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Beginning French - 2013 TAC - Team PaX | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| fezmond Groupie Korea, South Joined 4711 days ago 72 posts - 78 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, French | Message 9 of 64 19 November 2012 at 1:52pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Week one finished.
Up to Assimil lesson 8 now. I want to do more than one a day but feel I won't pick up as much. I want to really understand these lessons and not skip through like I did with previous Korean studies. I like the Assimil lessons as they're short and humorous and not too difficult at this stage. However, I'm Kinda doing the active phase already. I copy out the lesson in both French and English to a notebook and I spent Saturday translating lessons 1-7 from English back into French. Not too may mistakes but still come confusion over genders and making sure the accents are the right ones etc. Forgot all about Pimsleur so started again today. Up to lesson 6, not the most stimulating material but I'm mostly replying without having to pause the tape. FSI is slow progress because it's so tedious but useful. (should try to listen to the audio more). Will check out the French in Action videos. Thanks for the tips and the replies. How long did it take you guys to get to the B1 level? That's intermediate, right? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4492 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 10 of 64 19 November 2012 at 2:04pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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B1 in French? I have no idea, actually, because I was B1 for a loooooong time before
actually noticing it and that in my case was dependent on 4 years of French education at school, but as we know that's slow and tedious. You learn languages in hours not years. More practice = better faster. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| fezmond Groupie Korea, South Joined 4711 days ago 72 posts - 78 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, French | Message 11 of 64 24 November 2012 at 5:42am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Have hit a wall the past week, not so much with the desire to learn but sleep problems
and work make it seem that nothing is going into my head. I'll be sitting with Pimsleur and suddenly realise I'm not listening at all, drifting away with thoughts. Up to lesson 11 with Assimil. Definitely getting harder. I'm not sure if I should try and memorize the lessons or not but the first 7 were much easier than the next 4. At least they're somewhat interesting and amusing. I'm still writing the conversations out by hand, maybe it's a bad idea to try a somewhat active part already. Pimsleur has been OK. Up to lesson 12 of French 1. It's not particularly exciting but I'm enjoying the speed at which they speak and trying to match it clearly. Still getting some things wrong when not listening to the questions properly. voudriez/voulez FSI is boring me to death. I'm writing out most of the practice sentences but have a hard time listening to the audio and sitting around for 30 mins to do it. I've decided I'll look into some lyrics from a French ska band - N&SK and the Pink Martini - Sympathique. I'm still missing articles and confusing pronouns but it's still early days. Would love to be further along but will persevere. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| fezmond Groupie Korea, South Joined 4711 days ago 72 posts - 78 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, French | Message 12 of 64 05 December 2012 at 4:35pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Wow, a long time since I updated this.
Have been snowed under with work and sleep problems again so nothing seems to be sticking in the brain. Up to lesson 16 of Assimil but have hardly studied the past 3/4 lessons. I've written them out in English and French in an attempt to make things stick. The vocab and sentences seem to be getting a big harder/more complex but I'm fairly sure that it's completely basic stuff right now. Worrying for the times ahead. Started Michel Thomas and have just finished disk 3. Seems to be OK, though I'm still making dumb mistakes. Finished half of Pimsleur I and that seemed to be going quite well, just not enough hours in the day. FSI has really taken a backseat these days. Need to start pushing it more and more. I'm disappointed in the fact that when I see something written down, I usually gather the meaning pretty well but am struggling when asked to respond to this question or tell me.... Enjoying listening to RFI facile though. More words are making sense though the speed and general vocabulary is way too high for me. Here's hoping that the coming week proves fruitful. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| fezmond Groupie Korea, South Joined 4711 days ago 72 posts - 78 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, French | Message 13 of 64 12 December 2012 at 9:09am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I managed to get a hold of French In Action and watched the first (real) lesson today.
Seems to be OK although a little cheesy and definitely very 80s. I've printed out the workbook and textbook for lesson 2 so will have a look later at home. FSI has been non-existent in my learning over the past few weeks. I completed unit 1 but have no desire to push on with unit 2 yet. Pimsleur has been going pretty well lately, though I'm sometimes confused with the questions being asked when they're in French. I'd also like to see more of the grammar I'm using in written format. Up to lesson 25 now so should finish it by early next week. I find that while I'm not really paying attention, certain phrases roll off the tongue easily then when I'm really concentrating, I get confused sometimes. Thinking of heading to course II after this one. I wish I had more devotion to Assimil but it's hard to find the time. I like the course but not really sure how much of it is being properly absorbed. I can look over the text and have a decent understanding initially and then understand what it all says upon review. However, I don't think I could just say the sentences off the top of my head without seeing them in French first. The biggest issue so far: how is my accent? I really have no idea and living in a country of Koreans, it's hard to know. If anyone reads this, did you ever do 2 Assimil lessons a day? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5317 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 64 12 December 2012 at 12:55pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I will be really interested to hear about your experiences with FIA. It looks like a great course, and a few people have tried it, but I've never looked at it myself. (Not that it would do me much good at this point, but they also have a Spanish course I might like to try someday!)
If you do an Assimil lesson a day (more or less), and if you can passively understand 95% of the text and 80–90% of the audio, you'll learn a lot of French without noticing it. By the time you reach lesson 30, you'll look back on lesson 1 and you'll say, "Wow, that's easy." By the time you reach lesson 50, you should be able to translate most of the English in lesson 1 back to French without any problems. Assimil sort of sneaks up on you. You'll feel like maybe you're not making any progress and then you'll look back at a month-old lesson and you'll say, "Wow, that's really easy." Seriously—when I used Assimil to study Egyptian hieroglyphs, it was really hard going, but when I look at the older lessons, I'm like, "Wow, was the material really that basic? This stuff is easy." So if you find Assimil is pleasant, and you understand each lesson passively, then it's almost certainly going to work for you, and you might want to keep going. For a grammar book, I recommend Essential French Grammar by Resnik. It's really cheap (about $5), and it covers 90% of the grammar you'll need without getting into crazy details that you won't need until much later. Plus there are lots of good example sentences. As for doing more than one Assimil lesson per day, that should probably work as long as you're consistent. For example, if you do 7 lessons all in one day, and take the next 6 days off, you'll probably forget everything by the end of the week. But if you, say, work 5 days a week and always do either 1 or 2 lessons, then the course should work fine, although you might feel a little overwhelmed.
For most English speakers, you need to pay attention to the following sounds: - The French R. This is in the back of your throat, and there's a zillion YouTube videos explaining it. - The front rounded vowels. Try rounding your lips like you're going to say "boot", and then say "beet", "bait" (but chop the diphthong off—if you imagine the word as being "b(aayee)t", lose everything except the first part of the vowel) and "bet". This isn't a terribly good description, particularly the "bait" example, but it should help you find a better explanation somewhere. :-) - The nasal vowels. You really only need 3 of these, though some dialects have 4. English speakers are mostly good at nasal vowels as long as we remember to turn it off when appropriate: "bon" is nasalized, "bonne" isn't. You don't have to get these perfect right away, but it's never to early to start listening for them and trying to imitate the sounds. If you get these sounds right, and you try to get the intonation right (listen to how the pitch rises and falls in a sentence), then you'll sound better than 95% of people learning French. You can look up the IPA for these sounds using the Wikipedia link below and practice with an online IPA chart: French phonology (you only need the basics) Interactive IPA charts I hope some of this helps answer your questions. Good luck with your studies! Edited by emk on 12 December 2012 at 12:56pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| fezmond Groupie Korea, South Joined 4711 days ago 72 posts - 78 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, French | Message 15 of 64 13 December 2012 at 3:11am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Thanks for the reply and the links emk.
I work in a different way with the assimil lessons, not sure it's a good or bad thing. After listening to the audio and reading the translations a few times I write out the French in a separate notebook and then the English underneath it. That seems to be the best way for me to learn, almost like drilling.' At the end of the week I line up all 6 previous lessons and try to write them out in French while only using the L1 translation. Apart from genders and pronouns, most sentences seem to be ok. I guess I'm already doing the active wave, maybe it would help if I stopped and only followed the passive. Hopefully I'll be able to reach B1 level in 6 months or so. I'm putting in about 12-15 hours a week at the moment (a lot of listening), just need to start on writing. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Quique Diglot Senior Member Spain cronopios.net/Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4467 days ago 183 posts - 313 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: French, German | Message 16 of 64 13 December 2012 at 8:51am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
It's extremely 80s: clothes, haircuts, etc. I find them charming! To do the workbook you also need the audio. A few days ago I posted some instructions for French in Action.
You don't have to! Not until you reach the active wave (lesson 50). For now, don't even try.
You could talk through Skype or equivalent with French natives or other students. Have you considered joining the TAC 2013 Romance team?
Yep, I'm doing that right now (I'm up to lesson 21), but I had already studied French as a kid. I guess I'll have to slow down some time soon. Rather than doing 2 lessons a day, I'd suggest doing the old French without Toil at the same time. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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