishes it from other languages, like adding "Est-ce que" to the beginning of the sentence. Est-ce que reminds me of do, because we use it to make questions as well. Instead of saying "you have car?" or "have you a car?" we just say "you have a car" and add do to the beginning. It's the same in French. Est-ce que vous avez une voiture? In Spanish it's just Tiene un coche? The German is Haben Sie ein Auto? But French adds the est-ce que to the beginning. So French is pretty much as close as I'm going to get to learning English. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Aeroflot Senior Member United States Joined 5600 days ago 102 posts - 115 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 10 of 18 15 August 2009 at 6:49am | IP Logged |
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Okay, I'm officially addicted to AJATT. I think I read just about everything on that site since last night. Sounds like it would be a good idea to immerse myself as much as possible in French for the next few months, at least to give it a try. Couldn't hurt.
I ordered Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Little Red Riding Hood in French with CDs, and Horton Hears a Who en francais aussi. Those will help me get started reading and fill up immersion time. I'm thinking about setting a goal of being able to read Madeleine by the end of September. I'm not sure how difficult the book is, but it's 48 pages long, so I expect at least a fairly good amount of knowledge is expected. But I'm going to work up from Dr Seuss, then go on to comics, and then Madeleine. You know, maybe not exactly like that, but I'm going to try to increase the difficulty with each book. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Aeroflot Senior Member United States Joined 5600 days ago 102 posts - 115 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 11 of 18 16 August 2009 at 4:43pm | IP Logged |
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Okay I'm progressing into French immersion. So far I've got 24hr French TV thanks to
http://www.fomny.com/France-tv.php which also happens to have other languages too. It's got 24 hour Looney Tunes and 24hour Tom & Jerry. FTW! I've bought an iPod shuffle to hold audiobooks for when I'm walking outside. Here's a good site for free audio livres en Frenchie www.litteratureaudio.com/ But before I go into literature I'm going to start with children's stories from this site which has MP3s to go along with the stories. http://www.iletaitunehistoire.com/ Edited by Aeroflot on 16 August 2009 at 4:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Aeroflot Senior Member United States Joined 5600 days ago 102 posts - 115 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 12 of 18 17 August 2009 at 2:29pm | IP Logged |
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HELP! All this French music on Radio Canada is so addicting!!!
Marie-Christine Trottier Claude Saucier Rupa & the April Fishes Gilles Payer Et tout... Now I know exactly what Khatsumoto means by having fun with the language. This stuff is especially nice in the mornings when you just wake up and lie in bed staring at the ceiling. And in the afternoon RC has French jazz... heaven. Where has French been all my life? >>>>> www.radio-canada.ca <<<<< Now I'm a pretty big Regina Spektor fan and I don't really care if the music is girly. That being said, I've found this artist Coeur de pirate. Her songs are addicting and remind me in a way of Regina Spekor. http://www.coeurdepirate.com/videos/ Edited by Aeroflot on 17 August 2009 at 3:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Aeroflot Senior Member United States Joined 5600 days ago 102 posts - 115 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 13 of 18 18 August 2009 at 3:41am | IP Logged |
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Captains log, lundi 17 août 2009, supplemental.
Okay so after reading AJATT again, and semi-immersed myself in French, I am convinced that full(er) immersion would be indeed a good choice, not only allowing me to pick up French quickly, but also being a beneficial life changing experience on the part of allowing me to clear out my messy room and redecorating. If I am not burned out and hating French by now, I can safely say I will continue on indefintely, so there is no danger in clearing out my 'icky' English choses! ;) Right now I have got to re-read AJATT again because there are some details I keep forgetting, like not thinking in English and making sure not to prowl English language websites such as these. For the sake of my fragile mind, I will keep posting in this forum, not because I am too weak to fully immerse myself, but because Khatsumoto says to have fun watching movies and such, but actually my favorite thing to do is browse English language websites. Movies can be work sometimes. *gasp* I know... uptight. Yiiick. The next obvious step for me is to rely totally on French websites, but I feel that my French isn't quite there yet. I know for sure that if I were to cut myself off from English that I'd get burned out constantly looking up French words. So gradually I'll dive deeper as I am also reading more books.--By the way, my books came in: Horton Entend Un Zou pour Dr. Seuss, Boucle D'or et Les Trois Ours, and Le Petit Chaperon Rouge. The Dr. Seuss book is actually kinda difficult, but the others are specially made to teach 50 new words a piece, so I will work up to Dr. Seuss with those. As a supplement to vocab learning, I am going to start learning songs I really like. Enfants by Coeur de Pirate is good to start out with. As for movies I am thinking of learning new words from the subtitles, even though they are not word-for-word with the movie. After websites, the next thing is to throw out all the English stuff, which luckily I was already doing by selling my library of 100+ books, and replace them with French, which luckily the used bookstore has. The other day I was eyeing a Stephen King book but it looked too difficult to bother buying, yet. I have now forced myself not to buy more books than I can read in a week, because I end up not reading the books. It is like looking at a huge plate of food: sometimes all that food is like propaganda for your stomach: You can never eat all of this! Lastly the hugest feat to overcome is stopping thinking in English. --Okay weird, I'm listening to Radio Canada music station and the French sounded like Swedish, I swear it was the weirdest. thing. ever. --Anyway, English thinking is going to take a long time to do, and I think Khatsumoto probably did not even begin to attack his thoughts until he was a-ways into AJATT. --This Quebecoise girl really sounds like a Swede. I want her accent now please okay? D'accord? De rien. --Though I am kinda excited because I will be forced to learn more words if I have to think in French. Speaking of new words, I have decided that for every new word, I have to add it to Anki with a few example sentences on the card. I think that is all I have to say for now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Aeroflot Senior Member United States Joined 5600 days ago 102 posts - 115 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 14 of 18 19 August 2009 at 2:53am | IP Logged |
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Okay now I feel a little bit bad. I haven't been keeping constant with Assimil for the past week; I've only give maybe fifteen minutes at the most to each lesson. It's funny because before I was complaining about how much stuff is in each one, but I just listened to lesson fifteen maybe four times and I have 100% listening comprehension. All I did was earlier going through the lesson really quick to add all the unknown words to Anki. For the lesson I listened without the book a few times to get as much as possible, and then once with the dialogue. Then afterward I played the lesson a couple more times just to make myself feel like I'm doing some actual work. Haha. Again, Khatsumoto is right: it doesn't have to feel like work, and it shouldn't feel like work, and we are stuck in this mode of thinking only work brings progress. The only 'work' I did today was add 75 sentences to Anki, and that was mostly fun, because I turned it into a game. What I did was find an unknown word on a current webpage, look it up at Larousse.fr and find and add phrase that uses the unknown word as well as a new unknown one, and then find another phrase with the new unknown word, and so on. Basically I call it can Anki chain. Just keep adding until you run out of words, haha! "Sorry, you have reached the end of French."
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| Aeroflot Senior Member United States Joined 5600 days ago 102 posts - 115 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 15 of 18 20 August 2009 at 7:45pm | IP Logged |
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Wow I hate to sound like I'm giving Khatzumoto favors under the table, but he's right yet again: don't ever make your language learning into a chore. Once it turns into a chore then the fun evaporates. That means Assimil is out and putting French songs onto my eye pod is in. Bruno: You are either in or you're aus. Assimil is awesome and I couldn't recommend it more if you like learning in lessons, but as easy as it is, it's still work. Khatzumoto also says that language cannot be an end to itself--that's a philosophical term meaning that an action leads to the aquisition of your desire.
You'd think that's what you wanted: to learn a language. But in fact it's better to find another goal and use language to get you there, like a car to get to the other side of the city. Pretend you have never driven standard and you have no choice but to drive it to the store miles away. You're going to screw up your gears a bit, but you'll eventually get the hang of it, and you'll get to the store. So not only have you gotten where you wanted, but you also acquired a skill along the way (in passing). Same thing with language: you find something you genuinely like, like watching movies, and you learn the language to understand that favorite movie. You shouldn't study the language to learn it, but you should study the language to learn the movie. In that way the language comes out as a by product of understanding the movie. This just makes so much sense then to toil with books and classes. My wanderlust, which is crazy strong, just vanished when I learned that. Because if you treat languages like work, then you become used to them right away and they become boring, so you look at another language that is new and fresh. It's the same with guitar: if you learn all the music theory, then music turns into this mechanical thing, but if you just listen to the sounds from the string and makes songs from that, then the guitar retains much of it's mysteriousness and vitality. Don't study the grammar of the language because you're just doing the same thing. You get bogged down in the technicalities and then the cool factor is ejected out like Goose. Capicse? That being said, I just cherry picked knowledge out of a Coeur de Pirate song and learned so much from just that one song. I was translating the lyrics and at one point I had Anki open and I wasn't paying attention and I was translating French to French. I was like "no, you're not supposed to do that, I need the English" and then it dawned on me that not translating was exactly was I needed to do. Just get a dictionary and find the general meaning of the words and let your imaginationg take over the rest. To top of the AJATT method, you're also learning 100% real language, including expressions and things that aren't grammatically correctly but real people use anyway. You'll be more like a native. You'll pick up the meaning of what you're hearing through the context. It'll be like you have an emotion connection with your words. Edited by Aeroflot on 20 August 2009 at 7:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Aeroflot Senior Member United States Joined 5600 days ago 102 posts - 115 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 16 of 18 21 August 2009 at 7:00pm | IP Logged |
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Alright so my French hearing skills have increased a lot since beginning the AJATT method. Not only does French not sound like a bunch of gobbledygoop, but I can pick out the syllables and quite a few words. But I'm listening to music so it's a bit harder to listen to that straight talk. Music seems to be better learning material than movies, for listening practice, because vocals stretch and constrict the words and force the mind be more flexible in acquiring sounds. If one becomes good at listening to music, then talk should be a cinch.
I found a copy of Amelie and Bon Cop Bad Cop with word-for-word subtitles yesterday, so that's also helped me gain some little phrases and a better idea of how people talk. I feel like after a week of AJATT that I'm already converting to French in my mind. Sometimes little phrases pop out without me even thinking. C'est pas? Câlice de tabernac! Où es-tu? J'arrive! Aide-moi, s'il tu plaît Oh, yeah and this is sort of strange, but Parisian French is pretty and it drew me into learning French, but after listening to so much Radio Canada, France French is beginning to become annoying to my ears. I don't even turn on France TV anymore even if they've got cooler shows on, I just go straight to Quebec radio stations. I'm even debating whether I should throw out Amelie, because it sounds like nails on a chalk board. Sort of ironic, non? Nah, it's not that bad, but I don't prefer the Paris accent anymore. Edited by Aeroflot on 21 August 2009 at 7:28pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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