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Rdearman Super Challenge Log | ||
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| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5023 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 65 of 158 02 October 2014 at 3:12pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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--- Weekly Update ---
This week I revisited the language diagnostic site to re-evaluate my French level for the third time. If you are a regular reader you might remember this from the 1st time:
From the second time:
This time around my score has gone up again and I'm now at 2+ level ILR Proficiency Level (high B2). I got Content 66.67%%, Linguistic 36.36% in this next level. Which is a drop, but I think because the test took even longer this time and it was giving me some hard-core level 3 (C1/C2) stuff to read. I could get the gist of it, but they were then asking questions which were well out of my comfort zone. --- SC Statistics --- French : 25.0 books : 63.4 films Italian : 18.3 books : 65.3 films Reading Averages Change French: 1.104 books per week --> 1.086 books per week (slight decrease) Italian: 0.831 books per week --> 0.865 books per week (slight increase) At my current rate I will fail in French by 4.34 books and fail in Italian by 23.86 books. French I finally managed to get a star for reading! YAY me! Timed my reading and I can do up to ~20 pages per hour now, so it is 4 times as fast as when I started. So from the statistics you can easily work out that I'm spending a LOT less time reading than I should. FILMS None BOOKS Working my way slowly through and I'm on the last half of the 2nd book. I've added yet another list from EMK's lexicon database which is the ~3k non-noun words which make up 98% of the frequency list. I'm hoping this will give me another boost in reading comprehension. Books I am reading are: "Le Fléau" - Stephen King Italian I've tried to get the Italian up to par, and so I've added an Italian section to my Anki deck and I'm breezing through the top few thousand most frequent words like I have been doing for French. It helps to reinforce what you are seeing and looking up. FILMS I've watched a couple of films, and I'm starting to watch a detective series recommended here on HTLAL called La Piovra. I watched the first one and it seems ok. Inspector Montalbano Gamorah La Piovra BOOKS Just completed Pericolo in Mare, and I'll be moving on to my next Hardy Boys book tomorrow. Books I am reading are: "Pericolo in Mare" Conclusion Progress is definitely being made and actually a lot faster than I anticipated. When I started the challenge I figured massive amounts of reading and listening would boost my level, but I really didn't think it would expand my abilities so quickly. I'm less than a quarter of the way with reading in both French & Italian but I've had comments from my tutor & fellow students of French about the improvements they've seen, as well as the scores from the tests like the one above. My own "back of the fag packet" calculations for reading speed shows a 3-4 times increase from when I started. So I'd highly recommend anyone who hasn't done the Super Challenge to take it up. Even if you don't want to officially join it is still worth trying to read 1/2 hour or hour each day. The Anki decks with the most frequent words I'm using mostly as reinforcement only. I am not spending a lot of time agonising over the answers, it is more like just flipping through them each day. I have lapsed a little on the films as well, mostly because of the time I've been squandering on Mandarin. I've basically got my time scheduled so that I read in Italian at lunch, Listen to Mandarin on the way home, read French before bed, and watch a film/tv show in one of the three languages. I'm planning to watch a movie I have about a family in Singapore in the 80's, which is in Mandarin but with French sub-titles. So I'll count this toward my SC movies I think. Good luck to everyone in the super challenge, and anyone learning a language. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5023 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 66 of 158 09 October 2014 at 2:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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--- Weekly Update ---
I've been off work this week, and between house cleaning tasks I've been reading and listening and watching. So an overall increase in all my Super Challenge activities. I even managed to combine a Mandarin film with French sub-titles into the SC. --- SC Statistics --- French : 27.0 books : 64.0 films Italian : 21.0 books : 68.1 films Reading Averages Change French: 1.086 books per week --> 1.125 books per week (slight increase) Italian: 0.865 books per week --> 0.875 books per week (slight increase) At my current rate I will fail in French by 1 book and fail in Italian by 23 books. French I have been reading a lot in French while I've been off and I really thought I'd brought myself back up to the point where I'd be on target. Sadly no that isn't the case and it seems I need to work harder. FILMS I watched "Ilo Ilo" which is a Singaporean film about a family and their Filipino maid in the 90's and the struggles they all had. The dynamic between the characters is good and shows the daily struggle to make ends meet. BOOKS Still reading Le Fléau, as you can imagine with a Stephen King book it is large and takes a long time. Books I am reading are: "Le Fléau" - Stephen King Italian I've tried to get the Italian up to par, and so I've added an Italian section to my Anki deck and I'm breezing through the top few thousand most frequent words like I have been doing for French. It helps to reinforce what you are seeing and looking up. FILMS Getting a bit bored of Italian detectives so I took a small break and watched the cartoon Huntik in Italian this week. BOOKS Still working on my Hardy Boys book series, Almost done with "Colpo de Boomarang" and I seem to be averaging a complete physical book each week now. This equates to 2-3 SC books of 50 pages. Books I am reading are: "Colpo de Boomarang" Conclusion Italian books have almost caught up with the French 21 vs 27 and I really would like to get them to a level playing field. I'm spending more time on Italian than French but it doesn't really show in the numbers because it takes me longer to read 50 pages of Italian than it does to read 50 pages of French. I've just written a long post on motivation and I've got to ask myself is my motivation an issue or time? Or maybe I'm just reading the wrong stuff in Italian. French just seems soooooooo much easier to read, and I don't know why. Whatever the reason I should have already read 28 books in Italian and French as of this week and 29 as of next week. So I'm going to try and give myself a mini-challange to read 500 pages 100 in French & 400 in Italian before next Thursday. Good luck to everyone in the super challenge, and anyone learning a language. Edited by rdearman on 09 October 2014 at 2:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4696 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 67 of 158 09 October 2014 at 10:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It's interesting that you find French reading so much easier, especially as you list Italian as "speaks" and French as "studies". Is it because French has more cognates, or the syntax is closer to English (I don't know any Italian, but French syntax is so much easier for me than any other language I've studied). Or perhaps you enjoy Stephen King more than the Hardy Boys? In any case, completing a Hardy Boys book each week is a pretty good pace.
Good luck with your mini challenge! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5023 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 68 of 158 10 October 2014 at 12:23am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thanks Jeffers. I think it is the cognates which helps me. It has been said that French is just mispronounced English. And I think I get probably a good 50% uplift in my reading comprehension in French because the words mean the same thing. Italian you get some benefit from romance language knowledge but only probably 20%. Another thing which helps my French is where a word doesn't have an English cognate, it often has an Latin/Italian root word I recognise. There is also a difference in the focus of my studies of both languages. I have really focused on speaking Italian. The vast majority of my work with Italian was reading aloud with a tutor and lots of flashcards. As soon as I could, I began doing language exchanges with Italians and visiting Italy. I only recently moved Italian into the speaks category after a trip to Italy and spending a week speaking Italian. It was only after a dinner party speaking with lots of people who didn't speak English was I confident enough to say I can speak (a little) Italian. But in Italian I'm what you would call functionally illiterate. Wikipedia: "functionally illiterate persons can read and possibly write simple sentences with a limited vocabulary, but cannot read or write well enough to deal with the everyday requirements of life in their own society." My spelling in Italian is terrible and I struggle to read. But reading was never my focus before the super challenge, I watched films & TV and I talked to people. I would say Italian is easier to pronounce from the written page. Basically because in Italian if a letter is in the word and it isn't an H, then you say it. Unlike French (and English) which have a lot of silent letters. So in French I have a different problem, I can read and understand a good percentage of the words on the page, but when I read them aloud nobody can understand me. Because I say some of the letters which are supposed to be silent, I don't run the words together like I should, or speak through my nose like you should, and I can't do that breathy R sound. My listening comprehension in French is a lot lower than Italian. In a conversation with a French person I am easily confused and struggle to maintain a conversation. I cannot tell the difference when a French person is saying they are crazy, or they have an oven. Because to me Fou and Four sound the same when they say it! But in reading it is easy to tell them apart. French syntax helps me read because (I think) it is closer to English than Italian. For example in French people say "Je vois", English would say "I see", but an Italian would say just "Vedo", they just change the ending of the verb depending on who is speaking and the tense. Which isn't normally a problem when talking, because you are mostly using the present tense. So to get them to the same level I need to watch a lot more French films & TV (I had already watch 500+ hours of films & TV in Italian before starting the Super Challenge) and I need to read a lot more Italian, I had read exactly 0 books in Italian other than textbooks prior to the SC. But it isn't all bad, I know my reading speed and comprehension in Italian is getting better, but it still has yet to become relatively easy. Even better when I read Italian aloud, people can understand what I'm reading, because at least I pronounce it correctly! Now I worry I should change Italian back to studies. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Mohave Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Mohave1 Joined 3794 days ago 291 posts - 444 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 69 of 158 10 October 2014 at 4:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
What great stats - definitely impressive - particularly that this has occurred with only five months effort! Congratulations! I wasn't aware GLOSS had a diagnostic test, and I think I am going to do this one so that I too can track my progress in the Super Challenge for the next 15 months! Thanks for the share! Also, I really think your reading speed improvement during the next 15 months will make up for books you believe you will fail on - so no worries! Great job! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5023 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 70 of 158 10 October 2014 at 5:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thanks for the encouragement! One word of advice before you take the test; make sure you have at least 1-2 hours to complete it, and a bit of quiet to think. The more you get right the longer the test becomes because it just keeps giving you more and more difficult stuff to read! I don't know if the test is Gloss, but it was linked to from that site, and it seems to be much more comprehensive than any of the other stuff I've seen online. Also I noticed that they seemed to have put up an audio comprehension test now for French, so I might have a turn at that soon. Let me know how you get on with the test, I'm interested in seeing what others think of it as a measurement. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5023 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 71 of 158 16 October 2014 at 1:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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--- Weekly Update ---
After my personal mini-challenge this week I've managed to get a star for my Italian and read four and a half books in Italian! I puttered about with only a half book in French. I'm hoping another burst of activity will finally allow me to get on target in both languages. --- SC Statistics --- French : 27.5 books : 64.4 films Italian : 25.5 books : 68.1 films Reading Averages Change French: 1.125 books per week --> 1.100 books per week (slight decrease) Italian: 0.875 books per week --> 1.020 books per week (good increase) At my current rate I will fail in French by 3.2 books and fail in Italian by 10.74 books. Which I'm actually happy about since at one point I would fail in Italian by almost 40+ books. I'm narrowing the gap my target for next week is to be at 29.6 books completed in both Italian and French. This will have me back on target to achieve 100 books at the end of the challenge. French Still not on target for reading, so need to step up the pace. FILMS Nothing in French this week. I really want to find a TV series to watch, but I'm sick of detectives and police dramas, anyone know a good situational comedy in French? I have a couple of other French series to watch but they are all drama depressing stuff. BOOKS Still reading Le Fléau. Plan to kill the second book of the three this week and move on to the 3rd and final physical book of Le Fléau. I've already lined up a fantasy book I want to read, and another S.King book as well. Books I am reading are: "Le Fléau" - Stephen King Italian Worked really hard and dedicated a lot of time to my Hardy Boys books this week. I managed to read one entire physical book this week! FILMS Didn't watch anything this week, most of my watching/listening has been shifted to Mandarin studies. BOOKS Still working on my Hardy Boys book series, Completed "Colpo de Boomarang" and completed "L'indrizio Fra Le Braci" as well. Lined up another one in the series and if I can plow through it this week then I should be at my 29.6 book target. Conclusion
Well I did pretty good on my mini-challenge although I didn't manage 500 pages I did surge ahead. So the target for next Thursday is 29.6 in both books, this is 105 pages in French, and 305 pages in Italian. Given that I read 275 pages in Italian last week and it was a struggle to find the time, this is still a stretch goal! I have one last Petit Nicolas book to read also, so might go for that too. Assuming I can level up to 29.6, then I'll just need to do 57 pages per week per language to score a win in the Super Challenge. The more I read, the faster I get so perhaps it will not be that bad. I felt quite good about doing a mini-challenge for myself, so I might keep making weekly challenges to myself. I need to get back on track with listening and so a good French comedy series would help me out. I'm considering watching Carabinieri (TV Series) again for the 4th time! Good luck to everyone in the super challenge, and anyone learning a language. Edited by rdearman on 16 October 2014 at 1:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4696 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 72 of 158 16 October 2014 at 2:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I also find I end up watching a lot of cop shows in French, even though I never watch them in English. A lot of people like Un village français, which is a drama about a village under German occupation during WW2. I've watched 2 series, and I like it a lot. I have no idea about sitcoms, but I'd also love to hear about some. I've seen Kaamelot mentioned a lot, and apparently it's a comedy/drama. This website mentions Caméra Café which looks like it would be fun, and since it's based around natural conversations it should be good for learning. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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