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Kanewai 2015: Team Caesar | ||
Tags: Super Challenge | Catalan | Ancient Greek | Turkish | Polyglot | Arabic | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | Italian | Japanese | French | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4678 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 73 of 331 30 April 2012 at 11:16pm | IP Logged |
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I've been back a week, and have been using Assimil Using French and Jules Verne
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to keep my French moving forward. I also started listing to RFI again. They've all become much easier, which is interesting. I'm sure that I only used basic sentence constructions while overseas, and probably only simple tenses. And yet my comprehension of more complex written French seems to have made a huge leap. I can understand a lot of the Assimil even before I look at the English text, and I can infer a lot of the vocabulary in Jules Verne now from context, without using the dictionary. This feels like <B1> to me! Next stop: B2. This one is going to be harder, as I don't think it's possible for me to reach that level without actively using the language. There are also going to be fewer and fewer guided resources out there. I'll have to get creative. But first, I have Assimil and - maybe - FSI Volume 2 to finish. __________________________________________ And I'm fighting the urge to start Japanese. Or to restart Spanish. My life is pretty busy right now, and I need to focus on doing one language right. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5184 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 74 of 331 01 May 2012 at 12:03am | IP Logged |
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You should think about doing the Super Challenge that Cristina has organized. It would be great motivation for your French. :D
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| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4678 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 75 of 331 01 May 2012 at 9:54pm | IP Logged |
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I'm slowly making my way through the Super Challenge thread. At 48 pages, it might take
awhile. 100 actual books in 20 months is completely unrealistic for me, and everyone's wordpress blogs look great but I can't even figure out how to install wordpress - I hope this all gets explained in the thread (I'm on page 19 already). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5184 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 76 of 331 01 May 2012 at 10:14pm | IP Logged |
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If it's too much, you can sign up for a half challenge instead (either 100 books OR 100 movies OR 50/50 each). The "rules" are on the first page, but it seems to me rather flexible. The idea is exposure and to push yourself to do more.
I don't have a wordpress blog either - I don't think you have to install anything though. You can either keep track of it all in your log here, and/or you can do it on twitter. If you have specific questions, I might be able to help. =) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4678 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 77 of 331 03 May 2012 at 12:36am | IP Logged |
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I signed up, and put my lists on Just Paste It.
I'm a list maker anyways, so that site fits my style! I haven't really decided how to break it up, though; I think I'll add comments on books and movies here, just keep the list as a straight check-list, and touch base with the Super Challenge thread as needed. With that ... I already have some movie reivews! Garçon Stupide - I thought it would be a silly comedy, but it turned out to be a cinema-verité style drama about a young kid living an empty life full of casual sex and the older man who teaches him about deeper values. I was bored within the first ten minutes, and stopped watching. Hollywoo - This was the first French comedy I've seen in awhile that was actually funny. A Parisian voice actor loses her job when the American actress whom she dubs over quites the business. She flies to LA to convince the American to act again. I saw it on the plane, and really enjoyed it. There was nothing deep; it was more a fish out of water story as the Parisian chick tries to navigate the artificial world of Hollywood. I can't find it on Netflix yet, so I don't know when it will come to the US. Watch it if you get the chance! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4678 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 78 of 331 09 May 2012 at 9:14pm | IP Logged |
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I finally caved and joined twitter. Damn you Super Challenge! Though I have doubts
about how useful it will be ... one person already posted 27 films by the eighth day, which seems a bit far fetched to me. I like coming here better and seeing what people actually thought about what they watched. Earlier this week I caught a glimpse of what the next level of French might look like - the level where one would move beyond simply communicating needs, and move into playing with and manipulating the language. It was triggered by Flaubert; I love the way he writes, even though it is difficult for me at this stage. But it was only a glimpse; soon it was back to the grind of solidifying my B-1 skills. That alone will take a couple hundred hours, I think. Assimil Using French got irritating this week (Chaps 36-42). It started off fine, but then there were two chapters on idioms with the verb "faire," one on acronmyms, and one on metaphors. The metaphor chapter in particular was poorly written - there were too many mixed metaphors that made no sense in English, the English translations themselves were archaic, and the footnotes strange and clunky. e.g., one read: "un sigle is translated by the rather pompous English word, an acronym." 'Acronym' seems like a fine word to me, while writing 'rather pompous' is ... rather pompous. I don't trust Assimil with slang, and so I wasn't motivated to focus to hard on these lessons. Or even to stay awake long enough to finish one. It was slow going. On the plus side, I tried watching Game of Thrones in French (Le Trône de fer). I usually hate movies that are dubbed into English, but the reverse didn't bother me at all. I've been wanting to watch the series, and I liked it a lot in French. It helped that fantasy dialogue tends to be straightforward; while I still used subtitles I felt that I was understanding most of the French independently. This doesn't happen yet with native movies. Edited by kanewai on 10 May 2012 at 10:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4678 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 79 of 331 10 May 2012 at 10:42pm | IP Logged |
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I just tried to do a lesson from FSI Chapter 15. And failed. Sigh. I thought I could
pick up from where I left off, or that it would be easy with all the additional work under my belt. I suppose it's good that I still have @ 100 hours worth of study material here, though, to help with the long climb to B-2. I read somewhere on here that almost no one finished the second level of FSI. That alone is motivation for me to try! Though right now I'm finding Assimil and the Super Challenge challenging enough. FSI is something that I'll get back to, maybe this summer, maybe further on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4678 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 80 of 331 16 May 2012 at 4:25am | IP Logged |
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I've started thinking of this as 'French Round 3' for me. Round 1 was two years at the University. Round 2 was reaching B-1 over the past year. And now Round 3, where I aim to go from B1 to B2 ...
French Round 3, Week 4: Where I get jumped by the plus-que-parfait du subjonctif The what? you ask. Isn't that one of those tenses in the back of the book that our professors told us that we would never, ever, have to use? Well. Something has escaped from the back of the book. Witness this paragraph from Madame Bovary: Elle se demandait s'il n'y aurait pas eu moyen, par d'autres combinaisons du hasard, de rencontrer un autre homme; et elle cherchait à imaginer quels eussent été ces événements non survenus, cette vie différente, ce mari qu'elle ne connaissait pas*. There's not a single simple tense in there. The 'literary tenses' are beautiful, but it's hard to take it all in at this point - I hit critical mass and all the tenses I had ever learned suddenly merged into a big pile of mush in my brain. I need to do more than just read and assimilate things; I need to set my ass down and do a touch of good old-fashioned studying. My first step will be to make a complete conjugation reference sheet of the top 20 verbs. I should be finishing Assimil in a few weeks, and I'm looking ahead to what to do next. The Super Challenge is great, but I want something structured to work with also. I've narrowed my choices down to three, mostly based on other posts in HTLAL ... has anyone had any experience with any of them? French Grammar in Context Grammaire progressive du Francais / niveau avance L'exercisier - Manuel d'expression Francaise: CECR B1-B2 ********************************************** (*My take: She asked herself if there might have been another way, by another combination of chance, to have met another man; and she dreamt of events that never happened, the different life, the husband that she never knew.) Edited by kanewai on 16 May 2012 at 4:29am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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