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TAC ’15 French Spanish Celtic Adv Study

 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log Post Reply
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sctroyenne
Diglot
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United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
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739 posts - 1312 votes 
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Spanish, Irish

 
 Message 73 of 336
23 September 2012 at 9:44pm | IP Logged 
I've been catching up with Por ella soy Eva through On Demand and I'm quite
enjoying the earlier episodes. They deal a lot with gender issues, especially (though
not exclusively) through Eva/Juan Carlos, a man who sees what it's really like to be a
woman, especially one who isn't young and attractive. The added plus is that through On
Demand the closed captioning is in sync, whereas it gets out of sync when it airs at
its regular time which makes it almost useless. Airing at the same time on another
channel is another telenovela with the same actor, Los Existosos Perez, which I
have found is easier to understand. But unfortunately it's not on On Demand so I would
need to find some other way to catch up with it.

I have decided that while watching TV and reading Harry Potter are very nice, I need to
make a stronger effort to make my Spanish more active. I've gotten into a more set
schedule at work and just got through an 8-9 day run so I ought to be able to. I don't
have any specific goal in mind for my Spanish but it'd be nice to get up to some kind
of conversational level so that it could be of some use at work. I plan on actively
learning vocab and phrases (concentrating on hospitality industry I suppose), being
more consistent with Assimil (I keep saying that so time to do it) and practicing the
main verbs. I'll also try to write on a regular basis. To that end I've written a bit
on Lang-8. My first Spanish entry was to be expected: quite a bit of red back though
sometimes it was just for little things ("de" vs. "del"). My latest one is suspiciously
too good - just a couple of mistakes that were simply word choice though it may not
have been corrected all the way (which I suspect is the case). You can check out my
journal here: http://lang-
8.com/121496/journals


I was able to work through a fairly serious guest service issue at work thanks to my
French which made my coworkers and managers happy. And though I wasn't able to read as
much because it was busy, I did get manage some:

rétropédaler: to backpeddle
l'alternance: (politique) change in power
tant/aussi sur le fond que sur la forme: in form/content as well as substace
un Grenelle: a political conference (the sort that ends with an agreement or
treaty). The origin of this expression is explained
here.
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sillygoose1
Tetraglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4426 days ago

566 posts - 814 votes 
Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French
Studies: German, Latin

 
 Message 74 of 336
23 September 2012 at 11:00pm | IP Logged 
Good luck with Spanish!

Also, thanks for putting those little phrases/vocab words on your log the last two posts. I never heard of "sur le qui vive" but when I read your log, I saw it used in a chatroom a few hours later.

Are you using the Assimil with the French base or English?
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sctroyenne
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Senior Member
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5181 days ago

739 posts - 1312 votes 
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Spanish, Irish

 
 Message 75 of 336
23 September 2012 at 11:28pm | IP Logged 
Thanks! Good to know people appreciate it! I find that's the way it works with vocab -
you learn it once and then you suddenly encounter it everywhere. I regret not following
the news more before because I always get great vocab from it.

I'm using Assimil with French.
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sctroyenne
Diglot
Senior Member
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5181 days ago

739 posts - 1312 votes 
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Spanish, Irish

 
 Message 76 of 336
24 September 2012 at 1:47am | IP Logged 
sctroyenne wrote:
My latest one is suspiciously
too good - just a couple of mistakes that were simply word choice though it may not
have been corrected all the way (which I suspect is the case). You can check out my
journal here: http://lang-
8.com/121496/journals


My Spanish-speaking coworker confirmed that I in fact made very few errors which really
surprises me. I had to look up a lot of stuff so I expected some preposition errors and
whatnot at the very least. And for one of the word choice errors I was about to use the
"correct" one when I decided it looked like the other one was used more. Well, we'll see
next time if it was just a fluke.
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sctroyenne
Diglot
Senior Member
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5181 days ago

739 posts - 1312 votes 
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Spanish, Irish

 
 Message 77 of 336
29 September 2012 at 2:55am | IP Logged 
Just finished Harry Potter y la cámara secreta today so I get to move on to what many
identify as their favorite book in the series. I think I'm getting more into the flow
of reading in Spanish now. Some passages I barely glance over at the English except for
the odd vocabulary word here and there.

I wrote some more for Lang-8. This time my entry was hardly as flawless but I suppose
that's because I had to mix verb times a lot more and quite a bit of the
vocabulary/expressions I looked up didn't work out right. It took me a good hour to
come up with a short paragraph as well.

One method I've used to activate my study of Spanish has been Memrise. Let me just say
how much I'm loving this site for learning new vocabulary! I've tried using pre-made
Anki decks and I just couldn't get into it. I love how Memrise presents the words in
several ways, working on getting me to recognize and then produce vocabulary. I'm
working through the first 5000 words in Spanish deck and trying out some advanced
French ones. I looked for Irish ones but I haven't found any at beginning level that
have audio, example sentences and the like and so if anyone has found one let me know!

I'm going to a production of Rhinoceros by Ionesco performed in French tonight
so I'll spend the evening surrounded by my lovely Frenchies.
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sctroyenne
Diglot
Senior Member
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5181 days ago

739 posts - 1312 votes 
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Spanish, Irish

 
 Message 78 of 336
08 October 2012 at 6:46am | IP Logged 
I've been making some decent progress in Spanish. I decided to see if I was good enough
to skip Pimsleur I and start in directly on II with the background I already have and I
found that I could. There were only a couple words that were unknown to me. I was
wanting to use it to hopefully get some of the accent benefit but was really dreading
going through the whole "You're a businessman in Latin America and you see a local
woman" thing.

Continuing with Memrise which I'm really loving. I think I have about 200 plants in my
garden now. Making progress towards 5000.

I'm now halfway through Harry Potter y el prisionero de Azkaban. I also watched a bit
of the first movie with the Spanish language track and I found that after getting used
to watching Spanish television that it's really easy to follow.

I've been writing on Lang-8. My near perfect post was a bit of a fluke in that my next
one had many more errors. I chalked it up to the fact that I had to mix tenses a lot
more in that one. But I just started a series that will be an alternate ending to Harry
Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and my first post only had minor mistakes even with
quite a bit of tense mixing. I also wrote an entry in French but was loosely
translating from something I had already written in English. That turned out to be a
minor disaster. Not only was it really hard for me to write but it came back with tons
of mistakes. Which shows it's a good exercise - I probably have plenty of "work-
arounds" I'm not aware of when writing directly in French to overcome anything I don't
know and translating directly from my own writing shows how I'm deficient in expressing
exactly what I want.
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emk
Diglot
Moderator
United States
Joined 5322 days ago

2615 posts - 8806 votes 
Speaks: English*, FrenchB2
Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian
Personal Language Map

 
 Message 79 of 336
08 October 2012 at 4:48pm | IP Logged 
sctroyenne wrote:
I was wanting to use it to hopefully get some of the accent benefit but was really dreading going through the whole "You're a businessman in Latin America and you see a local woman" thing.


Eww. That sounds really kinda skeevy, now that you mention it.

My biggest yuck in French is the portrayal of Africans in older bandes dessinées. A lot of newer stuff, fortunately, is amazingly good—contrast the excellent Immigrants with Tintin au Congo.

sctroyenne wrote:
I also wrote an entry in French but was loosely translating from something I had already written in English. That turned out to be a minor disaster. Not only was it really hard for me to write but it came back with tons of mistakes. Which shows it's a good exercise - I probably have plenty of "work-arounds" I'm not aware of when writing directly in French to overcome anything I don't know and translating directly from my own writing shows how I'm deficient in expressing exactly what I want.


Yeah, when I write in French, I think in French. This limits my range of expression, but tends to reduce the number of outright linguistic train wrecks.
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sctroyenne
Diglot
Senior Member
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5181 days ago

739 posts - 1312 votes 
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Spanish, Irish

 
 Message 80 of 336
08 October 2012 at 6:18pm | IP Logged 
emk wrote:
sctroyenne wrote:
I was wanting to use it to hopefully get some of the
accent benefit but was really dreading going through the whole "You're a businessman in
Latin America and you see a local woman" thing.


Eww. That sounds really kinda skeevy, now that you mention it.


Yup since I used the short Pimsleur Irish course one of the few things I know how to say
is "Would you like something to drink at my place?" (Ar mhaith leat rud éigin a ól ag mo
thighse?) That and say that I'm American, that I only speak a little Irish and ask for
directions. What more does a tourist need to know?


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