Norvasc Newbie Canada Joined 6299 days ago 30 posts - 31 votes Studies: French
| Message 9 of 13 24 November 2010 at 5:24pm | IP Logged |
Thank you for all your replies. I have found them to be extremely useful. It is true that Assimil does not prepare you for the Quebec french that I am surrounded with but it is a help.
It is like tourists from the USA who come here and speak English. We do think that their accents are funny at first but we continue our conversations without thinking as it progresses. Although I do not want to be considered a tourist in the town that I live.
In any case I am thinking that I will continue with my methodology because it is giving me the confidence of learning phrases and words which I can recall extremely fast.
By the end of January I will start doing the Yabla videos like the suggestion above and I will also try to practice at the gas station, coffee shop and outside the post office.
Edited by Norvasc on 24 November 2010 at 5:27pm
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s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5240 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish
| Message 10 of 13 24 November 2010 at 5:37pm | IP Logged |
To add to all the good advice that others have given, I suggest that you look at television programming from Quebec. Most of it is closed-captioned (just press the CC button on your television remote), so that you can have a very good idea of what is actually being said. I must warn you that the closed-captioning is often rather incomplete and inaccurate, but it does give you a base to work with. I don't think the closed-captioning works on the Internet.
Of course, the real challenge is actually speaking the language. Most of the time we reach a level where we understand pretty much everything. But the real litmus test is actually communicating with native speakers.
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slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6485 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English
| Message 11 of 13 24 November 2010 at 6:55pm | IP Logged |
s_allard wrote:
Of course, the real challenge is actually speaking the language. Most of the time we reach a level where we understand pretty much everything. But the real litmus test is actually communicating with native speakers. |
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You are right. I find very useful talking to myself in L1 as a first stage.Maybe in two or five minutes chunks.
This is a good thread about this topic: "talking to yourself".
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=2984&PN=22&TPN=1
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caracao Triglot Groupie France Joined 4930 days ago 53 posts - 84 votes Speaks: French*, English, Italian Studies: German
| Message 12 of 13 27 November 2010 at 5:10am | IP Logged |
As a French speaker, I can tell you you're not waisting your time with the assimil, although I heard the old edition of "French with ease" was better.
Anyway, assimil can't hurt you, I'm a big fan of the method myself. It's not always perfect, many people don't like it, but who cares. It's a first step, a first help, and can help you reaching a good level. But don't forget to take a good grammar later.
As for the French Canadian, it's actually a very interesting "language" (don't have other words in mind right now, it's late). but don't be afraid, they tend to speak rather "standard" when it comes with foreigners French speakers or not. See it more as a Variant of French. They do have interesting words not used in modern european French anymore. French Canadian also have more adjectives than standard French.
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microsnout TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Canada microsnout.wordpress Joined 5281 days ago 277 posts - 553 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French
| Message 13 of 13 27 November 2010 at 6:56am | IP Logged |
caracao wrote:
As a French speaker, I can tell you you're not waisting your time with the assimil, . |
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Just to clarify. No one was suggesting that Assimil is a waste of time. However, he claimed that he had
already done the entire course, not just once but 8 times! He was asking if it would be a waste of time to try to
memorize all 113 lessons.
Edited by microsnout on 27 November 2010 at 7:27am
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