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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 49 of 331 05 March 2012 at 9:10pm | IP Logged |
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T minus 3 Weeks
blackdahlia - I did a couple lessons of FSI Volume 2. I find that FSI takes more mental focus, so it's harder to do when I'm juggling multiple languages. I also wanted to focus on speaking skills a bit more. Come May I think I'll just focus on French again, and go back to FSI and Assimil. Catalan And we're off! The first chapter of Teach Yourself covered the alphabet, gender, numbers, pronouns, the present tense of "to be," the present tense of the reflexive "to be called," (i.e., 'my name is'). It was a lot to take in. I resorted to the old-school methods of cramming and memorizing. Derja Tunisia Switching to cramming and memorizing here, also. I have enough of a base that I can provide a context to the phrases in my book. But if I may vent: The vocabulary list in the back of the Assimil book only lists half of the words they use in the dialogues, and because it is the Tunisian dialect I can't find the words in a regular Arabic dictionary. There is no vocabulary list for my Maghrébi book, or for FSI. Nor do either of these provide a translation for their dialogues, or an answer key for their exercises. It is extremely frustrating. French MT Advanced, CD3 starts off with a review of the 19 tenses he's covered so far. I might spend all day just on this five minute section! I also downloaded a bucket-load of free and inexpensive French classic literature. Here's what I've found ... The A-List: Free audio on LibriVox; free / $1 Kindle versions in both English and French: - Jules Verne, 20000 lieus sur le mer - Jules Verne, La tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours - Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, La Belle et La Bête - Gaston Leroux, Le mystère de la chambre jeune - Charles Perrault, Histoires ou contes du temps passé - Marcel Proust, A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fluers ("Within a Budding Grove" in English. What an awful translation.) It looks like people are currently working on the audio for Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misèrables. The B-List: Free / $1 Kindle versions in English and French, but no audio: - Gaston Leroux, Fantôme de l'opéra - Stendhal, La Chartreuse De Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) - Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary - Honoré de Balzac, Le pére Goriot - Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann (I already had Lydia Davis's beautiful English translation, which is not free) I suppose that's enough for one lifetime, eh? Edited by kanewai on 05 March 2012 at 10:37pm 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 50 of 331 05 March 2012 at 9:15pm | IP Logged |
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I'm having the same problem with the Michel Thomas Advanced course in Italian. It makes my head swim!
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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 51 of 331 06 March 2012 at 10:48pm | IP Logged |
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Thirty minutes from the end of the last tape, and Michael Thomas says, "there is one
more thing I have to tell you ..." Dammit. Really. I'm almost finished, I've just mastered nineteen tenses, it's the home stretch, and now you say "one more thing???" "... we have something in French called the subjunctive ... " and I hang my head in defeat. Of course. I was trying to pretend that it didn't exist; I was hoping that this mood would just stay quiet and not bother me. The thunder was so loud last night I couldn't sleep, so I rode out the storm curled up on the couch with the subjunctive and my cat. Edited by kanewai on 06 March 2012 at 11:09pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| microsnout TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Canada microsnout.wordpress Joined 5260 days ago 277 posts - 553 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 52 of 331 06 March 2012 at 11:22pm | IP Logged |
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Nineteen verb tenses !!!
Are you kidding me ? or as they say here in Québec "Tu me niaise-tu ?" I think you could throw out 10 and still have too many. Francophones tell me they use maybe 4-6 in spoken French. Good luck with the subjunctive, my language partner tells me he doesn't even use that but of course he does, he just doesn't notice. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Quabazaa Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5398 days ago 414 posts - 543 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German, French Studies: Japanese, Korean, Maori, Scottish Gaelic, Arabic (Levantine), Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (Written) | Message 53 of 331 07 March 2012 at 7:38am | IP Logged |
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Do you know about Litterature Audio? They may have some of the audio books you haven't found yet and their recordings are much more uniform than Librivox.
Wow is it really 19? I'll pretend I didn't hear that and continue without getting depressed :P 2 persons have 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 54 of 331 08 March 2012 at 8:56pm | IP Logged |
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Literature Audio looks like an incredible resource, thanks!
In the end the French subjunctive wasn't so hard after all. And even the nineteen tenses isn't as hard as it sounds ... he includes passive and active voice in his count, and some of the tenses that are different in English (such as 'he sells the house' and 'he is selling the house') are the same in French. They add up quickly! The real benefit of these last CD's, though, is going to be with my reading. I often gloss over the nuances when I read; as long as I recognized the verb and basic tense I haven't focused too much on whether it is in the conditional, imperfect, subjunctive, etc. I moved on to the Language Builder. If anyone is looking to buy it, a word of warning: it is not done in anything remotely like the same style as his Foundation and Advanced Courses. It is more like one long run-on sentence, where you are expected to hit 'pause' and translate the phrase he gives you. There are no students, and he barely takes a breath or gives you a chance to actually hit the pause button. Imagine two hours of: He wants to go there il veut y aller he would go there il voudrait y aller he would go il voudrait so he would go there il voudrait y aller I'm going to put this one aside for the moment. It will be nice as a refresher, and will help me get some of the most common phrases down. One of the challenges I find with courses like Assimil is that they teach a lot, but it's hard to tell which idioms are common and which are rare, or which ones we really should work on remembering. Michel Thomas Language Builder does seem more focused on the set phrases that we could use every day. Catalan and Italian I'm trying to keep these to their own separate days, but I really should be doing a bit of them each on every day. What I find fascinating is that I can finally see how Romantic languages exist on a continuum. Italian, French, and Spanish all appear very distinct. Catalan is also very distinct from those three, but once you look at all four the distinctions start to blur. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Hendrek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4671 days ago 152 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Persian | Message 55 of 331 08 March 2012 at 11:29pm | IP Logged |
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That language builder course sounds to me like the review CD that comes with the
courses, right? (or at least it came with my beginner's and advanced courses) Maybe I'm mis-understanding your description, but it's basically just him saying the phrase without any real pauses and you having to come up with it very quickly to keep up. That's exactly like my review CDs. That's also how I helped myself with my conjugation fluency in Italian: I went through that CD several times until I could just respond without even needing to hit pause. Now I really don't even need to think much to come out with something like "non avrebbe dovuto essere così" (it shouldn't have been this way). I also practiced some scriptorium using this tape, which turns into speed writing with the pace. Of course, it's not so necessary to practice scriptorium in a language that uses the roman alphabet, but it was a way to do something different while still reviewing, and I think engaging the hand muscles does do something for activating learning. 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 56 of 331 09 March 2012 at 2:42am | IP Logged |
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Hendrek, that's exactly what I meant. I think I will come back to these cd's in a few weeks, when I'm more in a 'review and refresh' mode. I'd love to reach a point in Italian where this format would be useful, but I'm still at the beginners stage there.
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