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French in 3 months?

  Tags: Time to learn | French
 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages Post Reply
26 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3
liam.pike1
Groupie
Australia
Joined 3514 days ago

84 posts - 122 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish, Esperanto, French

 
 Message 25 of 26
10 December 2014 at 3:26pm | IP Logged 
Hey aabram... yes, 'crashcoursing' is the word! A few months ago my music teacher at school gave myself and another boy a crashcourse in the Russian language (very interesting).

Your approach of reading pretty much straight away is very impressive, but I suppose it helps that you can speak 5 languages, even if only one of them is related to French. What I mean is that you are a very experienced language learner.
I too plan to move into 'native materials' or, at first, materials like parallel readers as soon as I can (well, this won't be for a long while though). And French has the best resources and materials of any language, it appears (perhaps other than English). So I am sooo excited to think that by the end of next year I should be able to immerse myself in all of these wonderful books and movies and whatnot...

Thanks for all the links as well :)


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aabram
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Estonia
Joined 5293 days ago

138 posts - 263 votes 
Speaks: Estonian*, English, Spanish, Russian, Finnish
Studies: Mandarin, French

 
 Message 26 of 26
15 January 2015 at 4:17am | IP Logged 
Small update frome me.

I've finished one book in French and are about to finish another one, also have two others in progress.
I've amassed enough vocabulary and grammar to read on subjects that I have previous knoweldge of. In my
case that would be astrophysics and general history, for example. I picked up copy of Brian Greene's
L'Universe Elegant and I can follow most of it with relative ease, as is the case with Robert Clarke's
Naissance de l'Homme. I still need to look up things, but I'm at the point when I enjoy reading this sort
of texts.

I find much harder to read fiction. I'm in the middle of one detective story and without constantly
referring to dictionary I would struggle to get the nuances of the story.

However I'm still very pleased with my progress in this regard. I've been reading and translating like
this for two and half months, but not every day though. If I was under pressure, I'd guess I'd be much
more advanced by now. My learning has mostly been passive, so I couldn't really hold a conversation, but
that has not been my aim so I'm not complaining. I haven't done any grammar drills or looked at
conjugation tables, but since I've been exposed so many times to often used verbs in various forms I've
developed some sort of understanding and feel for it. I do feel that when I start speaking practice I
already have pretty good base to build upon. Of course, that is yet to be verified, but I'm not overly
concerned.

Update 2 (an hour later)

Just for fun I did few online placement tests, scored between 46-55% which placed me in intermediate / advanced
intermediate range. Tests clearly pointed out my weak spots, especially knowing the gender of the words which
I've been largely unconsiously ignoring and ortography. Given choices between correct and similar looking but
incorrect word, especially plural I had to make random guess because I haven't internalised correct forms. Nominative gâteau
vs gateau or plural gâteau vs gâteaux. Also diacritics, arrivé vs arrive and such sort of things. I can mostly
recognise words correctly but not reproduce correctly.

Edited by aabram on 15 January 2015 at 5:21am

1 person has voted this message useful



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