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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5537 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 841 of 1317 22 December 2013 at 6:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
How I'm spending my Sunday afternoon:
Coursera is actually a very nice platform for studying advanced subjects in a second language. I obviously don't get speaking practice, but I do get a rewind button and optional subtitles. And it's a nice way to remind my brain that it's not allowed to devote 100% of my mental "bandwidth" to simple decoding, but that it needs to reserve plenty of bandwidth for actually understanding the math. I can generally do without the subs for 2 of 3 lecturers at this point, provided I'm in a quiet room. The pause button, however, is still essential, because I like to stop and read the slide, and then listen to the explanation. But I'd like to do that in English, too. The nice thing about being a high-intermediate / low-advanced student of a Romance language it's easy to get up to speed on new subjects. Even after a month, I find that listening to these lectures is getting a lot easier. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4670 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 842 of 1317 22 December 2013 at 8:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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That's awesome.
I need to learn something in depth using French. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5537 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 843 of 1317 23 December 2013 at 9:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Go for it! It's a nice challenge. And then you can have all the fun of knowing the French words for stuff that you can't explain in English. :-) French OK, time to shake things up. I've done a nice big stack of SRS cards over the last few months, learning between 500 and 750 words of new vocabulary, and I've gotten good results with my half-word cloze cards. But it's getting a little monotonous, so it's time for a French SRS "vacation", where I only rep existing cards for a while. My new focuses will be: - My statistics course. This is not a particularly easy course, and I'm about half a week behind at the 5 week mark. Time to buckle down. I am, however, enjoying this tremendously. - A new speaking project, inspired by Khatzumoto: Beating my average. Rather than constantly trying to recreate what I can do when in full immersion, I'm simply going to aim to do better. And maybe it's time to sacrifice a little correctness for fluency; I've been working on correctness for a long time. - Anything else which amuses me. Egyptian Now that I've dusted off my skills and resumed my Assimil course, I'm remember just how much I love this language with its quirky verbs, adverbial sentences, and strange clitic pronouns. Plus, hey, pretty pictures and ancient royal propaganda! My tools are a lot sharper this time: Using image MCDs, I can make cards much more quickly than I could before. And MCDs allow me to blow off the harder, rarer vocabulary while going much deeper on the stuff I care about. I'll be averaging a single Assimil lesson per week, give or take, until the stats course is done. This is basically just a hair more than nothing, but as the saying goes, Trois fois rien, c'est déjà quelque chose. Lesson 31 and 32 have some nice new stuff, but lesson 33 goes off a weird tangent: Some "Song of Solomon"-style love poetry that's mostly descriptive vocabulary. Fun to read, but it's so not going into Anki at this stage. Anyway, that's the plan for now: statistics, speaking and a tiny touch of Egyptian. Edited by emk on 23 December 2013 at 9:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5537 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 844 of 1317 27 December 2013 at 4:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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rapp's log is awesome
For those of you who have any interest whatsoever in AJATT or Neutrino, I highly recommend Rapp’s Neutrino Log. In fact, everybody should go read it. :-) It's full of great observations like:
A mathematical metaphor for listening comprehension For those who like the occasional mathematical metaphor, I posted the following in JC_Identity's log:
Mathematics and French My stats course got hard this week, thanks to a rather technical lecture on fonctions génératrices. This rests on a clever analogy between the center of balance of an object and the expected value of a random variable, and it allows me to replace pages of tedious, simple calculations with a few lines of tricky calculus. Nice! One thing that's nice about listening to these lectures in French is that it says, "Hey, brain. You have no time to figure out the French. You need to worry about the math. So it's time to get your French comprehension tucked away into a tiny corner somewhere and free up some mental bandwidth for important stuff." I also find that listening to these lectures and doing the homework forces my brain into French mode with a vengeance. And after 5 weeks, it's actually easier to deal with this material in French than to translate everything back to English to explain it to English-speakers. On the other hand, the work load is getting brutal, and I have other responsibilities. But my new rule is simple: I can't quit long-term activities this week, but may only decide to quit them a week in advance. So I'll hang on for now and hope this last lecture was just a freak challenge, and not a sign of things to come. Speaking French I had a nice talk in French the other night with a woman who had once lived in Paris for 3 years with a French boyfriend. She was definitely still "fluent," but I kept having to consciously slow down, hold back and simplify my French to avoid losing her. It's things like that that really drive home that (a) beginner/intermediate Meetups are now pretty much useless for me as speaking practice, and (b) despite my griping, my spoken French really isn't that bad—at least on good days. Every time I get frustrated speaking, I remind myself, "My goal is not to have an excellent day. My goal is to have a better-than-average day." And I've been doing that a lot lately, to my great pleasure. Egyptian What a fun language! I have my MCD cards and my Assimil lessons, and I'm strolling slowly through the book. Here's a half-word cloze card for sKbb "refresh":  
These are all made using the Anki image occlusion addon, which is a bit weird and clunky, but still massively useful. I find that these cards are much easier than my old Egyptian sentence cards, but that I actually get more out of them. So I'm really becoming a big fan of MCDs. And many thanks to Khatzumoto for pushing this idea aggressively enough that I eventually decided to try it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5396 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 845 of 1317 27 December 2013 at 6:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm really looking forward to the World Cup this year even though I don't follow soccer/football at all. Why? Because I can seek out bars where they're showing France's matches and find French expats and visitors here in their "natural" habitat rather than the few token ones that show up for language exchange nights. Hopefully France advances far enough in order to give me a few chances. I'm wondering if I could do this for the Olympics as well... 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5537 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 846 of 1317 30 December 2013 at 12:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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sctroyenne: That's an excellent idea!
Aléatoire : une Introduction aux Probabilités I got a 7 of 7 on this week's quiz! The course, however, is getting downright brutal: - The lectures increasingly consist of very theoretical proofs. Sometimes we get 20 minutes of hairy math, followed by 5 minutes of context. This brings back bad memories of my undergraduate math classes. - The homework problems often require significant insights. It's not just a matter of regurgitating something from the lectures. Instead, I often have to spend 30 minutes or an hour just to find a path towards the solution. This reminds me of the two or three most difficult classes in my CS degree, classes where the average student was putting in 20-plus hours per week and handing in 12 pages of proofs. All told, doing this class justice would require at least 20 "high quality" hours per week, which I just don't have. On the other hand, the quizzes are actually pretty straightforward, and they're far easier than either the lectures or the homework. So I've decided to shift to damage-control mode: - Smile and nod whenever the lectures get technical. - Do the homework in half-baked fashion, since we never hand it in. When I get stuck, give up after 20 or 30 minutes and watch that part of the solution video. - Skip some of the nastier parts of the homework questions. So far, so good: I did get 7 out of 7 on the quiz. But I can't afford to invest 20 high quality hours per week into this course. One thing that's disconcerting for Americans dealing with the French educational system: Passing grades in the US are typically 70%. Anything below 85% is generally a poor performance, and truly diligent students should be able to score in the mid-90s. In France, however, a passing grade is often 50%. This means that the teachers can put some very hard questions on the exams. For example, good luck trying to score 95/100 on the DELF B2. You'd have to be telepathic. But I can see the same thing in my probability course: The range between "passing" and "actually understood everything in the lectures and the homework" is much wider than I'm used to in the US. Egyptian I've finished Assimil lessons 32 and 33. I hope to get some time today or tomorrow to make MCDs of lessons 34 and 35, which will hold me for another week or two. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5561 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 847 of 1317 30 December 2013 at 9:07am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I think this is a great way to fill in some of that academic French vocabulary, as well as dab oil on any rusty maths skills as a happy by-product (or should my priorities be the other way round ;) )! I've written a serious note to my future self to follow suit and try out some courses once I reach a good enough level in French.
Your experience with the French grading system is interesting. I'm currently experiencing it the other way round in the US. The minimum pass mark for many universities in the UK is 40%, whilst achieving 70% is pretty impressive (A+ and publishable) and graduating with this is known as a First Class degree. I recall one crotchety old professor even refusing to give anything beyond 70% (which he contended he only ever did once in his entire career), and most top international companies advertise for graduates with an upper second class degree (60-69%), which is recognised as a high achievement. So imagine my shock (now the shoe's on the other foot) when I'm told to hand out grades in the mid-high 90 percent range for diligent students. Every time I do, my ears grow red from the undoubted malicious whispers of the ghosts of Wittgenstein and Newton berating me from beyond... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4538 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 848 of 1317 30 December 2013 at 12:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
When I was studying psychology in Australia all marks were standardized to a Gaussian distribution. I can't remember the mean/SD but it was something like mean=65 and SD=12 or something like that. I have to say it made marking much easier. You could essentially rank students and then very simply convert the rankings into the required distribution. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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