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s.mann’s French ** TAC 2015 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4703 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 41 of 58 18 January 2015 at 8:57pm | IP Logged |
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Did you get your Assimil NFWE for Christmas? I found that NFWE did a lot to make things like the passé composé seem really natural, and give me a good "feel" of when to use être and when to use avoir (Pimsleur helped a lot with it as well). I know you have loads to be getting on with, and it will no doubt work really well for you. But if I would change one thing, it would be to get into Assimil and save French in Action for the next thing after Assimil.
Also, be careful about overdoing Duolingo. If you do too many new lessons at once, the day of reckoning will come when they all degrade at once and it takes you a week just to make your tree golden again. I've had an on-again off-again relationship with Duolingo partly for that reason. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| s.mann Groupie United States lang-8.com/973514/jo Joined 3432 days ago 55 posts - 76 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 42 of 58 20 January 2015 at 2:04am | IP Logged |
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@Jeffers
What you say about NFWE before FIA totally makes sense to me, and I do have it now, so I should get to it. What I really want to avoid is repeating beginner work since I'd rather advance, so this kind of feedback and prodding is really awesome and helpful. I'll certainly pay heed, I'm just still eager for some entertainment options and don't really know what I can handle. I totally get what you're saying about the day of reckoning thing too, and I feel like I'm there with Lingvist. Having set a minimum of new vocab for the last couple of weeks I've had to spend longer and longer on there to get to new words each day... I'm going to back off and let that solidify while I see if I can get my percentage in Duolingo to catch back up. They used to be mostly tracking with each other, but Lingvist is now ahead 5%. I realize that to an extent this is arbitrary since they are using different bases for comparison, but it still indicates to me that my vocab is exceeding my grammar comprehension. @Mohave Thanks for the encouragement. It really helps when I do these weekly assessments and feel like I fell short on parts of my plan. I saw from your log that you're longing for the days when it becomes second-nature, and miss the beginner stage I'm in. Just know I envy you at least as much. I'd love to be plowing through native materials like you are, struggle or no! :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| liam.pike1 Groupie Australia Joined 3548 days ago 84 posts - 122 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto, French | Message 43 of 58 24 January 2015 at 5:35pm | IP Logged |
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Hey!
Yes, I second Jeffers advice about getting stuck into Assimil. If there's one thing I should have done to make my '3 month challenge' a success (not that it wasn't a success, but you get what I mean) then it would have been to focus on Assimil from a month in to my challenge. I say 'a month in' because it doesn't explain a whole lot of the fundamentals, and a bit of background knowledge is probably essential (unless you're one who is happy to just go along with things. Some, however, may be forever put off by not understanding why, for example, it goes 'je parle', 'vous parlez', 'nous parlons' ext.). With hindsight, I think that Assimil is probably the method which will allow one to progress with their French the fastest. Duolingo is good for doing this as well, especially for people completely new to language learning (I was one of those not very long ago). However, I reckon you should definitely watch French in Action on the side, or whenever you need a break from Assimil... Keep up the awesome work :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| s.mann Groupie United States lang-8.com/973514/jo Joined 3432 days ago 55 posts - 76 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 44 of 58 26 January 2015 at 7:26am | IP Logged |
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Week in Sum:
Lingvist – minimum 150 cards per day, but no minimum or average number of new words this time. Do 1 listening and 1 reading from the site per day. Done and done Duolingo - All gold and get to passive voice. 100xp per day, 100% on skills. Yep yep, and I'm ahead a little bit, finished pluperfect and 3/6 on the Nature skill. The extra XP seems to be keeping the tree stable at all gold. French in Action – I did not watch any of this, but I rewatched some Marco Polo with French sound and French subs for entertainment. L’avis de Marie – I felt like I was understanding more and more of the emission, but I got bored with it mid-week and didn't do it daily as planned. RFI – I only did this on Monday, because honestly I forgot and have a lot going on in parallel. Michel Thomas – I seem to be the weirdo who isn’t into this series. Feels way too slow even though there are a few things I don’t know that are getting covered. I probably should have started with this much earlier in the process. +1 hour. GLOSS – do at least one of the 2+ reading exercises - I scaled this back to a 1+ after taking a swing at the 2+ exercise. I think some easier ones that give me an idea of what it's expecting as responses are in order, plus the grammar and vocab leap was enormous. I'm thinking I may have lucked out on my test placement. I think the extra work on Duolingo has been really good for me this week. Toward the end of the week I kept having questions come up that I wasn't sure how to answer, but my instinct was right most of the time. With the 150 card maximum, vocabulary on Lingvist didn't really progress very far (only 5 new vocab words), but that was expected. I'm going to keep it on slow for next week while I keep hammering Duolingo for the grammar practice and expansion. I feel like I’m on the cusp of something good with my listening, but being on the cusp is frustrating and it’s been there for days without any sign of a breakthrough. I will listen to longer excerpts like a show or a podcast and I'll keep picking out all of these 1-3 word sections that I understand, but then my brain goes direct to translate mode, and I miss what’s next. If I force myself to keep listening I generally just lose what I recognized before, and it still doesn't make a complete thought in the end. I probably know 90% or more of the vocab I’m hearing and can hear most of the separate words, but I can't even focus on the listening long enough to understand any content. This even happens with things like L'avis de Marie, when I’ve listened to a single episode 10+ times and know exactly what the gist is and quite a lot of the specifics. The only thing so far that’s been decent was News in Slow French and these current early lessons in Assimil, probably because they are speaking so slow I have time to do the switching back and forth. Plans for next week: Tracking - I really need to come up with a good system for tracking hours for the 6WC, so I will work on how I'll do it this week. Duolingo - Continue with 100XP per day, finish the next 4 vocab skills and tackle gerunds and future tense if I feel like it (18-20 lessons) Lingvist - bump up to 200 cards per day, plus the 1 listening and 1 reading per day Listening - can select from RFI or L'avis de Marie at will for 20-30 minutes of listening work per day. Assimil - figure out where it fits into my life, and get at least 5 new lessons in (lessons 5-9) FSI Phonology - do one more lesson some time this week when I have extra time. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| fortheo Senior Member United States Joined 4830 days ago 187 posts - 222 votes Studies: French | Message 45 of 58 26 January 2015 at 8:03am | IP Logged |
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Looks like your making good progress! I wouldn't worry too much about the translating in your head right now. It seems to go away after you encounter the words more and more in various contexts.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| s.mann Groupie United States lang-8.com/973514/jo Joined 3432 days ago 55 posts - 76 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 46 of 58 30 January 2015 at 9:09pm | IP Logged |
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Doing my month-in-review now because tomorrow is going to be busy:
Lingvist: 1762 words (+504 words) 80% (+4%) hours - 37:18 (+13 hours), have worked on it for minimum 150 cards every day since the 2nd of Jan. Duolingo: 1589 words (+353 words this month) 1/3 through Future tense (+14 skills), 78.4%, all gold (some needed strengthening at beginning of the month) SUCCESS! Anki F-F pronunciation deck: M: 352; Y+L: 247; U: 0 ;S+B: 15 (up from: M:43; Y+L:238; U:306; S+B: 27) worked 53% of the days the last month. Pimsleur: Completed through lesson 14 (no progress) Assimil: Started this month, on lesson 6 And the thing I was most dreading... the extemporaneous speech recording: S.Mann @ Soundcloud (Actually, don't listen to it until next monthly posting, this is just a baseline. I seriously hadn't tried to speak for a full minute in French before today. It can only get better from here.) In preparation for the 6WC I started using Toggl to track my time, based on a teammate's recommendation (sorry, can't remember who and Google search doesn't seem to have it indexed yet). I like Toggl so far, it's really helping me track down how much time I spend on actual language-learning tasks. I haven't logged quite as much time for direct learning activities (browsing and posting don't count...), so I think that I'll do well to get some more activities in for the challenge. I'm not counting random things I do throughout the day, like finding out how to really use merde from ohlalafrench, or watching dubbed clips of movie scenes I like, and it's not easy to remember to track the time for little things like that anyway. I've also been doing more than just the above, such as the Harry Potter and now Jules Verne LR'ing and show watching, but I think the above projects are the definite long-term projects that will have a clear result at the end. I'm not doing LR dogmatically, but it's the best way to describe what I'm attempting. I'm now reading along with Voyage au centre de la Terre. Since I actually did a lot of translation work on Duolingo for this a few months ago, it's easy so far, but I dropped out at chapter 13 so it will probably get difficult after that since I've never actually read the story. I will at least finish LR through Chapter 13 and then may intensively read the rest of the book, or perhaps I'll just continue anyway and see what happens. The chapters are short so it's easy to assimilate in small chunks. I'm using the farkastranslations website parallel text and a litteratureaudio.com non-professional audio reading for this. I feel like the voice actor blurs his words a little more than I'd like, but I need to get used to that eventually. I need to get cracking on Assimil. I think the early lessons are not that exciting for me especially since I did listen to the first 10-15 repeatedly on the road trip last month. I think one of my hang-ups is that even though the reading/vocab/grammar isn't difficult at all yet, I am trying to "master" the dialogue, FSI-style, and I'm just not there yet. I think once I get rolling with it I'll really be into it, based on my looks ahead into the curriculum. I dropped update line about FSI Basic because I think that I'm going to use it as Professor Arguelles (sp?) recommends and only really use it for drilling grammar and structure points to mastery from an intermediate position instead. I'm going to do FSI Phonology from the beginning again though, until those basics are truly mastered. And I'm rethinking my intent to do the FSI Metropolitan French FAST course for the 6WC and instead develop something that's more tailored to my interests, like news and culture-based rather than transactions. I haven't talked much about the Fluent Forever Anki deck I'm using, so here goes: It's not free, but it's good, has minimal pairs and trains some specific spelling rules which really do help. I'm being pretty hard on myself with perfection on it,and insisting on perfect spelling with the accents even though I'm being lenient with myself regarding accents everywhere else so far. Even if I wasn't so demanding on myself, some of the minimal pairs like notre/nôtre and sais/ces are just impossible for me to hear so far, and others where I can hear a difference I can't remember which is which and why (like boeuf y and boeufs phi). I plan to keep it up semi-regularly and see if over time and varied exposures it doesn't start becoming more discernable. A couple of plans on the horizon: I picked up Practice Makes Perfect: French Pronouns and Prepositions from the library and plan to work through it - I already did unit 1. The author recommends doing it twice through, which seems like a good goal. I think these grammar points are really good to focus on at my stage. While the verbs come intuitively on Duolingo, I keep making errors with en/à/dans/y etc. and I don't seem to be internalizing why it's one way or the other with Duolingo's method. And last, I want to declare my intention to take the TCF in mid-September to see how far I've come in 1 year. I really want to rock it, and think I need a minimum of 6 months of speaking to get anywhere on this because true immersion is not an option this year. Edited by s.mann on 31 January 2015 at 3:19am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| s.mann Groupie United States lang-8.com/973514/jo Joined 3432 days ago 55 posts - 76 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 47 of 58 02 February 2015 at 5:15pm | IP Logged |
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Regarding the 6WC:
I've done some soul and forum searching, and decided not to use FSI FAST as my course for the challenge. I think it would be better if I had a more immediate need to interact with French speakers in French, but alas I will have to chase them down and make them talk to me instead, which means I need to be much more interesting rather than transactional. So, the revised plan: Reading (as little as 10 minutes a day, more if it’s compelling) Continue my LR with Voyage au Centre de la Terre with some potential intensive reading if it gets too opaque to enjoy after the part I translated on Duolingo a couple of months ago. Grammar (2 hrs/day, 5 days/week, 30 minutes on weekends) Finish the Duolingo tree Work through the Practice Makes Perfect: Pronouns and Prepositions workbook at least once, possibly twice. There are 18 units and Unit 1 took me just under an hour according to Toggl. That would be worthy. Possibly follow-on with some lexical drills for the pronouns and prepositions from FSI Basic to really drill this part in before moving on. (? Hrs) (Sort of) Speaking (1 hr/day, 5 days/wk) Give myself up to 3 weeks of the 6 to work through French Phonology again and nail it. Restart Pimsleur after feeling confident with pronunciation, which should get me to at least the end of Pimsleur I (morning, review previous; evening, new lesson, on the treadmill) Pure Listening Listen to RFI daily with the transcript in hand (cheat with Google News if I really can't figure it out from both of those). Work backwards through News in Slow French (see Writing below) (Sort of) Writing (30-45 minutes a day?) Type out transcripts as I hear them of the short old broadcasts of News in Slow French. At minimum check them in Word for spelling mistakes. See if anyone on the forums wants to help me correct them. Vocab Keep up with Lingvist! As I get closer to the end of Duolingo it becomes more clear that I'm going to run out of overlap and will need words further down the frequency list. Thankfully, Lingvist can and will manage that for me. Overall Assimil NFWE – I WILL get through to lesson 49. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| s.mann Groupie United States lang-8.com/973514/jo Joined 3432 days ago 55 posts - 76 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 48 of 58 06 February 2015 at 6:43pm | IP Logged |
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Not a full update, but I wanted to highlight that Découvrir la science politique on edx.org has
now started. I am really happy how well I'm able to keep up with the lectures and do the quizzes without much use of translation at all. I've gotten to the part where you're expected to read excerpts from "The Prince" and trying to decide if I should tackle that in French, or be realistic and read the assigned chapters in English. I think I'd rather have a chance to write something useful in a reasonable amount of time so I can get it checked on Lang-8 and posted before the deadline than try to read a French translation of dated Italian... Bonne chance a tous qui prennent la course avec moi ! 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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