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French: Ron’s Learning Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5655 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 9 of 68 09 February 2014 at 7:09am | IP Logged | ||
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I really appreciate the descriptions of the courses. I've never used Fluenz before, so it's nice to get an overview. I hope you reach 100% entertainment time soon :)
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rlnv Senior Member United States Joined 3741 days ago 126 posts - 233 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 10 of 68 11 February 2014 at 1:55am | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you Crush. To further my goal of increasing entertainment, I ended up purchasing the complete Buffy box set from amazon.fr. Full title « Buffy contre les vampires - L'intégrale des 7 saisons + la 8ème saison animée ». Now I just need to get an all region DVD player. I've decided to watch this series due to the accurate French transcriptions as noted by emk, found here - http://bufyvs.free.fr/series/btvs/transcript.php. So thanks goes to emk and his excellent log for pointing this out to me.
Looking at some of the transcripts, I believe the language is simpler than the movies I've been watching, and the accurate transcripts will be huge advantage. Reading though a couple of them, I'm surprised how much I understand already. Probably far less than 50 percent at this time, but a few more weeks of Assimil will help prepare. My approach will be to go through the transcript ahead of time and look up some of the vocabulary that I don't know, followed by watching the episode. I might then review the transcript and watch it again. I'm still at an early stage, but since I'm already spending a lot of time with French movies, I figure my time is better invested in Buffy given the transcripts. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rlnv Senior Member United States Joined 3741 days ago 126 posts - 233 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 11 of 68 17 February 2014 at 2:54am | IP Logged | ||
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It has been a rough week since I last posted. There have been system failures at work requiring lots of extra hours, and now I'm sick. Somehow I managed to do an average of 1.8 hours a day during this time.
I may have underestimated how much extra time is now needed in level 3 of Fluenz. I find the lessons in level 3 to be significantly better than the earlier levels. The instruction is more thorough and enjoyable. I've decided to take a break from Assimil for a few weeks. I'd like to use my extra time after Fluenz for additional grammar and pronunciation study. I have a copy of Collins Beginner's French Grammar and Practice. The book has a number of good exercises, and I think I can make significant progress through it by the end of next month. I'll also be working in Barron's Pronounce It Perfectly. When I do get back to Assimil, I think the lessons will move along smoothly and rapidly given all my other study. I'll be back to it no later than the end of March, probably much sooner. My box set of Buffy has arrived! I just ordered a region 2 DVD player today. I tried playing the first disk on my laptop and could not get it to play. I'm looking forward to watching these. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5322 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 68 18 February 2014 at 12:26am | IP Logged | ||
Excellent! A fine choice for any aspiring language learner. The Buffy transcripts have some typos and accent errors, but aside from that, they're extremely accurate. And they come with "stage directions", which makes it a lot easier to get a handle on what's going on. When I started watching Buffy in earnest, I understood maybe 80% to 90% of the transcripts, but only about 40% of the audio. So if still you're a bit under 50% reading comprehension, it may take you a little bit longer to get into the swing of things. Don't hesitate to experiment and try out different ways of using the transcripts and the DVDs—I found it really helped to read through the transcript first and look up a bunch of unknown words, then to watch the episode afterwards. I also watched the early episodes several times through. You may need to do something different. In fact, you might even try pasting the episode transcripts into readlang, LingQ, or one of those other popup dictionary sites, and reading them like short stories. The soundtrack in Buffy is definitely easier than many French movies, and the French dubbing is really quite good. Don't worry if you can't understand Xander—he sometimes goes completely nuts and speaks really quickly. The nice thing about that box set is there's a lot of Buffy episodes, and if you like the show, your initial "startup effort" will pay off across quite a few seasons. And you'll pick up lots of really useful conversational expressions—the dialog is very natural, overall, and there's a ton of it. Happy watching! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| rlnv Senior Member United States Joined 3741 days ago 126 posts - 233 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 13 of 68 18 February 2014 at 5:11am | IP Logged | ||
Thanks for pointing out the sites. I was previously aware of LingQ, but not Readlang. They look to be just what I need to review the transcripts before watching. I already signed up for LingQ, and gave it a short test drive this afternoon. I also looked at the overview video of Readlang, and will sign up for it as well. I like what I saw in the video, so it may be the one I use for this purpose. I definitely will be preparing ahead of time to gain a reasonable understanding of the dialogs before watching. Then I'll probably go through the episodes a couple of times with some rewinding. I realize at first I won't get everything, but I'll take what I can at the start. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rlnv Senior Member United States Joined 3741 days ago 126 posts - 233 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 14 of 68 18 February 2014 at 5:39am | IP Logged | ||
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Fluenz progress:
I feel like my head is going to explode at times. There definitely are ups and downs. When I finished 3-5, I felt that I could do no wrong. After finishing 3-6, I'm a bit more humbled. At this stage there is so much to comprehend and it feels that there is so much flying at me from all angles. I'm finding that there is often a delay from the time when I read one of the presented sentences before I understand it. It's not a great delay, but it is a pause. When I listen, sometimes I have to repeat several times to get what is said. I've started to adopt a semi-second-wave approach to Fluenz. I'm going back to the lesson roughly 30 lessons back from the current one and reviewing it. Specifically I'm re-watching the dialogs, and listening to the "repeat the phrase" sentences without looking at the text. I'm finding the earlier lessons are very easy compared to the current. My thought is that this will help internalize the dialogs, and it does not add much time to the daily routine. Edited by rlnv on 18 February 2014 at 5:53am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rlnv Senior Member United States Joined 3741 days ago 126 posts - 233 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 15 of 68 27 February 2014 at 2:45am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm fully realizing now that Fluenz lessons are consuming about 4 hours now, so if that remains true, progress through the levels will not be as fast as I initially anticipated. I'm up to 3-10, and finding that 3 hours for the lesson is about right, along with about an hour for related flashcards.
I'm fully committed to getting back to Assimil as quickly as possible. I ended up substituting the time I thought I'd spend on grammar books, for time spent with the book, Easy French Reader by McGraw Hill. I'm finding it thoroughly enjoyable after grinding Fluenz. After a stretch with the book, I'm going back to Assimil. Easy French Reader has a number of stories, half of which are about an American student in Paris, and her French friend. The stories are shadowed on the accompanying CD, with some great native accents. They are humorous at times, and progressively introduce new vocabulary. Light and enjoyable. The second half of the book are stories of historical French figures. I'm sure those will also be enjoyable. Increasing my study time average: I'm still running at 2.3 hours a day averaged from my start in November. That is conservative, as I am very stingy recording my time spent. I'd like to get that up to 3 hours average. So I'm now committing myself to 5 hours per day on weekends, and minimum 3 hours on week days for the next couple of months. The good thing is that, I'm starting to see the payoff. I can feel my progress and see myself succeeding. I know this time is well spend, and the reward will be huge. I may or may not be taking the most efficient approach, but it seems to be working. Edited by rlnv on 27 February 2014 at 2:46am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| rlnv Senior Member United States Joined 3741 days ago 126 posts - 233 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 16 of 68 10 March 2014 at 12:21am | IP Logged | ||
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Back to Assimil:
I'm shifting focus again back to Assimil. I've reached the half way point of 5 levels of Fluenz, and will shift it to a secondary role after daily Assimil and Easy Reader. I like to think of my shifting focus as, dynamically changing my approach to fine tune what is needed for my study at the given moment! :) All three have been very useful up to this point. Verb conjugations: There are many resources for verbs, about.com is a good one, and I have a couple of verb books. That aside, I have found that one of the most useful ways for me to memorize and internalize verb conjugations is to create my own table within Excel. I started a few weeks ago, by listing all the verbs that I have encountered thus far in Fluenz, Assimil and Easy Reader. I list out the present, past participle with auxiliary verb, and the limited conditionals that I'm working with. For me the benefits of creating my own conjugation table are; a) I can easily review the ones I have worked with, b) color coding helps point out where the conjugation is not regular. I can visualize quickly through my own table, and sort or search as needed. I've found this to be very helpful. At this time I have 69 verbs in my table. Since I was primarily working in Fluenz up to this point, most of them I encountered there. An incredibly useful movie for French beginners: The other night I pulled out a movie from my incoming movie stack, and watched Les parapluies de Cherbourg - The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. This is just a fantastic movie for listening comprehension. I've watched well over a couple of dozen French movies and some Buffy, but none of them have dialog as easy to understand as this movie. Percentages are hard to estimate, but lets say that if I was typically understanding 5%, I jumped to 25% with this movie. The entire dialog is sung. So that means the conversation is of reduced complexity, words are slower and more clearly produced. It was a very good moral boaster being able to understand so much. It almost seemed like the movie was tailored in a way to cover what I have been learning. Really, beginners get this movie. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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