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Do you ever just get fatigued? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6123 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 9 of 15 15 June 2015 at 6:02am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I don't think you're alone. Sometimes, I also I get fatigued. I keep buying Japanese books, but I get exhausted going through them and drift off. It's like I read the words, but I don't really feel the charcters or the stories, like I do with English.
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| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6781 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 10 of 15 15 June 2015 at 9:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I just did a little reading test reading a page and a half out loud to myself and there are two main things going on: - I can decipher fast enough to enunciate fast (practically as fast as English), but every so often I need to take a little break (and stay on a vowel for a bit longer, say) to "unstick" my throat after too many difficult consonant combinations, notably involving the R. It's a bit like driving with the handbreak on, albeit driving quite fast. After a few more pages though my throat really needs a break - I can only read about 5 pages in one sitting (I can do Italian quite effortlessly for much longer), otherwise I actually start coughing. - I need to spend considerable mental effort on "collapsing" constructions that aren't spoken as written. So as I'm enunciating I need to be several steps ahead so that I can read at full speed once I get there and not be stuck decoding, for instance: "Je préfère arrêter avant qu'il ne soit trop tard" (not the best example, but with a lot of "il", "y", "en" and prepositions there are many "rewrite rules" before reaching the spoken form). I notice often after speaking a phrase that I decoded something wrong and forgot to apply some rule. Edited by numerodix on 15 June 2015 at 9:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 15 15 June 2015 at 11:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I had lots of trouble with the French R. The thing that seems to have finally helped me was singing along with songs in the car. The most effective was probably Un coup d'œil dans le métro (lyrics), which has long, lovely French Rs in the refrain:
My tutor also told me to practice my Rs daily in the shower, in combination with other consonants.
Hmm. For me, it's as if all the spoken forms already exist in my head (including lots of common expressions). So I don't usually need to decode them; I just need to match them up to something I already know. This breaks down when the syntax and vocab get more complicated than what I'd hear on TV on in person, but it works fine for the common stuff. So there's two different things you might try: 1. Improving your ability to understand and predict spoken French. 2. Improving the link between written and spoken French. Sometimes, French feels like two closely related languages (spoken and written), and it's necessary to learn both and link them together somehow, I suspect. As for en and the other prepositions, there's a classic comedy sketch by Raymond Devos, Parler pour ne rien dire, which is stuffed full of that sort of idiomatic French. I don't know if it will help any, but if you can follow most of the word-play, then you're in pretty good shape. :-) Edited by emk on 16 June 2015 at 1:04pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Arnaud25 Diglot Senior Member France Joined 3840 days ago 129 posts - 235 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Russian | Message 12 of 15 16 June 2015 at 6:46am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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In case you have a doubt, native french speakers can pronounce the R as easily as any other consonant. You're probably raking/gargling/scraping/whatever you're doing/ with too much energy (and perhaps there is a wrong placement of the tongue in the mouth: the tongue is not placed like in Italian or English). The R is a very soft sound to produce, especially inside and at the end of the words. It's a little stronger at the beginning of the words.
Each time I see someone on YouTube taking his glass of water and saying "Ok guys, basically the R sound is gargling without the water", I just want to cry out of despair :) Anyway, as I have no concrete advice to give you (I'm the typical native speaker who don't know how, himself, he can produce the right sound), I can only tell you that you have a great leeway for the R: some roll it "à l'italienne" (in Brittany or Burgundy), some foreigners pronounce it like the German -ch or russian x, and it's not unpleasant to hear that, too, so you can choose a variant that is less painful to you. Edited by Arnaud25 on 16 June 2015 at 9:04am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5205 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 13 of 15 16 June 2015 at 10:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I find speaking a foreign language, be it in conversation or reading aloud, to be a very mentally and physically demanding activity. Especially French, but also Italian although it's phonetically simpler and I'm more used to using it in natural contexts. Not with any sounds or constructions in particular, but in general it has just never seemed to feel "natural" to me. Not even now that my level is quite high. I have to constantly monitor my prosody and make sure I'm getting all the individual sounds right, otherwise I'll go on autopilot and all the English-speaker bad habits come in.
It's like a constant conscious effort to speak properly. My pronunciation is generally far worse in conversation than when reading/speaking alone because more of my mental energy is being used for the conversation itself. If it's a particularly involved or emotional conversation then things get even worse. I'm not sure how much practice, training, and exposure is needed before good pronunciation feels natural, but it seems like a hell of a lot, for me at least. This is just a general observation though; like I say it's not just limited to French for me so I don't know if it's relevant to your situation. French is a particularly awkward language to pronounce well, but I don't know whether Portuguese and Dutch are any less so. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4442 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 14 of 15 16 June 2015 at 6:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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When it comes to learning languages, it is like learning to play music with any instrument. In the beginning you put in a lot of effort and you get your level to go up. After a while, if you push yourself into learning new materials on top of your daily routine, you can get very tired.
You basically rework your schedule to do all the things you'd normally do in your native language in your new language. Normally I'd spend 1 hour reading English news articles online. I'd cut the pie and spend half an hour reading news in Chinese or French. If necessary, I'd reduce my time for reading in English and devote more time reading in French. When I'm watching a Chinese drama series, I can spend up to 3h a day but I'd have to cut my English TV programs down. Edited by shk00design on 16 June 2015 at 6:06pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5007 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 15 of 15 18 June 2015 at 7:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Any activity can get tiring, that's why having a larger pool to choose from pays off. But why are you torturing yourself with just this one kind of exercise? There appear to be two different parts of the problem that could (and in my opinion should) be treated separately: reading and pronunciation.
1.reading being tiring. You can just grab other books and continue silently. That will get your reading to perfection. 60 books are great but go for more and always choose things you find interesting, fascinating, fun, enriching and so on, never for things you "should" read. Truth be told, I'd be bored by reading out loud as well as it is slower, it doesn't help me dive into the story (and immersion in case of books in other languages), and it is annoying me. Reading silently is something totally different and efficient in many ways. 2.pronunciation. You don't need to read out lout to perfect it. Especially when a particular sound is giving you hard time. There are good quality pronunciation exercises. I like the introductory+pronunciation chapters of the FSI courses, for example. There are specific pronunciation guides, some aimed at advanced learners polishing the last bits. You can shadow or repeate after audio, trying to sound just like the native audiobook reader, movie actor or politician giving a speech. Sing along with your favourite artist. It is actually quite a fun game and you will get better by following such models (and it is so damn fun sometimes). Just taking a book and reading out loud, that is not an ideal exercise, in my opinion, to practice pronunciation. 3.Listen a lot, don't stop just because your listening comprehension is already ok. I've noticed my pronunciation and accent got much better just by listening a lot. I really mean lots and lots of input. Pronunciation and sounding natural, that is not primarily about your tongue or voicebox, even though you need to practice using these tools. The brain is in charge and the brain is likely to follow the pattern you've been drowning it in. 4.You might want feedback from a tutor. In such a case, reading things out loud may be a useful exercise, just like speaking about anything else. But the feedback, if the tutor is good, will be the valuable part, not just reading out loud, in my opinion. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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