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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5177 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 249 of 336 27 March 2014 at 5:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm still excited to discover how much more I can understand from the new episodes of
Aifric that get posted. I can now understand little bits that aren't covered by the subtitles which means I'm making my way towards understanding without subtitles. I just got this from Deastore in Italy! It took a long time (over a month) but it was cheap and shipping was free! 
90 minutes of Dora in Irish as well as a few other languages! I've been experimenting with a sort of flashcard system for Irish starting with the 11 irregular verbs. I made little úrú and séimhiú cards as well as cards for the various particles. Don't laugh at my awful drawings. 
I've also been reviewing Learning Irish a bit. I found this little gem: 
I'm sure it has some other meaning but I enjoy it all the same. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5177 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 250 of 336 27 March 2014 at 8:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think there was a thread devoted to French video with subtitles somewhere. If someone
can point me to it, we can add: FranceTV Pluzz It automatically redirects you to the videos that are viewable from abroad. Down the left-hand side, you can select "sous-titrés" to have subtitles. For the video I was watching, the subtitles lagged quite a bit so this is not a good option for someone just starting out who wouldn't be able to figure out what to match up on their own. But for someone who just wants something to go back to to figure out a word or a sentence that was mumbled it should be a good option. Also, just wanted to share a link I've known about for a while but kind of forgot about. It's an online French collocation dictionary: Collocations 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5177 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 251 of 336 08 April 2014 at 5:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm a bit tardy but here's my March summary:
Month tallies: 
248 hours and 54 minutes (should have done something for 6 minutes to make it even...) Average per day: about 8 hours and almost 2 minutes. French: 133 hours, 49 minutes Passive (listening, reading): 126:38 Active (speaking, writing): 2:09 Study time (lessons, classes): 5:02 Irish: 89 hours, 39 minutes Passive (listening, reading): 28:17 Study time (course, vocab): 61:12 Active (writing): 10 minutes Spanish (!): 13 hours 35 minutes (course - Duolingo) Meta: 11 hours, 52 minutes So I'm still getting my hours in, mainly thanks to listening practically all day. But I'm afraid this doesn't cut it for improving. It helps create the immersive environment but it's actually pretty lazy to only sit back and listen and I know I often put off doing something more intensive, such as writing, just to sit and watch more Aifric. That makes this a really good time for the learning based challenge to make sure i get some tasks in I just received the Intermediate version of Gaeilge gan Stró. I'll go into more detail later about the differences but it will be more challenging to work with. The increased difficulty is mitigated somewhat by the fact that the content matter is pretty much the same as the Beginner level. There are just more "flourishes" and the dialogues are longer and more complex. The book is much more dialogue-focused so I'll have to get creative with mining them for everything they can teach me. Big progress in Irish this month: my listening comprehension grew by leaps and bounds! Another episode of Aifric that I've watched a million times came back around on TG4. I'm understanding lots! This is really the secret-find something you can watch over and over again without torturing yourself. A TV series that has lasted years may not be best choice because there's too much variety. At only 26 episodes, I get a lot of repetition watching Aifric. The hard part is finding that magic something that you can never get tired of. Here you have to be a bit like a child - like when I would beg people to read me the same story over and over again, when I could watch one Rainbow Brite movie 100 times, when I would listen to New Kids on the Block until the tapes wore out (and later, Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, Miss Saigon, and Rent). After the announcement that Duolingo would be adding Irish, I decided to give it a shot with Spanish. The gamified aspect can be quite motivating and it was easy getting through the beginning levels. But there are times now where it feels like a slog, like I'm torturing myself to finish the skill. It's good, but it's not perfect. Other weaknesses: skills are presented in isolation (there's some mixing, but not as much as other courses), it tests you on stuff before it's been presented (if i didn't already have background in Spanish i would have been frustrated), and sometimes answers marked wrong are debatable. I wouldn't use it as a sole means to learn a language but as an accompaniment it works great. This month one of my goals involves French writing. For that I need to come up with a workflow since I tend to overcomplicate the process of writing in general. So I'll pick some articles by X date, write down key words by X date, etc. So in addition to improving my writing I'm also looking into teaching myself how to not make it an arduous process. And lastly, I'll leave any readers I may have with this little play on words I ran across in an article on philospher Alain Finkielkraut regarding his controversial nomination to the Academie Française. I'll let you puzzle it out first: "Dans son dernier ouvrage à succès,L'Identité malheureuse, l'essayiste déplorait notamment la dérive scatologique de notre vocabulaire, soulignant le déferlement des termes "chier" et "merde" dans une société "postlittéraire". Ses amis éviteront ainsi l'utilisation du mot de Cambronne pour lui souhaiter bonne chance le 10 avril." 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5177 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 252 of 336 10 April 2014 at 8:32am | IP Logged | |||||
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So in the spirit of the learning challenge, I'm tackling one of my bêtes noires, the résumé (the next step being the synthèse).
When I first encountered this specific type of writing assignment in my FLE classes in Paris, I really didn't understand why we were doing it. It turns out they really like these things. And now that I've learned more about it, I see why it's a good exercise. It can be quite difficult to do well, though. What makes the résumé actually harder to do than the synthèse is the constraint of having to stick to the order established by the writer in the original text (that, and the strict word count limits). It also requires an organizational method that just doesn't jive with my regular process which is why I've had such a hard time working on them all this time. The text I'm working with, Municipales : la gauche n'a perdu que des mairies has already posed a few problems for me. One, it's fairly long so there's a lot of stuff that I just want to put in there but the word count won't let me (the longer the text, the larger percentage of the original text should be cut). Also, the author doesn't link arguments together using transitions, which you're supposed to look for in order to structure the résumé. A lot of the major transitions are expressed through headers so after reducing each section to a few lines, I'm finding that there are big gaps between subjects and arguments. I can't make up my own way of linking them together - it has to come from the text itself in the order presented. It's about 100 words too long and now I'm at the stage where I'm just shaving off random words here and there and I still need to somehow establish links between ideas. I've already put about 4 hours into it - I'm hoping with practice the process will become much quicker. Hopefully in the end the work will show and my tutor will be impressed. Here's a peak at the process: identifying main ideas of each paragraph, keywords, phrases, and information that should be included, and figuring out the major sections that represent the major ideas of the article as a whole. From there I typed it into outline form and started building my résumé from there. 
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| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5177 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 253 of 336 10 April 2014 at 5:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
An update regarding this: Finkielkraut was elected to the Académie Française today. Here are the problems with the French language that he plans to tackle:
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| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5177 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 254 of 336 04 May 2014 at 9:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It's been a little while so I'll give a quick update before I do my major one with charts and graphs.
I didn't hit my targets for the Learning Challenge. One reason - it's really easy to choose more passive learning and exposure activities over this kind of active study. Which is why I'll be looking to track my "assignments" completed as well as my time spent. Another reason - work has been a source of major drama so I've been very focused on that for the past few weeks. Despite that I'm still plugging along. I had hoped the Learning Challenge would get me into a better groove for writing regularly but I didn't keep it up. I'll be looking to do that. While HTLAL was down I got more into the Google+ HTLAL Learning Den. It could really be a great resource if it takes off. I've been posting content to keep it interesting. I encourage everyone to try it out! I've been focusing a bit on my pronunciation while reading aloud in French. It may be helping with my accent - the leader of the history seminar I went to kept requesting me to read aloud so that could mean that my reading aloud voice has gotten better. Speaking of the seminar, for the one on the war in Algeria we read an excerpt from L'amour, la fantasia by Assia Djebar. It's books like these that make you appreciate being able to read materials in their native languages. I have never encountered a style like hers in English language literature (the closest perhaps being Nabokov). While there are a lot of shared literary movements between cultures, each culture really has their own unique literature. I've been attending another Irish study group that has more advanced, even native (or semi-native) speakers). I'm still grunting in Irish so I'm mostly listening. But it's surprising to me when I can actually follow what people are saying. I can respond using some words not chained together in a grammatical way so I'm working on that. We've been working on a story and we start by reading aloud the week's excerpt. I typical struggle with this but I did get one selection that had a high-frequency of words/chunks that I was already familiar with through GGGS and the marked improvement in my pronunciation was noticeable (the "teacher" of the group praised me). So it's encouraging to know that as I keep working at it my spoken fluency/pronunciation will get better. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5177 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 255 of 336 05 May 2014 at 5:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I forgot to mention that I got a bunch of books from the Alliance Française library. For
anyone doing the SC who lives near an AF, this is a great resource. For me, it means having "free" access to tons of nonfiction. I've started reading La Méditerrannée by Fernand Braudel. I looked for some of the BDs emk suggested but I didn't find Persepolis and I only found the 2nd volume of Le chat du rabbin. I noticed a whole other stack of BDs on my way out so I'll look again next time. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5177 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 256 of 336 08 May 2014 at 6:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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An episode of Aifric that I've watched dozens of times already was re-posted. Like my
other commonly-watched episodes, my listening comprehension level has made a lot of strides thanks to the repeated exposure. This time, I forced myself to leave the safety net of the English subtitles (it was hard - I was still quite "scared" that I wouldn't understand anything) and the results were great! My suspicions were right - the English subtitles have started to hold me back. There was of course quite a bit that I missed but there was a lot that I was able to understand that I was missing before while reading. This has been the biggest lesson I've learned about languages - it's never too early to start working on listening comprehension. As hard as Irish can be, I won't have the listening comprehension lag I had learning French in high school thanks to all the listening exposure I'm getting (though I say that now, let's see if I still think that whenever end up visiting the Gaelteacht). In other news, the week long Irish immersion program was cancelled. I'm pretty disappointed but now I'm seriously considering using my saved up PTO and money to go to Guatemala for a couple weeks. I looked and October seems to be a good time for airfare. I'll be deciding on that soon (if anyone has any input to offer that would be welcome). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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