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300 days for French B2 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4803 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes  Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 9 of 35 05 October 2013 at 11:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I thought the same when fashion choices in high schools was the less horrible option at the oral exam. The other was about sweets in shops and some socio-psycho-economical aspects of that. Really, not something I could speak for approximately 12 minutes about and still bring new and new things and not feel like an idiot. And the examinator wasn't even non verbally helping by being a participating listener (the other went away for nearly all the time meant for my exam). It felt like lecturing a smiling wall.
Btw some of your reasons are among the most original I have ever heard and all are awesome. And proving the old and horrible teachers wrong is a great feeling, no matter they will never know of this victory (and if they do, they won't understand it correctly). I'm sure you will succeed. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| jayjayvp Tetraglot Newbie Netherlands Joined 3870 days ago 26 posts - 40 votes Speaks: English, Dutch*, German, Afrikaans Studies: French, Spanish | Message 10 of 35 06 October 2013 at 12:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I went through seomthing like that at the oral part of my CPE, you're divided in pairs
and have to have some kind of dialogue with your partner. I was linked to someone who barely spoke English and took the CPE as a sort of lark. I wasn`t laughing. The examiner actually became a bit more pro-active when conversation inevitably floundered and I had a nice chat with her about, well I don`t remember really. The book about the Somme that I bought is this one: http://www.amazon.fr/La-bataille- Somme-Juillet-novembre-1916/dp/226202426X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8 &qid=1381056354&sr=8- 1&keywords=somme+denizot Maybe I'll just start reading it. I'd very much *want* to read it in any case, more than I *want* to read the guff Sanderson throws at me. Oh well. I`ll keep you posted. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jayjayvp Tetraglot Newbie Netherlands Joined 3870 days ago 26 posts - 40 votes Speaks: English, Dutch*, German, Afrikaans Studies: French, Spanish | Message 11 of 35 06 October 2013 at 6:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have started transferring words to Anki (slow. painful.) and fear the problem of my
vocabulary glut will become absolutely rampant pretty quickly. I now have about 150 words in Anki, another 6-700 on previous vocabulary lists that will want integrating in Anki and some 75-100 in a notebook I keep with me for writing down new words when watching TV5 or listening to RFI. As Anki only picks up twenty new cards for revision each day and I add to my vocabulary .. well, quite a bit more than that. Today, listening to about fifteen minutes of radio, reading an old newsletter from a monastery in France I visited last year and going through 3-4 pages in Denizot's "La Bataille de la Somme" I easily added some fifty new items of vocabulary to the ever-burgeoning lists, or - which seems more sensible - straight into Anki where the last word I added won`t come up until five days from now, or so. How do you deal with vocabulary gluts? An obvious solution would be to stop adding new items and let time do the rest, however that would practically mean putting a stop to both reading and listening for the time being. Surely that can`t be a good thing. Oh yes, as I noted before. I have started on "La bataille de la Somme". As I`m motivated to read it, the best thing is to put that motivation to work. It's hard going, with easily ten words to look up per page. I`m not struggling as much with the grammar though. I came across one or two utterly mystifying sentences but left them to be. I will deal with such isolated pockets of resistance in my rear once I have broken the back of my Vocabular Foe. My new favourite word is "frôler" meaning to barely avoid something. "Joffre frôle la catastrophe à Verdun" 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5326 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 35 06 October 2013 at 7:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
Via triage, to continue your military metaphor. First, don't set Anki to introduce more than 20 new cards per day, at least not yet. As a rule of thumb, if you introduce N new cards per day, you will soon wind up reviewing roughly 10N cards every day at various levels of maturity. So 20 words/day added becomes 200 words/day to review, which is a very heavy Anki load. So you need to prioritize. Things that don't really need to go into Anki 1. Words that you see constantly. 2. Words whose meaning is obvious, e.g. fonction for function. 3. Words that are specialized or rare. Things that really should go into Anki 1. Words you know you've seen a bunch of times before, but which you still can't define. 2. Words that you'd like to add to your conversational vocabulary soon. Everything else is up to you. :-) One nice way to deal with this is to set Anki's new word limit somewhere between 10 and 20 words/day. Then your goal is to add roughly that number of words, and to let the rest go for now. This will force you to do some triage: Which words do you need soonest, and which can be left until later? You have to be careful with Anki, just like you need to be careful with a power saw. It's a terrific tool, but if you're not careful, you can get into a lot of trouble. The usual way that people get into trouble with Anki is to collect a lot of marginal cards. Then they increase the daily limit, and watch in horror as they accumulate 300 painful daily reviews. Then they treat each of those cards as sacred. And eventually they turn Anki into a very efficient torture machine. There are horror stories floating around the internet… The secret to a happy and productive Anki experience is to add a reasonable number of cards per day, to focus on vocabulary which you see often but which is otherwise refusing to stick, and to delete or suspend cards aggressively. Oh, and to keep up with your reviews. It's better to fall behind on adding than on reviewing. In fact, I make it a rule that if I look at a card and groan, that card gets suspended. Khatzumoto, who based his entire learning method around spaced repetition, writes about this on a regular basis. In fact, his whole series on SRSing is full of good advice. But, you might ask, what about all those other words in your notebooks? How will you learn them? At this point, I probably know over 10,000 French vocabulary words. Perhaps 1,500 were learned using Anki. Another 5,000 or so are easy cognates that English speakers get for free. All the rest were picked up via osmosis, pretty much the same way that I learn most words in English. For an idea of what my vocabulary looks like in practice, see my post about 30 pages of Le pont de la rivière Kwai. Basically, I chewed through a big stack of interesting books and TV shows. So if I learn less than 15% of my vocabulary through Anki, why do I use it? Basically, it's a demolition charge for problems that aren't going away on their own, and it's invaluable in that role.
This is a good strategy in general. Learn whatever is easy to learn right now, and let the rest go. If you need to learn it, you'll see it again soon enough. And if some afternoon, you find yourself getting caught up in your book, and you don't want to mess with vocabulary, just go for it. If you're already down to 10 unknown words per page, and a few mysterious sentences, then you're actually in great shape. Throw another 500 to 3000 pages at the problem, and you'll see dramatic improvements. Seriously, that's less than 10 ordinary paperbacks. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| jayjayvp Tetraglot Newbie Netherlands Joined 3870 days ago 26 posts - 40 votes Speaks: English, Dutch*, German, Afrikaans Studies: French, Spanish | Message 13 of 35 07 October 2013 at 1:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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During a boring class I typed up about 300 anki cards, dropping between 20-30% of the words on the previous wordlists. Even so, backlog will ensue. I`m not going to be overly worried for now and am thinking up schemes of revising via anki and keeping more generic wordlists for extensive revision on the side. It's no use plonking everything into anki and then having to wait for three months until the card finally comes up for review. Once I`m done integrating the previous lists of vocabulary I`ll continue where I left off mining the Frequency Dictionary. I think it's sensible to assume *those* have a certain priority to them other words don`t necessarily have.
I might get to like this here anki thing. I`ll try not to turn it into my personal torture engine. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5326 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 35 07 October 2013 at 3:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
Sounds like an excellent plan. :-) I only warned you because most Anki users make this mistake at some point, and quite a few of them try to force themselves through the wall, and many end up burning out on Anki, or—even worse—on language learning itself. Even Khatzumoto, who made such effective use of SRS software while learning Japanese, ended up going badly off the rails with Chinese. He tells the story here, in his usual rambling style, and concludes that the "SRS is a servant, not a master." So don't hesitate to find your own way, but if you ever wind up staring at a backlog of hundreds of depressing cards, then it's time to troubleshoot and prune your deck ruthlessly. While I'm here, a couple more thoughts: 1) When adding nouns to your deck, don't forget to add their genders. You can save a lot of time by looking up a list of common French word endings and the associated genders, but you'll still have to memorize at least 25% of the genders yourself. The sooner your brain decides, "French nouns without genders make no sense," the happier you'll be. 2) Beware of "leeches". These are cards that you've marked as "learned", then latter missed, then marked as "learned" again, and missed again, and so on. Once your Anki deck gets to be a month or two old, these leeches will begin to take over your daily reviews, and you will soon find yourself devoting all your time to a tiny subset of vocabulary that refuses to stick. I personally prefer to suspend most of these leeches. After all, if they're important, you'll eventually run into them often enough that they become easy. In fact, Anki has a "suspend leeches" option, which I set to automatically suspend cards after 4 such cycles of learning/forgetting. Or you can deal with them manually. Just be aware that they will eventually try to invade. :-) 3) Once you've been using Anki for about a month, you'll have a good feeling for your daily review load. At that point, if you still think you could be comfortably doing 50% or 100% more work, then feel free to increase the number of new cards per day. About 8 weeks before my B2 exam, for instance, I was learning 30 to 40 cards per day for several weeks, with a backlog of a few hundred cards. But that was intense. 4) Even 20 cards per day is still 7,300 cards per year. And if you read and watch TV, you'll learn lots of words outside of Anki. (For me, the ratio of Anki to outside sources is between 1:4 and 1:8.) To tackle the DELF B2 comfortably, I'd recommend being solid on at least 90% of the most common 2,500 words, and knowing at least 75% of words 2,500 to 5,000. That implies you'll also know a good bunch of words between 5,000 and 10,000. At this level, I still struggled with some of the vocab on the DELF B2, but passed comfortably. So overall, it looks like you're in excellent shape and you should make very fast progress, as long as you avoid burnout and you don't give up. :-) 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| jayjayvp Tetraglot Newbie Netherlands Joined 3870 days ago 26 posts - 40 votes Speaks: English, Dutch*, German, Afrikaans Studies: French, Spanish | Message 15 of 35 07 October 2013 at 9:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Update 7 october
I currently have an Anki deck of 400 cards, the vast majority unseen. I`m not going to add anything to Anki for the coming seventeen days; otherwise I`ll just be adding to the backlog. In the meantime I`m going to compile a vocabulary list from my Frequency Dictionary the contents of which will have priority status for Anki-inclusion starting October 24. I read about ten pages in La bataille de la Somme, I circle all the words I don`t know, look up those I need for immediate understanding of - say - paragraphs and try to compile vocab lists afterwards. I`m not going to let noting down words disrupt my reading. I apparently have enough French to get the grist of what's on the page and waiting for my vocab compiling to catch up is just no fun at all. Reading is one thing, compiling something else, and one shouldn`t get overly in the way of the other. I watched most of the French-Swiss, French (France 2) and RTBF news-programmes today. I`m surprised by the extent of which I can follow what is said. It was a bit too much of a good thing though. I`ll try and limit myself to one or two news programmes a day. I didn`t get round to writing anything for Lang-8, but I think it's time for inclusion of a shady "type" sporting a 'cicatrice sur sa joue' and a 'blouson en cuir'. And up to no good, that much is certain. My favourite word of the day is 'légiférer', 'lawmaking'. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5003 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 35 08 October 2013 at 7:37am | IP Logged | |||||
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Welcome to the forums, Jayjayvp. You may already know these resources, but just in case not...
-Service Protestant. Not for the test, but perhaps for your own interest? (-Given your religious studies. Plus: transcripted!) If you'll forgive me linking to my own log, I've a couple of posts on it: Links now fixed (I think): post 41; #78, my favourite service of the series. And following up on Emk's advice on genders, there's also a book by Saul Rosenthal on the subject. Nouns">link, with a Google preview. (Genders are an ongoing - and all too often losing - battle for me.) Edit: www.frenchnoungenderendings.com, which I'd also been using, now seems to be a dead link. - Sorry! I look forward to reading about your journey to French-language awesomeness; hovering around an upper A2 myself, it's always inspiring seeing others light the path ahead... Edited by songlines on 08 October 2013 at 7:50am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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