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luke TAC15 Français - [TAC14] Deuxième

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luke
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6965 days ago

3133 posts - 4351 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Esperanto, French

 
 Message 153 of 439
17 January 2014 at 1:33am | IP Logged 
Jeffers wrote:
Just saying hello, and letting you know that I'll be following you for the TAC.


And I'm following your log too.

Today... FSI Basic French tape 3.5.
Listened to chapitre 1 of Camus's The Stranger.
Listened to a few more chapters of Sens du Bonheur (Think on These Things in English) by Krishnamurthi. This one I think is amazingly helpful.
One each lesson from Using French and Business French (Assimil).
Middle part of FSI Phonology unit 8.
Plus a little more background listening.

My comprehension seems to really have gone up over the last couple weeks. Exactly why, I'm not sure, but here were some new behaviors:
1) FSI Basic French - This is useful, but I don't think it was the real magic.
2) FSI French Phonology - also very helpful, but I'm not giving it all the credit either.
3) Listen/Reading Camus L'Etranger in French/French (mostly) and French/English (part 2). I think this was helpful.
4) Listen and sometimes reading another audiobook I'm very familiar with (about 2+ hours total).
5) Le Petit Prince (although the story is magic, I'm not thinking this was the magic ingredient.

and finally
6) Le Sens du Bonheur by Krishnamurti. This audiobook is on youtube and I used one of the video2mp3 services to make mp3s. I've been listening to this while working out. Now I'm also kicking myself for not listening for all these years while working out. I will give myself the one "bye" of saying, I was doing super high intensity before, and now I'm just trying to be active and healthy. This audio is the one I think is the magic. Partly because I find the subject very interesting, partly because it's the proper level, partly because I'm doing it while working out.

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Cristianoo
Triglot
Senior Member
Brazil
https://projetopoligRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 3881 days ago

175 posts - 289 votes 
Speaks: Portuguese*, FrenchB2, English
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 154 of 439
19 January 2014 at 5:50am | IP Logged 
Just saying hello. I'm following your progress for TAC/2nd French team.

Bonne chance!

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enrdbrow
Newbie
United Kingdom
Joined 4332 days ago

19 posts - 30 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: French

 
 Message 155 of 439
19 January 2014 at 3:14pm | IP Logged 
Hi luke, I'd just like to say Salut and good luck in your language learning adventures. I like how detailed your log has been to date. I'll be reading Le Petit Prince at the end of this month using the Ilya Frank link mentioned in your first post.I never thought of looking the places up mentioned in ASSIMIL. You know what I'll be doing after this post.
Once again bonne chance!
DB
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luke
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6965 days ago

3133 posts - 4351 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Esperanto, French

 
 Message 156 of 439
20 January 2014 at 12:23am | IP Logged 
Le Petit Nicolas is online with audio and words. I have the book, but since it is online, the chapters are great candidates for http://translate.google.com/.

The very literal translation of French into English makes the story much easier to understand. There are 19 chapters of 6-8 minutes each, which is a nice duration for a brief session. Another nice thing is that the chapters are largely independent of one another.

It's native material written for a French audience and funny to boot. It even has a multiple choice comprehension test for each chapter. Highly recommended!



Edited by luke on 20 January 2014 at 12:27am

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luke
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6965 days ago

3133 posts - 4351 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Esperanto, French

 
 Message 157 of 439
21 January 2014 at 2:49am | IP Logged 
J'écoute / lu plusieurs chapitres de Le Petit Nicolas aujourd'hui.
Je suis dans l'unité 9 du FSI French Phonology.
J'écoute / lu quelques heures de deux autres livres en français / français.
J'ai étudié le dialogue pour l'unité 4 de FSI français.
J'ai regardé 5 épisodes de French Sounds sur youtube.
Et bien sûr, une leçon de Français des affaires et Le Perfectionnement Du Français.
J'ai travaillé dans les deux premières bandes de DLI French (Phonology).

Edited by luke on 21 January 2014 at 2:55am

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luke
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6965 days ago

3133 posts - 4351 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Esperanto, French

 
 Message 158 of 439
24 January 2014 at 3:37am | IP Logged 
I've been doing my one a day lessons in Using and Business French.
FSI French Phonology .. up to Chapter 10 part 2.
Petit Nicolas ... listen/read about 1/2 of the book now.
Listen/Read a cigar worth of some other books on tape.
DLI Lesson 1. That was interesting. Did a good bit with Audacity to make the audio better.
Listened to a few more chapters of Krishamurti Sens du Bonheur.
Converted James Murphy's Power of the Subconscious to mp3 from youtube and into about chapter 3 (listening).
FSI Basic French ... on tape 4.4.
I also have a track to shadow New French with Ease and French Without Toil..   Did several of the beginning lessons in those two courses.


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luke
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6965 days ago

3133 posts - 4351 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Esperanto, French

 
 Message 159 of 439
26 January 2014 at 4:07am | IP Logged 
Another lesson each in Business and Using French. Each new wave through these courses seems to bring just a bit more clarity and review.

I did DLI (Defense Language Institute) French Basic Course lessons 3 and 4 today. These lessons are heavy on listen and repeat. There is about 30 minutes of audio per lesson, and about that much time going through the various exercises towards the end of each lesson. I've been editing the audio a bit to enhance it, sharpening certain frequencies, removing some excessive pauses, amplifying parts that are very quiet. I've felt good progress doing these lessons.

The DLI course is light on grammar and explanations, but that suits me fine. It's turned on a few lights, such as "des" is also a contraction of "de les". I wish all the audio was recorded, but nonetheless, it's helpful. I'm focusing a bit more on gender of nouns, as that ends up being very important in a lot of situations in French. I pulled the nouns out of lessons 1-4 along with the indefinite article un/une to make it easy when doing exercises and trying to remember the gender of certain nouns.

Another approach I came up with today is previewing the grammar and vocabulary points, which are summarized at the end of the lesson. This is helpful, as some words aren't given translation in the lesson, and the grammar points are very concise, so one gets an idea of what there is to learn. If there are new points in the grammar summary, I know I'll learn something and get some practice doing the lessons.

I've also pulled the dialogues for memorization as separate mp3 files.   One neat thing is the course has comic drawings to go along with these dialogues, as well as the translation and transcript. Looking at the comics while listening to the audio brings the dialogues to life.

The "edited" lessons are about 25 minutes. I'm thinking tonight that this will make for a good review during the drive home from work. So far, they aren't too challenging, and they do bring into focus certain grammatical points and a few new words. It helps with speaking. I've been doing a lot of listen/reading so far, so this is a nice new facet of studies.

The first 15 (of 85) lessons focus on phonology, so this is a good followup to the FSI French Phonology course. DLI lessons are meant to be one a day. Obviously there is no classroom practice component, but as an adjunct, I'm hoping I can keep this track going. I've had a lot of free time the last few days, so that may not be feasible. At least getting through the first 15 will be milestone 1.

I looked at all 8 volumes. The subjunctive is given very light treatment, as opposed to FSI Basic, where it gets focus in about 25% of the lessons. There are about 42 1/2 hours of audio in unedited DLI French. FSI Basic French has over 70.

I also glanced at the songbook and listened to a few songs on the internet. That seems like it could be useful from a cultural perspective at some point.

Other stuff:
A couple of cassette tape faces of listen/reading.

Several more chapters of Petit Nicolas. I just finished chapter 18 and it's getting easier to just follow the written French at times. I listened to the last couple of chapters twice, which helped with comprehension a good bit.

I also did a third pass at FSI Basic French tape 4.4. I'm moving on to tape 4.5 tomorrow.

Edited by luke on 26 January 2014 at 4:17am

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luke
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6965 days ago

3133 posts - 4351 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Esperanto, French

 
 Message 160 of 439
29 January 2014 at 11:18am | IP Logged 
I finished DLI French lesson 7. I have multiple thoughts about the course. The audio is pretty bad, so it requires an Audacity treatment. I've been editing out the excessive pauses and treating the sound as well. A 33 minute recording goes to about 26. It's not so much to save time, but to keep the flow going.

What I like is that DLI brings certain points in focus that have heretofore been vague. I'm learning a few new words. The focus on phonology is good, but the recordings probably limit the value in that regard. However, there are notes that make certain phonological phenomenon clearer.

One other thing about DLI is that one of the two voices seems to be non-native.

I got stuck in a 6 1/2 hour drive home from work yesterday. The only upside was lots of time to do French. I finished Camus (part 2 of book), the last 4 chapters of Le Petit Prince, 3 chapters of Petit Nicolas, about 1/3 each of New French with Ease and French Without Toil, review of DLI unit 2, and several tapes of FSI Basic French.

This experience gave me an idea for FSI Basic French. The later "practice" drills are more difficult than the earlier "learning" and "lexical" drills. The Lexical drills are to help with patterns in the dialogue.

So my idea is to do the dialogue tape (first tape of each unit), then the following tapes through lexical and practice drills, as the first grammar point's practice drills will follow the lexical drills. For unit 5, this had me deep into tape 4 before hitting "practice" drills.

Anyway, I can see how the course will be more manageable with this approach, as it starts as a bit more of a survey, doing about 1/3 to 1/2 of the drills per unit. A subsequent wave can include the practice drills, which will be easier at that point having done the easier "learning" drills in the past. When the "practice" drills begin to show up and get difficult, just skip to the next tape and hope that it's working on a new grammar point and practice drills.

Certain grammar points and learning drills would be skipped with this approach, but it would require no editing of the audio. Compared to the DLI audio, FSI sounds pretty good.

So whether I continue through unit 15 in DLI or give that time to FSI is still up in the air. One thing I like about the edited DLI lessons is they are also fairly easy, so make for a lower intensity study session on the drive home when I'm not as fresh as in the morning.

One idea on focusing more on FSI rather than DLI is that I could put that audio editing time into pulling out the categories of drills. E.G., the lexical drills, the learning drills, then practice drills, etc. This wouldn't be to make every drill a separate file, but only to get all the practice and lexical drills separated from the more difficult practice drills. Later, when focusing on practice drills, I can imagine splitting them up if there are some sticklers. There too, sometimes I think it may be better to get better at the easy drills and then the difficult ones will seem less challenging.

Edited by luke on 29 January 2014 at 11:30am



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