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Advanced to native fluency in French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6268 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes  Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 1 of 7 16 April 2007 at 12:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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I already have a very high level of French because my university major is French studies, which requires students to read the classics of French literature in the original, among other things. However, I'm now taking an advanced German-to-French translation class, which really has me sweating. I need to acquire more advanced vocabulary and idioms, perfect my spelling and especially get a better feel for native-sounding expressions. Since I have a one hour exam without the help of a dictionary in this translation course in mid-July, I better do that quickly. Even though we're doing literature texts right now, the exam will mostly likely feature a newspaper article.
Here's my plan: - read at least one newspaper article from a French online newspaper every day, putting all unknown words into my vocabulary program - practising my French vocabulary daily using that program - in addition to the translations I have to do for class, translate at least 2 exam-sized texts every week. For this I need to find a French native speaker who can correct my translations and especially point out Germanisms in my expression. Would anybody be up to the task? If you speak German at a high level, this exercise might help you acquire better fluency yourself. If not, I'd also gladly help you improve your German, Latin or Esperanto on any level. - speaking more French would also help my fluency, so if anybody is looking for an exchange... I must say I have somewhat of a Quebecois accent though, and I don't intend to change it. - I will also be going through the book "La joueuse de Go", which I have finished reading a few weeks ago, and look up all the florid words that I just skipped or guessed when reading (I was reading for comprehension only). By the way, I can really recommend that book, especially to Go players and those who want to become Go players. Go is an amazing game: incredibly simple yet deeper than chess. Edited by Sprachprofi on 16 April 2007 at 2:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| justinwilliams Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6487 days ago 321 posts - 327 votes 3 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Italian | Message 2 of 7 17 April 2007 at 7:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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How did you acquire a Quebecois accent?
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| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6268 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 3 of 7 18 April 2007 at 2:03am | IP Logged | ||
I only learned French for two years in High School. I had a very bad teacher who liked to ramble instead of teach French and I decided to take Italian instead for the remaining 3 years. After my graduation I spent one month with a bilingual Quebecois family I knew in Montreal, since I wanted to go some place where I can practise more than just one foreign language I learned. I quite fell in love with the city and the people. After returning to Germany, I needed a major to go with my minor in computational linguistics (it's only offered as a minor) and I decided to take French studies. That meant I needed some help to get my rusty and incomplete French up to speed for the entry exam. I asked my Quebecois friends to help me out and we studied quite a bit together using voice-chat. I also try to speak mostly French with them now. So between not remembering much of my High School French and speaking a lot of Quebecois French with them, I acquired a slight accent; enough to annoy my Parisian university teacher. I actually prefer this accent, it sounds nicer to my ear; the Parisian French accent can have an haughty tone to it. At university, they teach us Parisian French of course, but I try not to pick up on the accent. As a counter-balance and also just for fun I listen to some Quebecois music, online news broadcasts and comedy, though I'd never want for my accent to be as strong as Richard Desjardin's for example. When it's my turn to present a topic to the class, I also try to choose something with a link to Quebec, because the lessons focus almost entirely on France métropole though they're supposed to be about the French-speaking world. Except for one mention in the basic introductory course, my classmates would be blissfully ignorant that French is spoken outside of France, too :-( Since I need to improve my oral fluency in French, it would be ideal to find somebody from Quebec to practise with, but that's so hard, seeing that there's only about 6 million people... Edited by Sprachprofi on 18 April 2007 at 2:05am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| justinwilliams Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6487 days ago 321 posts - 327 votes 3 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Italian | Message 4 of 7 18 April 2007 at 9:37am | IP Logged | ||
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Very interesting, thanks! I believe it shouldn't be too hard to find people from Quebec using websites like polyglotclub or sharedtalk...the only problem being they might not be good enough in linguistic to criticise a translation as it requires a very advanced knowledge.
P.S. I suggest you listen Pierre Lapointe, Jean Leloup and Les Cowboys Fringants if you like listening to Quebecois music. You could also buy The Simpsons from Canada. It's dubbed in Quebec and you get to hear a wide variety of accents from Quebec. There are many more shows dubbed in Quebec but this one is funnier and the translation is maybe netter than the original English version. It's full of insights about life and people in Quebec. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6268 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 5 of 7 18 April 2007 at 11:11am | IP Logged | ||
Les Cowboys Fringants are my favourite band right now! They have lots of good songs. I have also listened to Pierre Lapointe before, I believe he was singing together with Mario Pelchat. I like Mario Pelchat's rendition of "Le plus beau voyage", it's much more powerful than Claude Gauthier's. I don't think I have listened to anything by Jean Leloup yet. Can you recommend a few songs that you like? As for the translation: I am not trying to become a translator, so I don't want that kind of critique. Just somebody telling me whether e. g. it's possible to use "offrir" in "un image qui s'offrait de lui chaque soir" - in German it would be possible to use "anbieten"(offer) in that sense, so I'd be tempted to write that, but I don't have any clue as to whether that's possible in French. These kind of insecurities are my worst problem right now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| polyglossia Senior Member FranceRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5202 days ago 205 posts - 255 votes Speaks: French* | Message 6 of 7 30 December 2010 at 2:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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Tu cherches toujours à améliorer ton français, Sprachprofi??
J'ai proposé que chaque équipe pour le Team Tac 2011, soit supervisée par un locuteur natif... Je suis partant pour être observateur/correcteur du Team French... Why dont you join in?? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hakan D Tetraglot Groupie Turkey Joined 4899 days ago 45 posts - 77 votes Speaks: Turkish*, Icelandic, English, German Studies: Spanish, Greek, Swedish, Hungarian, Mongolian, Modern Hebrew, Russian | Message 7 of 7 30 December 2010 at 4:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know whether you would consider it but apart from putting the new vocabulary into your programme, I'd
suggest also putting sentences. At your level of course not every other sentence you see but rather the sentences that you think you might not be able to produce yourself even though you would know all the words in it. I think this may be of help especially if you're going to make translations in one specific area. As we know if the text is about law, medicine, engineering etc. there's almost always a certain jargon and specific character to the language. I used this method for Icelandic and saw that even the sentences that the native speakers go with patterns. I dabbled quite a lot with Icelandic the first 3-4 years, I had a large vocabulary, a good grasp of the grammar even my accent was like an Icelander but obviously I didn't sound like a native speaker. I reckon I started memorizing sentences as I soon realized that Icelandic is a highly idiomatic language. I guess things start to click after one acquires around 3000-4000 stock-sentences. Then these sentence patterns merge into each other and you can create lots of others with these patterns. Even half the way through it, at least for me, reading newspaper articles or books was much easier and fun. In the case that one is trying to learn a language living in a different country reaching a native sound should lie somewhere around well-chosen 15.000-20.000 sentences. I'm trying out this approach with the new languages that I've started. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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