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Gary’s TAC 2011 - Team Œ | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5006 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 49 of 104 14 March 2011 at 1:23pm | IP Logged |
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Progress last week was slow but somewhat steady: continuing with all the usual stuff. I'm one lesson away from finishing the French With Ease active wave, and I have 5 Pimsleur Russian lessons to go; in an ideal world that means I'll be finished by the weekend, but we shall see.
I've started watching Braquo, a French detective drama series, which is quite challenging and will probably help my "advanced" listening comprehension (unusual accents, very fast speech, slang, etc.). Only half a 1-hour episode so far though. I've also been watching news and interviews etc. during lunch break but they're starting to feel a bit too easy and so I'd rather focus on series and films. Perhaps I should load the Braquo episodes onto a USB drive then watch some every lunchtime... This week: lesson on Tuesday, meetup on Wednesday, then off to Les Alpes on Sunday, que le temps passe vite ! Then when I get back from France I think I'll start working on Italian although French will remain the top priority at least until June. I'm hearing so much Italian these days and now I'm even living with an Italian flatmate so I may as well make the most of it! Possibly boring and irrelevant time management stuff: Now that I'm living nearer the town centre, my schedule's changing a bit: in particular, my new flat is near the gym so I can go there before/after work rather than at lunchtime, which is less hassle but means I lose a bit of evening time in exchange for less useful free time when I'm not at home; however since I won't be under any pressure to get back to work, I can do more exercises in one session and hence go less frequently. So then it's a case of organising my activities into things I can do when not at home (reading, listening, watching certain things, writing) and things I can (anything involving speaking; other hobbies e.g. guitar). Perhaps I should also embrace the "do less" movement and chill out a bit rather than obsessing over productivity... My problem's that there's so many things I want to do and learn and I want to do and learn them all now, but I also need to pay for my living somehow... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5006 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 50 of 104 16 March 2011 at 12:33pm | IP Logged |
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Interesting evening yesterday. I had my French lesson and it went quite well: my reading from a text felt slightly more fluid and less monotone and robotic, and similarly I'm getting a bit better at expressing myself when talking about anything although still nowhere near fluid. However later on I ran into two French friends on the street and when they were talking to each other I could barely understand a single word they were saying. From a several-minute conversation I picked out a few "je"s and "tu"s, and caught most of the last two sentences ("??? à la maison" "t'as les clés?") and... that's about all. It was as if it was a different language from the French I hear on TV and films and at meetups and even from the bits of conversation I overhear on the street every so often, and easily understand 95% of.
I'd guess it was mainly the guy's accent (very different from the clean Parisian accent I'm used to); admittedly it was quite a one-sided conversation and the main speaker was a lot more difficult to understand than the other one who was mostly just responding "ouais, ouias" etc.. Fast speech and slang do trip me up sometimes but not to the point where I can't understand a thing. I was in the supermarket a few minutes later and heard two girls talking in Spanish and I could understand a hell of a lot more of their conversation than the previous French one. Anyway that's my frustration for the day - just when I think my listening comprehension's good, something like that happens and shows that I still have some way to go. Ah well, a challenge is always good I guess! And to be fair, a lot of foreign people I know who speak English quite well do struggle to keep up with fast conversations between me and my friends, especially when we're all Scottish so don't tone down the accent and slang. Edited by garyb on 16 March 2011 at 12:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5006 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 51 of 104 28 March 2011 at 5:11pm | IP Logged |
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Report from my week in France
I just got back from my week in the Alps yesterday. Great week of snowboarding, beautiful conditions. All in all it was a slight disappointment in terms of speaking French - of all the ski resorts I've been to, Tignes is by far the most Anglophone: almost every receptionist, shop employee and waiter seems to either be English or at least speak good English! There was even one woman at the supermarket whose nationality I wasn't sure of at first because she spoke English almost perfectly and even with a slight South England accent; only after hearing her make a few minor vocabulary errors and hearing her speak French with French customers I realised for sure that she was French. That's a sharp contrast with other resorts I've been to such as Les Deux Alpes and Les Gets where most staff's English was rudimentary at best, and so I probably spoke less French on this trip than on my other snowboarding trips before I was actively studying the language! Almost every single time I spoke to someone in French, they understood me but replied in English. I don't think my French was so awful and obviously foreign as much as my lack of confidence made it appear that I wasn't comfortable using the language - I'd feel nervous and speak quickly and unclearly and make very basic mistakes. I'm not bad at speaking French, as evidenced by all my recent meetups and lessons, but it does take me a few minutes to get "warmed up", and in everyday situations like talking to a receptionist, the interaction is rarely longer than that so I don't have the chance to get warmed up and start speaking well. On the day I arrived, my first French conversation was with a woman at the information point. I was looking for an ATM and she thought I was looking for a beer vending machine! "Bonjour. Je cherche un distributeur de billets." "Un distributeur de bières ? Non, il y en a pas. Pas du tout pour les boissons !" "Non, de billets. D'argent." "Oh... En sortant, à gauche." "Ah, merci." And that's why talking to natives is so useful - you get immediate feedback that you're mispronouncing something. I'm not sure exactly how "billets" sounded like "bières"; probably I didn't enunciate the /j/ sound (ll) enough so it sounded more like "bie-" than "bille-". Sadly that was the only proper conversation I had that was in all French - the others were either short exchanges of "bonjour", "merci", "au revoir", "excusez-moi", "allez-y", etc. or were quickly switched to English. I did stop one snack-bar attendant in her tracks when she attempted to switch - I ordered food and she asked "et une boisson? Drink?"; as soon as I heard the English word I immediately answered back in French "non merci" and she didn't make any more attempts to speak English after that. :P On a more minor point, I'm still not used to being polite and addressing one person as "vous"... I'm usually OK but when it comes to imperatives (in which the pronoun isn't used) I find myself reverting to the tu forms: I found myself saying things like "vas-y!" and "attend!" when "allez-y!" and "attendez!" would be more appropriate. The resort staff seem to go out of their way to hide the fact that their guests are staying in a foreign country - all the chalet staff were English, as were 95% of bar staff, and the bars put on English language music and comedy. Even the chalet TV was set up to only receive British channels by satellite - I had been looking forward to watching whatever crappy reality shows and dubbed films TF1 had to offer, but that wasn't possible. That made me a bit sad as one of the experiences I always remember from family holidays abroad was watching the country's TV; it's interesting even when you don't understand a word. And since I was with a group of English speakers, I was surrounded by English almost all of the time. An immersion experience it certainly was not. Even the chalet boy who had been in the Alps for two years admitted that his French was awful, because he simply had no need to work on it. I did however get plenty listening practice in - French radio is great! Lots of diverse discussions on all sorts of subjects. One night when I couldn't sleep I tuned into a crazy story being read, complete with sound effects. I hardly had any difficulty understanding anything on the radio. I also overheard some French people talking on the chairlifts, which I could understand most of the time but missed some words and sentences. I didn't experience anything like I described in my last post where I couldn't understand a thing. I didn't feel anywhere near confident enough to strike up a conversation with them though. I also read a book, Bonjour Tristesse, which I'd say I understood 95% of (and it must be the first book I've ever read that almost brought me to tears!). I'll probably read it again with looking up unknown words at a later point but it's not a priority. Anyway I've definitely identified a main weak point - those first, and often only, few minutes of conversation. I'm not sure how to really work on that, apart from just having a lot of conversations so I get more used to the language and confident speaking it. Also maybe it'll help, if I'm going into a shop or whatever, to prepare a bit beforehand by thinking about, and looking up if necessary, words and phrases that might come up. Particularly if I'm looking for a specific thing like a food or a medical item, since my general vocabulary is good but I don't have an active command of more specialised words. Should help me get over the initial humps. Overall though I just need to be more confident! Benny the Irish Polyglot's right about being confident and talking as much as you can. I need to speak confidently rather than hesitantly so I don't come across as a clueless foreigner, and seek out more opportunities to talk. I feel quite frustrated that my understanding of the language is so good yet I'm so bad at producing it. But on the other hand it's good to know that reaching fluency from now is mostly a case of "activating" my existing knowledge rather than actually learning. As I've said before I'm thinking of spending a season in the Alps at some point, but now I'm having second thoughts as to how useful it would be for learning French. Maybe I should look for smaller and less commercial resorts rather than the big ones that are top destinations for English speakers, or even find a town that's fairly near the resorts. Even if I just go on another one-week holiday, I'm going to try and figure out a way to make it more immersive like seeing if I can stay with French people. No idea how to go about that but if there's a will there's a way. I need to have a proper French trip at some point. Anyway going forward, it's only two and a half months until Hellfest so I've got my work cut out: sort out my conversation ability and confidence in French. I don't have Internet access in my new flat and won't for a few weeks, so unless I buy a headset and take it to work and stay late to talk, Skype's not really an option. The Wednesday meetup is only every 2 weeks which just doesn't cut it - I think I'll have to go to the hit-or-miss events like Yakety Yak and the Tuesday language exchange meetup just because they're better than nothing. Edited by garyb on 28 March 2011 at 5:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Adrean TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member France adrean83.wordpress.c Joined 5967 days ago 348 posts - 411 votes Speaks: FrenchC1 | Message 52 of 104 29 March 2011 at 10:18am | IP Logged |
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Wow what a great roundup Gary. You certainly have a good memory for things. It's really
great to pop here and read this log to see your hands on approach to learning. You talked a little about Benny and his approach. I have a little anecdote regarding a French learner. He was just at the very beginner stage as we were doing a intensive course in French, but he had this great ability to engage people with the minimal knowledge he had. He wouldn't show nerves and he made it very clear that he was making an effort to learn. He would approach other climbers at an indoor rock climbing and not worry about how good he was, whereas I had to mentally prepare myself and hesitated. He definitely had a skill to communicate as Benny often emphasises. I would also say that these exchanges were quite meaningful for the French person and my friend contrary to what some people say regarding Benny's method. Anyway best of luck! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5006 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 53 of 104 30 March 2011 at 1:44pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the feedback Adrean. Interesting anecdote. Another thing I find helpful is putting myself in the position of some of my Spanish friends, particularly those who haven't been here for long- they're never nervous or worried about talking to me in English, just enthusiastic about speaking the language. And I've certainly never been annoyed or bothered when they struggle and make mistakes. I remember I was once at a party and a Spanish girl said she was deliberately talking to us English speakers instead of her Spanish friends because she wanted to speak more English - that's the attitude to have.
Anyway an update regarding my other languages: I'm currently revising MT Russian by listening to it on the way to work etc. as I could do with being reminded of a lot of the material in it. I'm sticking to my plan of not learning any more new material but I could certainly do with revising what I've already learned. The Ukraine trip is looking like a possibility again now but who knows. All the chaos of moving flat is over now so I've got a bit more free time - I'm mostly focusing on French still but I'll attempt to fit some Italian in. There's a possibility of me spending a few days in Italy this summer. Thanks to this thread I think my bilingual text issue is solved- if you copy and paste a text into a spreadsheet program, it automatically puts each paragraph in a different row, meaning I can make parallel paragraph-aligned texts of a chapter of a book in a few seconds. Sorted. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5006 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 54 of 104 04 April 2011 at 1:35pm | IP Logged |
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Meetup last week was challenging, which is probably a good indication that I'm pushing myself. I definitely find that the more I go to the Meetup the more benefit I get from it. It's a snowball effect - the more you improve and get to know the regulars, the more you get to talk and can improve further. At this point I'd now say that the Meetup is the time when I feel most like I'm actually learning as opposed to just reading/listening and understanding.
Still working through Assimil, which is now (more than halfway through Using French) getting more literary and less conversational but it's still useful. I'm revising some of French With Ease to go over the useful day-to-day stuff again. I'm also reading more books; as I said in another thread, I'd rather spend more time speaking but reading is better than nothing and is quite enjoyable in itself. I've also watched a couple more episodes of Braquo, which is becoming a bit easier to understand but I'm still having trouble picking up everything and following the rather convoluted storyline. Lastly I'm experimenting more with the internal dialogue and talking-to-yourself methods for practising expressing my thoughts and "speaking" when people to speak to aren't available - it definitely feels similar to an actual conversation in that I often have to think about how to phrase things, so hopefully it will benefit that aspect of my conversation skills. I had a lot of free time on Saturday, and I seriously considered making a start on Italian but strangely decided that I just didn't really feel like it after all, it just didn't feel "right" and I felt more like simply doing more French. I like to think that the better I get at French, the easier Italian will be when I come to it, and the more lessons I'll have learned about language learning and what works for me. My current feelings towards Russian are also a bit strange as I still don't know if I'm going to find it useful soon or not. Yesterday I said a few basic phrases to a native speaker and he understood, so I'm happy that my pronunciation is at least passable. Essentially I'm still having the whole dilemma of focusing on French vs. starting Italian vs. learning/maintaining Russian. Edited by garyb on 04 April 2011 at 1:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5006 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 55 of 104 06 April 2011 at 4:24pm | IP Logged |
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I went to the Tuesday meetup as I said; as expected it wasn't the most productive time ever but a lot better than doing nothing or staying at home watching a film. No in-depth conversations but a fair few short ones and I need all the practice I can get really. I think I've figured out the secret of these Tuesday language-exchange meetups...
The first hour you're there is always a waste of time. With specific attention to the "you're there" part: in the past I've tried the strategy of arriving an hour late, and invariably nobody's wanted to have anything to do with me after I arrived; I guess skipping the first hour (theoretically the English-speaking hour) is just a bit too obvious :P. So now I just accept that the first hour's going to be boring, the conversation's going to be small-talk in English if anything at all, and just chill out and enjoy a drink. Then as soon as the clock hits 10pm, people become much more willing to converse. Don't ask me why it works that way, but that seems to be the way it does so I might as well stick with it. Also there's certain people who just have no interest in talking to certain other people (particularly me) either in French or at all, so there's no point in trying as they just ignore me and turn their backs on me, but after going a few times I'm realising which people are willing to talk and which aren't worth wasting time trying to talk to. Again I don't know why it's that way, seems like they don't take me seriously and they don't realise I'm actually there to improve my French as opposed to to simply sit and drink a beer, but better just go along with it and learn how to work round it. Of course the Wednesday meetups are much much more simple, friendly, inclusive, and social, provided your level of French is adequate, but as I say once every two weeks just doesn't cut it so I'm willing to put up with the Tuesday nonsense if it means getting a bit of real conversation in. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5006 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 56 of 104 08 April 2011 at 1:06pm | IP Logged |
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I went to Yakety Yak on Wednesday; not particularly useful, although I did pick up a couple of handy slang words. It didn't help that I arrived late and had to leave early due to other commitments. The more controlled nature of these meetups creates the classic group learning problem of the weakest link stopping the rest of the class from progressing: the less-skilled people are given more chance to speak, at the expense of the rest of the group who only get to say a couple of sentences each. Which is great for them but from a selfish perspective it's a bit of a waste of time and as I improve I'm preferring the unstructured meetups where the more skilled people get to hog the conversation :P.
Of course, neither is an ideal solution, so I'm thinking that one-to-one situations are the way forward. So I'm looking forward to my home internet connection being set up so I can use Skype and Conversation Exchange (I've yet to try its voice chat facility; I'm quite sceptical as to whether the combination of Flash, Linux and the utter mess that is its sound systems, and my old webcam with microphone will work in harmony). As for real life, the teacher who I was doing lessons with should be back from France sometime soon, and I'll take a look on Gumtree for exchanges. Maybe online tutoring is also worth looking into. Edited by garyb on 08 April 2011 at 1:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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