Rdearman 2016-24 You Can't Have Your Kate and Edith Too.

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arthaey
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Re: Rdearman (FR, IT, ZH) 2016/17 - The way of the lazy fist.

Postby arthaey » Sat Feb 25, 2017 6:21 pm

DaveBee wrote:France Culture's 'Samedi Noir' programme seems to be 1 hour radio dramas, my fave so far is Grand hôtel Babylon.

Thanks for the link! I browsed through all their podcasts and subscribed to a bunch of them. :)
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Re: Rdearman (FR, IT, ZH) 2016/17 - The way of the lazy fist.

Postby rdearman » Sat Feb 25, 2017 7:12 pm

DaveBee wrote:
rdearman wrote:I've been trying to spend more time listening and the majority of that time has been French. I've been watching "Trollhunter" which is a cartoon on Netflix with French audio. It is a struggle, and I really need to get more focus.
France Culture's 'Samedi Noir' programme seems to be 1 hour radio dramas, my fave so far is Grand hôtel Babylon.

Yeah that is where I got my version of Les Aventures de Tintin : le Lotus bleu
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Re: Rdearman (FR, IT, ZH) 2016/17 - The way of the lazy fist.

Postby DaveBee » Sun Feb 26, 2017 1:26 am

arthaey wrote:
DaveBee wrote:France Culture's 'Samedi Noir' programme seems to be 1 hour radio dramas, my fave so far is Grand hôtel Babylon.

Thanks for the link! I browsed through all their podcasts and subscribed to a bunch of them. :)
One I like is Un vie, une oeuvre. If I'm already familiar with the subject, I find I can follow along quite well (e.g. Daphne Du Maurier, Tolkien). But with someone whose career I'm unfamiliar with I can be a bit lost - no bad thing! :)
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Re: Rdearman (FR, IT, ZH) 2016/17 - The way of the lazy fist.

Postby rdearman » Sat Mar 04, 2017 8:53 pm

--- Super Challenge Update ---
Target: Double Challenge in French & Italian; Quarter Challenge in Esperanto, Mandarin and Finnish

--- SC Statistics ---
French : 51.2 books : 100.00 films
Italian : 52.1 books : 46.9 films
--- On-Hold ---
Chinese: 0 books : 4.0 films
Esperanto: 0.2 books : 0.5 films
Finnish: 0.0 books : 7.2 films
--------------------------------------

Well, I completed 100 films a full challenge for films in French, Last time I completed 112.3 films in French. This means since May 2014 I have watched (and recorded watching) 212 films, or 318 hours (13.25 days @24 hours) of French. It sounds a lot, and it is a lot, but am I better at French now? This is a difficult question.

When I first heard of the super challenge I thought it would be the silver bullet which would finally let me understand everything spoken to me in French (or Italian) but... After more than three hundred hours of watching or listening I still feel that my French isn't sufficient. My output is poor, my grammar is rubbish and I still don't understand as much as I need too.

That is the bad, the good is I do understand a lot more than when I started. I have a TV series I watch in French "Valérian and Laureline" which I don't have sub-tittles for and everything I've understood is just from listening. I watched the first five episodes again this time and I do understand more than before. If I were to give an estimate I'd say 60%?

I still have another 150 hours of films in front of me to get the double challenge mark. I've long since given up on the idea that it will be like Fry drinking a 100 cups of coffee in Futurama (below). It gets better, little by little, bit by bit and getting at the end of the Super Challenge doesn't give you super powers for comprehension.

I wonder how many films I'm going to have to watch to get to 100% comprehension? *sigh*....

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Re: Rdearman (FR, IT, ZH) 2016/17 - The way of the lazy fist.

Postby reineke » Sun Mar 05, 2017 3:02 am

rdearman wrote:--- Super Challenge Update ---
Target: Double Challenge in French & Italian; Quarter Challenge in Esperanto, Mandarin and Finnish

--- SC Statistics ---
French : 51.2 books : 100.00 films
Italian : 52.1 books : 46.9 films
--- On-Hold ---
Chinese: 0 books : 4.0 films
Esperanto: 0.2 books : 0.5 films
Finnish: 0.0 books : 7.2 films
--------------------------------------

Well, I completed 100 films a full challenge for films in French, Last time I completed 112.3 films in French. This means since May 2014 I have watched (and recorded watching) 212 films, or 318 hours (13.25 days @24 hours) of French. It sounds a lot, and it is a lot, but am I better at French now? This is a difficult question.

When I first heard of the super challenge I thought it would be the silver bullet which would finally let me understand everything spoken to me in French (or Italian) but... After more than three hundred hours of watching or listening I still feel that my French isn't sufficient. My output is poor, my grammar is rubbish and I still don't understand as much as I need too.

That is the bad, the good is I do understand a lot more than when I started. I have a TV series I watch in French "Valérian and Laureline" which I don't have sub-tittles for and everything I've understood is just from listening. I watched the first five episodes again this time and I do understand more than before. If I were to give an estimate I'd say 60%?

I still have another 150 hours of films in front of me to get the double challenge mark. I've long since given up on the idea that it will be like Fry drinking a 100 cups of coffee in Futurama (below). It gets better, little by little, bit by bit and getting at the end of the Super Challenge doesn't give you super powers for comprehension.

I wonder how many films I'm going to have to watch to get to 100% comprehension? *sigh*....
]


I'd like to offer some helpful advice without annoying you...too much. First let me note that some 300 hours of listening practice spread over 2.9 years is not much. I don't want to make light of the fact that you're sacrificing precious free time but I am not surprised that you are not at 100% comprehension. And while we're at it, there's a huge gap between understanding most things "at 100%" and near-native comprehension. Second, you were working to push two foreign languages to C1 level. In a year. While working on Mandarin. Then you threw in Finnish just for fun. I assume that you're referring to real working proficiency and that you actually care about this. You may have heard the saying that the first language is the hardest. That's no joke. Finally, please don't treat French, Italian, Spanish etc. like some easy stops on the way to bigger and better things and don't let yourself be influenced by such attitudes.
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Re: Rdearman (FR, IT, ZH) 2016/17 - The way of the lazy fist.

Postby smallwhite » Sun Mar 05, 2017 3:47 am

reineke wrote:... some 300 hours of listening practice ... I am not surprised that you are not at 100% comprehension.

With a Cat I language, what % comprehension did you reach after 300 hours? How many hours did it take you to reach 98-100% comprehension?
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Re: Rdearman (FR, IT, ZH) 2016/17 - The way of the lazy fist.

Postby Arnaud » Sun Mar 05, 2017 6:09 am

rdearman wrote:
Well, I completed 100 films a full challenge for films in French, Last time I completed 112.3 films in French. This means since May 2014 I have watched (and recorded watching) 212 films, or 318 hours (13.25 days @24 hours) of French. It sounds a lot, and it is a lot, but am I better at French now? This is a difficult question.

When I first heard of the super challenge I thought it would be the silver bullet which would finally let me understand everything spoken to me in French (or Italian) but... After more than three hundred hours of watching or listening I still feel that my French isn't sufficient. My output is poor, my grammar is rubbish and I still don't understand as much as I need too.

That is the bad, the good is I do understand a lot more than when I started. I have a TV series I watch in French "Valérian and Laureline" which I don't have sub-tittles for and everything I've understood is just from listening. I watched the first five episodes again this time and I do understand more than before. If I were to give an estimate I'd say 60%?

I still have another 150 hours of films in front of me to get the double challenge mark. I've long since given up on the idea that it will be like Fry drinking a 100 cups of coffee in Futurama (below). It gets better, little by little, bit by bit and getting at the end of the Super Challenge doesn't give you super powers for comprehension.

I wonder how many films I'm going to have to watch to get to 100% comprehension? *sigh*....

I could have written exactly the same post. Remplace the word french by russian, replace 300 hours by 400 and it's exactly the same result and the same mixed feelings. In his little book, "the word brain", Bernd Kamps gives the figure of 1500 hours to reach a confortable level of understanding.
The problem is that he says that amount of time can be easily integrated in daily activities (kind of "Steve Kaufman is learning Korean while washing the dishes") but it's not my personal experience: you need to be concentrated and it takes a lot of time, even if I listen a lot while commuting and walking...
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Re: Rdearman (FR, IT, ZH) 2016/17 - The way of the lazy fist.

Postby rdearman » Sun Mar 05, 2017 9:53 am

reineke wrote:I'd like to offer some helpful advice without annoying you...too much. First let me note that some 300 hours of listening practice spread over 2.9 years is not much. I don't want to make light of the fact that you're sacrificing precious free time but I am not surprised that you are not at 100% comprehension. And while we're at it, there's a huge gap between understanding most things "at 100%" and near-native comprehension. Second, you were working to push two foreign languages to C1 level. In a year. While working on Mandarin. Then you threw in Finnish just for fun. I assume that you're referring to real working proficiency and that you actually care about this. You may have heard the saying that the first language is the hardest. That's no joke. Finally, please don't treat French, Italian, Spanish etc. like some easy stops on the way to bigger and better things and don't let yourself be influenced by such attitudes.

Oh it didn't annoy me, in fact I've come to the same conclusion, which is why I've more or less parked everything except French & Italian. I'd point out that the 300 odd hours is just the stuff I've logged, but I take your point. I do mean working proficiency and I do care about it. Actually I'd be rather pleased with myself if I only managed to get French and Italian to C1 proficiency. In fact I would be rather smug about it! I don't think people here can say often enough that learning a language is:
  1. Bloody difficult
  2. Takes a long time
  3. Takes a lot of effort
At the moment other than doing anki cards for Mandarin, that language has more or less halted. Once I gave an analogy of language learning, not to climb a mountain, but rather it is like moving a mountain one spoonful at a time from it's location to your backyard. S everyday you set off with your wheelbarrow and your spoon, you get to the top of the mountain and dig up a wheelbarrow full and bring it home. The sigh in my post was because I've brought back yet another wheelbarrow full to my house, and even though I have a huge hill in my backyard, when I look back at the mountain, nothing seems to have changed!

smallwhite wrote:
reineke wrote:... some 300 hours of listening practice ... I am not surprised that you are not at 100% comprehension.

With a Cat I language, what % comprehension did you reach after 300 hours? How many hours did it take you to reach 98-100% comprehension?

This is an interesting question, which Arnaud eludes to and mentions Bernd Sebastian Kamps. I'd be really interested in what other English speakers think is the tipping point for listening comprehension.

I should point out at this point, that when reading in French I run into very few words I don't know. I've done a number of tests (non-official) which rate me at around C1 for reading. Interestingly my reading in Italian is much worse, but I understand far more when watching Italian TV. I think this has something to do with the fact that Italian is written as it is spoken, and has only one silent letter. In America my teacher used to say "Spell it like it sounds" and for Italian this is certainly true. But for French it seems to me that a word being spelled like it sounds is the exception rather than the rule. :)

Arnaud wrote:I could have written exactly the same post. Remplace the word french by russian, replace 300 hours by 400 and it's exactly the same result and the same mixed feelings. In his little book, "the word brain", Bernd Kamps gives the figure of 1500 hours to reach a comfortable level of understanding.
The problem is that he says that amount of time can be easily integrated in daily activities (kind of "Steve Kaufman is learning Korean while washing the dishes") but it's not my personal experience: you need to be concentrated and it takes a lot of time, even if I listen a lot while commuting and walking...


I've come to the conclusion that in order to get more out of it I need to be more "engaged" in the thing I'm watching (or listening too) and that just having it as background while doing the dishes would be a waste of time. I've recently discovered that if I listen and learn the same way I read and learned it works better. So I have a lot of extensive watching happening, but no intensive watching. For intensive reading I would read and lookup every word, but I've not done any (or rather wasn't doing any) intensive listening, where I take a small clip perhaps 1-3 minutes duration, and listen and lookup every word. Luckily this is something which I can do easily with anki, and I started that process in January.

Also, I'd like to report as a case study of one (me) that in order to get over the 100 mark, I have been binge watching/listening French for 4-8 hours per day for the last week and it was starting to creep into my thoughts. I caught myself thinking in French on the odd occasion.

15,000 hours seems a lot to me for EN->FR but 7,500 seems realistic. However, given my experience with binge watching, I'm wondering if not only is "time applied" a major factor, but also "time on task" might be even more relevant. Could I cut my 7.5k estimate, or M. Kamps 15k estimate down but simply using All Japanese All The Time (AJATT) time mentality and binge watching 4-8 hours consistently for the next X months?
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Re: Rdearman (FR, IT, ZH) 2016/17 - The way of the lazy fist.

Postby reineke » Sun Mar 05, 2017 4:13 pm

smallwhite wrote:
reineke wrote:... some 300 hours of listening practice ... I am not surprised that you are not at 100% comprehension.

With a Cat I language, what % comprehension did you reach after 300 hours? How many hours did it take you to reach 98-100% comprehension?


I don't think anyone can give you such a precise answer. With Portuguese I was able to enjoy a detective-type show after 150 hours of listening. If I switched to something else, my comprehension would suffer. The first 20 hours were almost pure incomprehensible input. After 50-60 hours I was able to string together many consecutive sentences while watching a simple TV show like DBZ. After 300 hours I was able to switch between shows with relative ease. I was still seing progress after each 50-hour block and a few nights' sleep. Spanish was easier.

I don't think that's fair to rdearman, though. When I was 12 I was already able to watch Italian TV and I started studying French pretty early. Also, I accumulated these hours in a short period.

If I were to choose one 30-minute episode with a 100% comprehensible quadrilingual audio track, my processing of this material would be different for each language.

Rdearman, if you were to focus on French or Italian your progress would be faster. The time spent flipping through the Anki cards for Mandarin could be spent reviewing French. I've noticed that you've been complaining that you cannot find interesting things to watch. Spend some time gathering interesting resources. This is important.
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Re: Rdearman (FR, IT, ZH) 2016/17 - The way of the lazy fist.

Postby reineke » Mon Mar 06, 2017 4:30 pm

rdearman wrote:
Ah well, 1st world problems eh?


While I do believe that people should feel free to express themselves... I immediately knew where I could share this article.

Why the phrase ‘first world problem’ is condescending to everyone
It’s not just a comical apology for trivial moaning and an enjoyable internet meme – there’s also something darker going on.

The phrase “first world problem” is these days used as a comical apology for moaning about trivia. It is also an enjoyable internet meme, with a dedicated subreddit.

But why do we speak of “first world problems”, exactly, and what might we unintentionally mean when we do?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.thegua ... o-everyone
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