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Emme’s Small Steps - Team Sleipnir TAC’15 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5129 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes  Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 25 of 360 22 June 2010 at 10:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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It’s been another hectic week so here’s another short update.
French: Assimil lesson 81 (second wave 32). That should mean that I’m halfway through Assimil French Without Pain (counting the days from the beginning of the first wave to the end of the second wave). Swedish: mainly authentic materials + Anki. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5129 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 26 of 360 24 July 2010 at 9:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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At long last, I’m back. I’ve had some problems with my internet connection in the past month, so I haven’t been able to log on the forum for some time. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t worked on my languages. In fact, I kept going through Assimil French and today I’ve reached a milestone: I’ve finished the first wave! Yippee!
Assimil is almost the only language book (not school- or university-related) that I’ve managed to read through (the only other being a Swedish grammar). Of course I’m not finished with it yet because I’ve still the second wave for the last 50 lessons to do, but I’m quite astonished that I’ve managed to get this far. I must confess that when I started out in April I wasn’t so sure that I could keep working on a lesson a day for more than a hundred days as I did. The fact that I managed it must count as an unmitigated success for my standards. And not only have I proven to myself that, with the right materials, I too can be consistent in my studies, but it seems that I’ve also learnt some French along the way. Today I took the placement test again to see what actual progress I’ve made in French. It was the same paper as the two previous times so I was starting to worry that its accuracy would plummet after these repeated tries. As it turned out, though, the first part was so easy this time that I scored enough points to move on to the second one which was brand new for me. In the second part I answered correctly 19 out of 40 times, which corresponds to a B1+ CEFR level. I scored abysmally on the items about verb conjugations (which means that I got it right only once in ten questions), but clearly the Assimil method doesn’t work very well on memorizing conjugations. I can probably recognize most verbs if I see them, but I can’t actively produce them. I will have to do some exercises for that, but that shouldn’t be much of a problem, as most other textbooks have plenty of those. The problem is finding the time! Keeping my schedule of one new Assimil lesson a day (plus the corresponding second wave lesson, plus some revision) has eaten up most of my free time. I don’t seem to find time either for working on other French textbooks (I had begun a couple which I have already dropped—temporarily, I hope) or for working on my Swedish (now almost confined to using Anki and listening to some radio). But I’m also lacking some free time for such leisure activities as reading, and I miss the pleasure of losing myself in a novel. I usually read upwards of 30 books a year, but since April (when I started Assimil) I’ve read only two. :( OK! I’ll stop complaining now because I think today I should only celebrate my milestone. Who knows, maybe I might discover some miraculous time-managing system and realize I’ve all the time I need for relationships, life commitments, languages, and other hobbies. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| xandreax Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5682 days ago 142 posts - 160 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 27 of 360 27 July 2010 at 7:38am | IP Logged | ||
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I was wondering what happened during this time - nice to see an update :) Congrats on the milestone!
And I think a lot of us can definitely understand the time management problem - I am an avid reader of novels as well and I feel like when I am putting a lot of effort into languages and studying them daily I end up not being able to read novels as much. Just wondering - what other French textbooks were you using? Edited by xandreax on 27 July 2010 at 7:39am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5129 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 28 of 360 27 July 2010 at 4:16pm | IP Logged | ||
Thanks xandreax! I’ve noticed in your Italian log that you too have been working hard in the past month. So congrats to you too! About the books: Dominique Berger/Nina Spicacci, Accord, méthode de français, Didier, 2000. 160 pp. This one is a typical textbook for evening courses, therefore it’s targeted at adults. It was my sister’s and she lent it to me because she gave up on her French ages ago. It comes with a student CD (which is always a plus), but it would be nice to have access to the teacher audio programme as well. There is also a companion website at http://www.didieraccord.com/ where you can do some online exercises, but it looks as if that was an afterthought, as it offers very little compared to other companion websites I saw online for other textbooks. I stopped at about Unité 3, mainly because of time constraint than for anything else. Alberto Lombardoni, Approche, Milano: Edizioni scolastiche Juvenilia, 1988; 1994. 544 pp. This one is a textbook for Italian school children aged 11-13. I bought it at a bargain price when a local bookshop was closing down some years ago. It came with a workbook, and theoretically one could buy audiocassettes to go with it, but the shop didn’t have them and I didn’t bother to search for them (I suspect this textbook is out of print by now). I did the first 4 Units which means the first hundred pages and honestly I like it. Even though it’s dated as a method compared to Accord, it suits my learning style in that it offers plenty of exercises—both oral and written—to use, reuse, and manipulate the linguistic structures just learnt (just consider: each unit consists of about 25 pages, so there’s plenty of space for exercises). What I find lacking in Assimil (and I must say that that doesn’t change my positive opinion of it) is that it doesn’t offer enough opportunities to consolidate your learning apart from repeating each lesson over and over. I mentioned in the previous post that most of my mistakes in the placement test were on the conjugations of verbs. Truth be told, I’m only on lesson 66 or so in the second (active) wave of Assimil, and most verb tenses are introduced later in the book, yet I’m not sure whether Assimil is the right way to go when dealing with conjugations. Maybe some traditional drilling exercises is what I need and a book like Approche offers those in spades. PS. Assimil, Approche, Accord: what’s up with all these French textbooks with titles starting with A? Just a coincidence, I know, but I was bound to notice it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| xandreax Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5682 days ago 142 posts - 160 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 29 of 360 29 July 2010 at 6:36am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for answering - very informative - it's always interesting to know what people are using to study their languages!
I'll leave a few (inexpensive but excellent, I assure you!)suggestions. Check out these following sites if you want! Reading the reviews is also very helpful. Even if you don't use any of them, it's good to know about them, I think. 1) http://www.amazon.com/Practice-Makes-Perfect-French-Tenses/d p/0071478949/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1280377823&sr=8- 1 2) http://www.amazon.com/French-Verb-Drills-Roussy-Sales/dp/007 1420878/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1280377965&sr=1-3 3) http://www.amazon.com/French-Workbook-Jeffrey-Chamberlain-Ph -D/dp/0764132415/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1280378015&s r=1-1 4) http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-French-Practice-UItimate-Refe rence/dp/0071416722/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=128037801 5&sr=1-2 Happy studying! :) Edited by xandreax on 29 July 2010 at 6:37am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5129 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 30 of 360 19 August 2010 at 7:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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I believe this log is overdue an update.
French: Assimil lesson 89 second wave Swedish: Schwedisch Lektion 7 Lehrbuch Kapitel 3 Text 2 Anki: almost 1500 facts I think it was a couple of weeks ago that on the forum there was a thread about how the passive wave of Assimil may turn out to be a motivation killer: for me the motivation killer is the active wave. (I’ve managed to find the thread here: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=22280&PN=2) I’m now doing lesson 89 of the second wave of Assimil French but I’ve noticed that studying has become a real chore lately. It seems that things have become rather boring after I finished the first wave, as if by not tackling a new lesson together with an old one I’m depriving myself of most of the fun of language learning. It’s a pity, given the positive general impression Assimil has given me over the months. It’s still the only language book I’ve worked on with any kind of consistency so it’s just natural that I’d love to keep moving on one lesson a day to its conclusion. It would take just a couple of weeks now, and I truly hope I won’t give up just now that I have the first real target in sight. Anyway, to keep myself motivated on language learning overall, I’ve spent more time on Swedish: not just Anki but also new textbook lessons. Honestly I don’t know whether this may have interfered with my Assimil experience: perhaps I really can’t study two languages at a time, but I must admit that I enjoyed the time spent on Swedish in the past couple of weeks infinitely more than the time spent on French. Luckily the Swedish textbooks I use have answer keys at the back, so I can check them to correct the mistakes I make in the exercises, but this week there was a more open-ended exercise consisting in summarising the content of a dialogue. I’ve noticed that I’ve produced a very different version from the sample solution they offered in the keys (probably because I’ve used several subordinate clauses: a topic my textbooks haven’t officially introduced yet). So here we go! If a native Swedish speaker happens to read this log, please feel free to correct any mistake or point out any problem you may notice. Your help will be much appreciated! Inger Lundén brukar hämta sin dotter och Anna Mårtenssons pojke från daghem varje tisdag. Idag har hon en tid hos tandläkaren och hon vet inte om hon hinner hämta barnen i tid. Hon ringer till Anna som tyvärr inte är hemma. Hennes man är inte hemma också: han är fortfarande på jobbet. Inger pratar med Annas syster som bestämmer att hämta barnen själv. Edited by Emme on 19 August 2010 at 8:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5129 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 31 of 360 30 August 2010 at 8:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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Time for another short update. My Swedish is coming along smoothly whereas I’m still struggling with keeping up with Assimil. As I wrote in the previous post, I’ve lost momentum since the end of the passive wave. ‘En revanche’, I’ve watched a couple of episodes of ‘Commissaire Brunetti’ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0896667/) on the French broadcaster France3 website (www.france3.fr). I must admit that it's been a rather bizarre ‘international’ experience watching a German tv-series dubbed in French, set in Italy, and adapted from crime novels written in English by an America expatriate (Donna Leon)! Apart from once watching ‘Amelie’ (Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain) in the original version some 6 or 7 years ago—after having watched it dubbed in Italian, of course!—I had never tried to watch anything in French before, and I must say that I’m quite pleased by the results. I’ve managed to follow the story sufficiently well, even tough there were still quite a lot of words I couldn’t get. But I think that this overall positive experience proves that I can begin to integrate my formal studying with authentic materials and hopefully keep boredom at bay in this way. Finally, I have to confess that I’ve been stricken (again) by ‘language wanderlust’ and I’m considering whether or not I should start dabbling in another language. Right now the first candidate would be Japanese: I’ve been collecting tons of material for it in the past several years so, from a practical point of view, I could start studying it any day. I’m not sure I want to learn Japanese to any advanced level, I’m probably more curious to understand how it works—after having read so many linguistic books stressing the peculiarities of different language families, it’s probably time I got to know one Non-Indo-European language in better detail. Moreover, knowing myself as I do, I am aware that for me the best way to stifle wanderlust is to set myself the goal of studying a language, say, for half an hour or even for just a quarter of an hour a day for a month. Generally after a week I’m ready to give up, I’m that hopeless at staying on track. So don’t be surprised if I come back to this forum for a few days mentioning Japanese or another language and then all of a sudden all mentions of that language simply vanish from my posts: I wasn’t really studying it, and neither was I dabbling in it. It was just my cure for wanderlust. As Oscar Wilde said: “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Impiegato Triglot Senior Member Sweden bsntranslation. Joined 5215 days ago 100 posts - 145 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, Italian Studies: Spanish, French, Russian | Message 32 of 360 16 October 2010 at 10:04pm | IP Logged | ||
Here are your mistakes: - Det ska stå "daghemmet" i stället för "daghem". - Skriv "Hennes man är inte heller hemma" i stället för "Hennes man är inte hemma också". - Det ska stå "...som bestämmer sig för att..." 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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