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Gary’s TAC 2012 - The Romantics | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5009 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 161 of 167 04 December 2012 at 11:37am | IP Logged | ||
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Italian Super Challenge
Films: 36 done, 64 to go. Conversation hours: 51 done, 49 to go. Just a quick update to mark getting over halfway through the speaking hours. I've also changed the name from "speaking hours" to "conversation hours" as it's more representative - I don't spend all the time actually speaking, and I haven't been counting non-conversational speaking practice like self-talk, not that I've been doing a whole lot of that anyway. Not much to say that I haven't said already - I've seen big improvements in these fifty hours, in terms of both ability and feeling comfortable speaking the language, and after another fifty I should hopefully be even more comfortable and have eliminated most of the stupid mistakes I tend to make with verbs and the like. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5009 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 162 of 167 06 December 2012 at 12:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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French seems to be going well too. I went to the meetup last night and it was a small and friendly group, although with no French people. The weather here must be getting too cold for them. I spoke a reasonable amount and I felt like I was mostly fluent most of the time, although there were a few times when it took a couple of seconds to find a word, and as always there was the odd basic mistake or moment of getting tongue-tied, although these seem to be becoming less and less frequent. All these sentences from Anki are really starting to make their way into my active repertoire - that SRS stuff works! And I still feel that my pronunciation's improving noticeably although it's still quite... "uneven" is the best word I can think of, especially in terms of rhythm and intonation. Overall great stuff, although I think the "speaking better with non-natives than with natives" phenomenon was in effect so I'll wait until I have a few conversations with French people before I say too much about my level increasing.
I've also found it quite interesting, whenever someone else makes an obvious mistake or says something that doesn't quite sound right, to think for a second about what a correct or better way to express what they were trying to say would be. Obviously not an ideal learning method because my knowledge isn't perfect either and I might not be aware of every mistake, but I still think it's useful. Just trying to get the most out of an imperfect situation. I watched a bit of Buffy. It is indeed good stuff. I've only gotten ten minutes into the first episode and there's already been quite a few great expressions. This is the third time in a row now that I've had a big burst of progress right at the end of the year. I'm not sure exactly why that's the case, but I think it's a big part of why my start-of-year goals and estimates are always so ridiculously optimistic: I base them on "if I keep going at this current rate". Edited by garyb on 06 December 2012 at 12:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5009 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 163 of 167 10 December 2012 at 12:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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I spent a lot of the weekend speaking Italian...
Italian Super Challenge Films: 37 done, 63 to go. Conversation hours: 58 done, 42 to go. I won't lie; it was difficult. This intermediate/B1 level is pretty cool yet pretty frustrating at the same time - there's so much that I can say, but so much that I just can't, not even in a roundabout way. After a couple of hours I begin to get mentally tired out, and after that point it's hard to focus enough to understand everything and even the basic stuff starts to get really difficult. But I've already been there and done that, and I know that I just need to keep up the work and I'll get there slowly but surely; the mental fatigue thing definitely goes away when you get more advanced. And recently I've had no shortage of conversation opportunities so that's perhaps speeding things up a bit! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5009 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 164 of 167 11 December 2012 at 11:18am | IP Logged | ||
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I had an interesting night at the Café; there's lots I could write about but I've got a busy day today so I'll spare you the details. I did get to practise some French and Italian, and I even got out a few sentences of Spanish... I may never have studied it, but put a cute Spanish girl who knows little English in front of me and I'll manage something!
One thing that did amuse me... There was another Spanish girl there, who had spent time in France and spoke French with a near-perfect accent. For a while I've been quite convinced that the key factor in being taken seriously by French people is a good accent, and that's been part of my motivation for doing so much work on pronunciation. But there were two French girls there, and whenever the aforementioned Spanish girl spoke French, the two French ones would start laughing and saying things like "wow, your accent's soooo good, it's amazing!!!", in English of course. You just can't win. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5009 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 165 of 167 19 December 2012 at 1:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm now off work, but I've still not had a whole lot of time. I'm still catching up on sleep, there's plenty social life going on, and my time still seems to be slipping away unnoticed. I have spoken lots of Italian though!
Italian Super Challenge Films: 38 done, 62 to go. Conversation hours: 71 done, 29 to go. I've seen a couple of French films - Un Prophète and Le Prénom. The first is set in a prison and so is as difficult as you'd expect; the second is set in a middle-class dining room and so is as easy as you'd expect. I've also watched a bit more Buffy. Another very interesting Café this week. Recently it seems that there have been two French tables - there's the "official French table" and the unofficial "cool kids' French table". I've been trying to get into the latter, where the level is higher, the people are my age, the conversation is more interesting to me, and there's some Italian and Spanish as well as the obvious French and English. At the start of my log I wrote about how improving my social skills was a big goal, and one very much related to my language goals, and this is still the case... I still very much got the feeling that the people there were simply tolerating me rather than actually enjoying my company, but even if my social skills haven't improved a lot (although I think they have; it's just that there's still a long way to go), I definitely have a much thicker skin than I did a year ago and I don't get as upset about these things. Also there is some truth to the old "some people are just dicks" saying, as much as people often use it to excuse their own or their friends' shortcomings - I don't think the fact that one of the French girls refused to take anything I said seriously was really any fault of my own ;). On the plus side though, in terms of languages I was doing pretty well, and was effortlessly joining in conversations in three different languages. Getting to sleep after that evening was difficult: after all the linguistic stimulation and social difficulty, my brain just didn't want to switch off. I think it's about time to do my end-of-year summary post and move onto TAC 2013, at least once I figure out what the hell's going on with the Romance teams. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5009 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 166 of 167 19 December 2012 at 2:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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TAC 2012 Evaluation
French My main goal was to improve my speaking and pronunciation, go from B2 to C1, and be “fluent with good pronunciation by June”. Looking back, that was ridiculously over-ambitious - I had thought that I was “almost fluent”, but wasn’t aware of the sheer size of the gap between that and “fluent”. It’s now December and I’m still far that goal. I’ve most certainly made a lot of progress towards it, but like I say I underestimated just how much progress was actually required. Overall, my progress was a bit slow for most of the year but it really picked up again in the last few months, which I mostly put down to my “rediscovery” of active study. At first I had thought “I’m advanced now, I don’t need to study, I just need lots of exposure and practice”, but I came to realise that that was holding me back and so I put studying back into my routine: mostly based on watching/reading native media attentively and putting sentences into Anki as cloze-deletion cards. Finding enough opportunities to practice conversation, particularly with native speakers, was and still is a big obstacle for me. However, I think I mentally placed too much importance on conversation practice. I still think it’s hugely important, but it’s not the be-all-and-end-all of language learning, and that way of thinking was causing me to get extremely frustrated at the difficulty of finding conversation opportunities and to blame that lack for my lack of progress. I’ve since come to realise that there are other ways to improve, even when it comes to conversational ability. I also didn’t improve my pronunciation and accent as much as I had hoped. I don’t think this was really my fault though, since I certainly tried, and while a lot of my efforts were misguided and inefficient (such as shadowing), I didn’t know any better at the time. However, I discovered an excellent instructional DVD on French pronunciation near the end of the year, and mostly thanks to that I’ve finally been making some noticeable improvements. Following the DVD, I’m trying to do some focused pronunciation improvement work. On the plus side, I had a few good French experiences, like spending ten days in France in the summer and having a few good conversations, and making friends with a French guy who was spending two months in my city and speaking a lot of French with him. And I think my effort, consistency, and motivation were good. I worked my ass off, especially on things like pronunciation and trying to find people to converse with, and when they didn’t go well, that just motivated me to keep up the work, do even more, and try to find more options and improve my methods. I also learnt to deal with the ups and downs. They seem to be particularly bad at the high-intermediate/low-advanced stage, but now they bother me a lot less than they used to, and I’ve realised that getting upset about a “down” only makes it worse. My listening comprehension was already quite good to start with, but it’s definitely more solid now and I find difficult material like Bref far easier to understand than I did a year ago. Italian My goal was to go from a bit of basic knowledge (some simple verb forms, vocabulary, and sentences, probably sub-A1, but decent passive understanding from similarities to French and quite a bit of exposure from hearing Italian friends conversing) to solid conversational level (B2). I don’t think my current level is quite up to B2 standard, as I still often have difficulty when conversations leave familiar territory, and I slightly underestimated how quickly I’d pick up the language, but I’m nonetheless still very happy with my results. Basic conversations are quite easy, I’m confident that I could get around in Italy with few problems, and my accent is far from perfect but very understandable. I picked up the basic structure and grammar very quickly, thanks to Michel Thomas and the similarities to French, although the verbs are complicated and I still get them wrong sometimes. After the initial burst of progress, I went through the “beginner frustration” stage where I could say quite a few simple things but felt overwhelmed about how many words and expressions I still had to learn to get to the point of being able to actually express myself; however I just kept diligently working through my daily Assimil lessons and before I knew it I reached around B1 and was chatting away with Italians. After that point, around the middle of the year, I went through a similar stage of frustration to what I described with French of struggling to find people to talk to and blaming that for not progressing and being stuck in the “intermediate plateau”. At the start I had assumed that finding opportunities to speak Italian would be easy because I knew some Italian people, but it turned out that things don’t quite work that way. At one point I was even considering giving up because of this, but between the good progress I had already made and my love for the language, I kept it up. Eventually I found a couple of reliable conversation partners, and applied the lesson from French that conversation isn’t everything. As more and more Italians come to my city and my ability improves, finding opportunities to talk to them is getting easier. Overall I think I mostly “did it right” in Italian and there’s really not much I’d change about what I did. Starting off by learning pronunciation was a good idea - obviously I didn’t get it perfect from the start and it still isn’t, but I think I avoided any serious bad habits. The combination of Michel Thomas then Assimil with Luca’s method was just the ticket to reach intermediate level, although if I were to go back, I’d definitely skip the Pimsleur beyond level 1, and I was right to give it up after level 2. I don’t think I started speaking too early or too late, although of course more speaking wouldn’t have hurt. I also think that de-prioritising Assimil after getting halfway through Perfectionnement Italien was the right thing to do, as by that point it was getting too specialised and there were much more useful ways to spend my time. I do however think that I started Italian a bit too early and I perhaps should have spent another six months or so focusing on French. This again comes down to me underestimating the amount of work I still had to do on French. But no regrets - a decent conversational level in Italian at the expense of being a bit less fluent in French by now isn’t a bad trade off! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5197 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 167 of 167 19 December 2012 at 2:08pm | IP Logged | ||
Come to Team PAX. I reserved you a place if you want it. :) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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