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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5314 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 73 of 1317 01 May 2012 at 11:31pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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After 3 more real lessons with my tutor, it's time to update my log.
Here's what we've done so far: Wed: Oral presentation and conversation. My tutor gave me a paragraph about TV violence and its effects on children. I had 30 minutes to prepare, after which I delivered a short and mostly spontaneous oral presentation. After this, she asked me questions and pushed me to defend my ideas. The total time was about 14 minutes. This actually went pretty well, because I was able to draw heavily on my parenting vocabulary. The trick, as always, is to illustrate the topic in question with examples from more familiar topics. Still, this was really hard, and I had no idea how to do until the presentation started. Still, needs must, and all that. My tutor was really good at putting me at ease and drawing out my answers. Fri: Written argument. I wrote a 250-word letter (on behalf of fictious fellow employees) arguing in favor of working from home. I make a fair number of "non- systematic" errors, where I flubbed a point of conjugation that I know perfectly well. Proofreading is hard in a second language, at least at my level. At least the DELF B2 gives only a single point for spelling! Mon: Reading comprehension, again. A fairly literary discussion of tropical deforestation, taken from the official sample B2 exam. Unfortunately, there's a fairly serious error with paragraph numbers in the questions, so I lost several points and a good chunk of my self-imposed 30-minute limit floundering. So I wrote a longish email to my tutor in French explaining the problem with the exam, and why the provided answer key was wrong. We followed this up with more oral work: I explained how land trust property easements work in the US, and suggested several strategies for fighting tropical deforestation using organizations like Equal Exchange. She accused me of evading her questions (a fair cop, guv), and asked me what could be done within the actual countries in question. So I spent several minutes arguing that local environmental regulation is a lost cause when there's a war between the government and les trafiquants de drogue and that on doit utilisier le pouvoir d'argent de dehors du pays. I made my point, but ouch, that hurt. ... Did I mention that this stuff is a real stretch for me? I've been speaking French for about 20 hours per week for ~2.5 months. If I had to take the DELF B2 test next week, I could probably score 40–60% under near-ideal circumstances, based on my actual scores on the sample exam. And I'm really good at standardized tests, so I'm scoring slightly above my real level. My verdict: - DELF B2 is hard, and it has a heavy bias towards academic tasks. - Still, DELF B2 is probably easier than understanding 50% of the dialog in a typical French movie. - My tutor is very, very good. I'm actually enjoying this process, but ouch. It's hard stuff. ... I've also worked through the first 7 lessons of Assimil Business French in the car. This is an interesting course: It has short, conversational dialogues between two actors, followed by a clearly delivered question & answer session. It's the difference between a (relatively clear) real-life conversation and a radio documentary. I get about 50% the first time through, and I can push it up to 80+% after 5 or 6 additional listens. I've got the book upstairs, and I need to find it and look up some of the harder dialog. I really like the combination of conversational and formal audio. My abilities continue to oscillate from day to day. And I'm continually struck by two things: (1) I'm actually pretty good at French, and (2) I'm really not that good at all. It's all a matter of what standard I judge by! (And as always, French is welcome in this log.) Edited by emk on 01 May 2012 at 11:34pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4470 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 74 of 1317 01 May 2012 at 11:38pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Sounds like yet another point for my theory that the DELF is tougher than the Goethe Institut's tests.
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| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5314 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 75 of 1317 02 May 2012 at 5:46pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I just finished another DELF B2 oral presentation. This time, I ended up sacrificing
fluidity of speech and accent in favor of a much more complicated argument. At this point, I can hold a social conversation with a French speaker. My accent and intonation are adequate, and I can maintain the flow of conversation without lots of awkward pauses and stuttering. If I'm warmed up but not exhausted, it's not even that difficult any more. DELF B2 presentations are much harder, though, because (1) I need to speak at much greater length, which means that I can't rehearse what I'm going to say or change the subject, and (2) I'm trying to speak on a semi-intellectual topic. So I'm under much greater linguistic stress, and that has all kinds of negative effects on other stuff. I've tried several different strategies, with varying degrees of success. Today I spent my 30 minutes of prep time making an outline. Here was the topic:
This is a fairly horrible prompt, because Michel Fize makes a bare assertion without evidence, and nobody in my family is a teenager, so I've never really talked about these subjects. And here's the outline I slapped together in half an hour, minus some personal examples taken from my boring and non-rebellious adolescence. Please excuse the atrocious spelling; these are personal notes under time pressure:
I'm required to introduce the discussion, state a position, defend it with examples, and transition gracefully between the sections. My basic strategy is, of course, the traditional trick of intermediate students who are getting massacred in a foreign language: Change the topic without getting caught. I can speak about all the typical B1 subjects: My daily life, my professional activities, my personal interests, and so on, with a level of fluency that's arguably acceptable for DELF B2, at least on a good day. So the first trick is to establish a plausible and defensible connection between the topic at hand, and something I can actually discuss. The second trick is simplify my language ruthlessly. To do this, I borrow an idea from Chesterton:
Basically, I'm forced to go with choice (2), because I don't have the vocab for choice (1). For another great example of what I mean, check out C.S. Lewis's fictitious translation from formal English to "Old Solar:"
So that's me: Trying to dodge the subject unobtrusively, and expressing abstract opinions in very simple language, with lots of circumlocutions. This can be fairly frustrating and depressing, but on the other hand, hey, I actually just spent 20 minutes explaining, among other things, why anthropological evidence must be treated with care when discussing adolescent rebellion. In French. So that's some consolation for my frustration. Next time, I'm going to prepare the notes in advance, and then try to avoid looking at them during the actual presentation. Maybe that will boost my fluidity a bit. And maybe I should cough up some $ for Benny's book on "language hacking"—he's taken enough of these exams at the B2, C1 and C2 levels, and he might have a couple of good ideas. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5314 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 76 of 1317 03 May 2012 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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After getting destroyed on my practice DELF B2 oral presentation yesterday, I quickly
explained it to my wife this evening, and I did just fine, with much smoother delivery. Go figure. ... Today's exercise from VDM:
Personally, I don't blame the rabbit one bit. As they say on VDM, "Tu l'as bien merité." à fond: Thoroughly. de bon matin: Bright and early in the morning. une coupelle: A little cup. une gamelle: (for humans) A lunchbox. (for animals) A food bowl. balancer: To swing, to rock. This actually has a whole list of idiomatic meanings, such as to hurl an insult. se ruer: To throw oneself (onto or into something). As usual, there's a lot of good vocabulary here. And it's not stuff that you can easily pick up from books. ... And now some Tin Tin, from L'Oreille Cassée. Two villans, one of them a knife- thrower with a Spanish accent, have decided that Tin Tin has followed them onto a passenger ship in disguise. The knife thrower always hits about 9" to the right of his target, so his companion has told him to aim left. They're chasing an innocent passenger, thinking that he must be Tin Tin in disguise. Watch out for the Spanish accent—you can see it in the spelling.
tout compte fait: All in all, taking everything into account (used in speech). vieillard: Old man, though this is obvious from context and the root "vieille." Y'ai, y'aurais, youré:: All these should theoretically start with "j". Spanish lacks the [ʒ] sound, so he's replacing it with [j], which the French write as "y". plous, youré: The "ou" in these words should be "u", which is pronounced [y]. But again, there's no such sound in Spanish, so here's using the back vowel [ u], just like I often do. And the French spell this "ou". Hence, "juré" becomes "youŕe." The Spanish villain also says "ouné" [une] instead of "une" [yne], and "yé" [ye] instead of "je" [ʒə]. The former is actually a bit surprising (does he really need to add a gratuitous trailing vowel, and if so, why [e]?), and the latter is a simple mapping of [ə] to [e], because Spanish lacks the unstressed vowel. I pretty much worked out all of this on the fly, and confirmed the IPA symbols and Spanish phonology afterwards. That cheered me up a bit after yesterday. ... A few months ago, I could understand Tin Tin, but it was still a bit "blurry." I was missing a lot of vocabulary, relying on context, and glossing over some weird verb forms. This are much sharper now. I find myself saying things like, "Oh, so you use the subjunctive in that expression, that's good to know," and, "Yup, that's a good spot to use the imperfect." I'm still missing some vocabulary, but it's increasingly specialized stuff. Since I'm picking up on a lot more fine details, I probably need to go on another reading binge. But it's good to know that all this work is really paying off. Whether or not I can squeak by the B2 exam in 40ish days, I can already forsee the day when I can read casually in French. Edited by emk on 03 May 2012 at 5:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5314 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 77 of 1317 06 May 2012 at 10:13pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Friday went really well. I had two long discussions, one with my tutor and one with a
language exchange partner, and I managed to explain some fairly complicated ideas without completely falling over my tongue. Just an example, I'd read a blog post about the French election titled "The Economist fails the Turing Test again." I managed to unpack all the cultural references in this headline and explain them to a non-technical French speaker, and did all this while maintaining reasonably fluid speech and a tolerable intonation. This involved explaining the editorial stance of the Economist, Alan Turing's role in WW2, how the Turing Test worked, and why "fails the Turing Test again" was a particularly nasty and appropriate insult. At the very least, that's got to be near a B2-level conversation. Let's pull up the very conservative assessment grid from the Swiss European Language Portfolio:
So yeah, I think I'm getting there, at least as long as nobody asks me to give a 10 minute presentation on the problems of teenagers. I can't do this all the time—I need to be warmed up, but not yet exhausted, and I have to care about the subject. But I'm confident I can do it a semi-regular basis. ... On the reading front, I'm doing some Tin Tin, some of the French version of Linux From Scratch (there are at least 3 French words for "command-line option", the ugliest of which is un drapeau), a dollop of art history, and anything else which strikes my fancy. Like khatzumoto at AJATT, I rarely bother to finish anything. My reading speed is way down today, because I'm doing Antimoon's "stop and think" technique, and digging out all the interesting bits. I'm also trying to be very conscious of gender (especially when marked by 'du', 'de la' or an adjective) and about unusual verb tenses. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5314 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 78 of 1317 07 May 2012 at 7:43pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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J'aimais bien écrire ce journal, parce que je pense qu'il n'y a pas assez d'anecdotes
personnelles des gens qui travaillent entre les niveaux B1 et C1. Tout le monde, au moins ici, connait comment on peut achever le niveau B1 — et Assimil n'est pas très cher. Mais après ça, tout est flou. Oui, on doit lire et parler, cela est clair. Mais c'est vraiment difficile d’envisager le processus réel, du moins si c'est la première fois qu'on a appris une langue étrangère. C'est pourquoi j'écrivais tant d'entrée en anglais dans ce journal. Je veux me souvenir le chemin. Mais le temps est venu de faire plus. Ce week-end, il faut que j'aie utilisé beaucoup d'anglais. Ce matin, j'avais des problèmes de compréhension et production. Je pense que je dois désormais éviter d'utiliser l'anglais quand c'est possible. Donc, il me faut essayer de penser en français à plein temps, si je peux le faire. Il sera difficile, parce que je suis encore stupide en français. Du moins j'ai un sens de l'humour en français, et je peux exprimer les idées un peu difficiles. Néanmoins, je perdrai quelque chose pendant un temps. Si vous voulez me corriger, je l'aimerais bien. Vous pouvez le faire ici, ou sur lang-8.com. ... An English translation:
Yes, this means that there won't be much English here for a while. I apologize to all the non-Francophones who've been reading along, but I really want that B2, and I'm tired of rebooting my French all the time. :-) But if you want to write something in English here, that's totally OK. And if folks are interested, maybe I can translate some entries later. Wish me luck! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4470 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 79 of 1317 07 May 2012 at 8:12pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Doh! Just when I was about through reading your entry, I saw that you had provided a translation. Oh well, it was good practice. Good luck!
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| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5314 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 80 of 1317 07 May 2012 at 9:00pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Merci ! Je suis heureux que tu aies pu me comprendre. C'est mon dernière anglais ici pour le moment. Bien sûr que je fasse beaucoup de fautes en français. Il faut bien commencer quelque part. Mais si je peux éviter de « redémarrer » mon français tout le temps ( bonjour les métaphores informatiques ), ce sera plus facile d'achever un B2 fort avant de l'examen. Edited by emk on 11 May 2012 at 2:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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