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

[rdearman]

For French, La Rochefoucauld springs to mind right away. Here is a sampler. His book Maxims is at La Rochefoucauld at Gutenberg.

Excellent! Although you gave me the translation in English, but the French version is on the site too. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14913

This lead me on to some Voltaire. Anyone know any more French & Italian philosophers?

[Cavesa]

I have the same problem. I have so much stuff that I want to read, but I can't decide if I should start reading it now or wait for the Super Challenge and just concentrate more on "real" study for now. I do hope you figure out the bot thing. With so many computer nerds around, it should be possible. Shouldn't it?

Obviously, you don't have enough stuff to read. If you had, reading before May wouldn't even make a noticeable difference on the shelf.

Btw congratulations to your daughter's good taste, rdearman.

[rdearman]

Btw congratulations to your daughter's good taste, rdearman.

LOL, didn't work out. Oh well.

[rdearman]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dictionnaire-proverbes-sentences-maximes-Maurice/dp/2035903769/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1456088149&sr=8-1&keywords=dictionnaire+des+proverbes%2C+sentences+et+maximes

In the US I can only buy an old edition, used, for $21.

http://www.proverbes-citations.com/

Very good! Thanks.

I had a look through and had to laugh at this one.

Les chaînes du mariage sont si lourdes qu'il faut être deux pour les porter - quelquefois trois.
Alexandre Dumas

[rdearman]

Well another boring post about how much studying I haven't done. I'm disappointed that Inspector Montalbano has stopped on the BBC, but I'm still watching Spin. I've got a couple of other youtube videos I watch regularly but they are normally only 10-15 minutes. I need to find some more TV series to watch in both French & Italian before the Super Challenge starts. It is a bit worrying that I'm not making any progress and I'm going to be stood in a building full of polygot soon with the "dear in the headlights" look.

My schedule doesn't change much. Trying to catch up on a huge backlog of anki cards in four languages. Watch a couple TV shows each week, and do a session with a tutor for French. I listen to French radio station in the morning on the way to work for about an hour when I can, lately the AM reception has been crap, so I couldn't hear anything and it was only today that I managed to tune in one of my normal stations.

I got a lot of French music loaded on spotify, so listen to that when I get a bit bored of everything else.

Finally I wanted to discuss my experiance with HelloTalk. To be honest it isn't great. The three languages I try to use if for all have slightly different problems. French just doesn't seem to have a lot of users available to speak, or the ones I approach aren't interested. My level of Mandarin isn't high enough to go much past hello and how are you. Italian is ok, has more users than French, and people seem more willing to engage in longer conversations. However they all seem to have the same problem I have in Mandarin. Their level of English isn't good and mostly I just talk Italian. Not that I'm complaining about this.

Then there is the problem with not having anything to talk about. I'm not much good at small talk, and it is difficult to keep a conversation going. Personally I think this HelloTalk would be more useful if there was a secondary category for interests other than languages. Trainspotters, or people who hate Apple Macs, etc. At least then I'd have something to talk about other than the weather and where do you live. This problem of course isn't just limited to HelloTalk, it happens all the time.

[garyb]

I used SharedTalk HelloTalk for around a month and then got fed up of it and deactivated my account, as my experience was similar to yours: just lots of short and superficial conversations. It was a distraction and not helping me much. I put my languages as French and Italian, and 95% of the contacts I got were from Italians, which is standard for a language exchange service.

[rdearman]

Garyb reminded me of sharedtalk, which is closed now I think, but I took a look at the new SharedLingo website. This is basically an user implementation of the same thing. But it seems well written and quite fast. I logged in 2-3 times this week and joined the Italian room. Which as garyb pointed out has people willing to talk. The other busy room was English where a ton of people wanting to learn English stayed, and not one native speaker. The Italian room normally boasts 1-2 Italians and a couple of us learner types. Last night when I was there it was really very good and I spent well over 3 hours typing in Italian (great for the old output). Lots of conversation, and nobody dipped into English. I had a side conversation with one of the Italians so they could practice some English, but otherwise it was full on Italian.

The French room was empty except one poor lonely lady who chatted with mostly in English. The reason being my French output isn't as good as Italian, since I have been doing my Output Challenge in Italian, not French. I can say with confidence however that I can misspell words in four different languages. French however is the worst one for me and spelling.

I've been ripping Lost season 4 because it has Italian audio & subtitles, and a couple of other DVD's I have for the French in preparation for the Super Challenge. Normally I shove all this stuff on an external hard drive so when I am travelling I can watch them with the usb port on the hotel TV, or on my laptop.

Not a lot else to report. Still plugging away on the zillions of anki cards I have outstanding, and I'm actually putting in a bunch more. I've downloaded closed captions from YouTube for a couple of songs and I've used emk's substudy tool to generate anki cards based on the song. Although this song didn't have the English captions I have imported it straight in. I could have spent some time messing about with getting a translation, but didn't seem worth the time. This seems to be a very good method for me to gather up a lot of cards quickly. After all there are a lot of videos on Youtube from University lectures to vloggers and lots of them have CC in the right language. I used Google2SRT, substudy for all of this.

[garyb]

Actually I made a mistake in my post, I meant HelloTalk, which you had just been talking about, not SharedTalk! I've edited the post now. My experiences with SharedTalk were actually a bit more positive. But it looks like something good came out of it if it reminded you to try SharedLingo. I've not tried that myself yet.

[rdearman]

I've got an interesting little note if anyone is learning Hanzi (Chinese) or Kanji (Japanese) characters. I've found a little Firefox extension (kanjilish) which changes the first letter of a word in English into the Chinese or Japanese character for that word. It does this for any web page you're using. So for example on my page right now it has replaced all occurrences of the word "language" with "語anguage" this extension with another extension, Perapera Chinese, which will show the definition of any character I don't know by hovering over it is brilliant. It means that I can be reviewing Hanzi characters, while I'm surfing normally.

The extension allows you to use custom XML files, so you could have the first letter of a French word replaced with the equivalent Chinese or Japanese character.

This almost certainly conforms to "The way of the lazy fist".

The only drawback I've seen so far is if you actually want to copy the words on the page without the characters, then you have to disable the extension and restart the browser. But it is still very cool.

[rdearman]

My wife’s shopping with my daughters had a tremendous effect on my anki card review this weekend. 1 hour in Fat-Face meant I spent one hour perched on a hard wooden step and 300+ hanzi cards completed. 1/2 hour outside a cafe on a plastic seat while she was shopping Jack Wills allowed me to comple 100+ French verbs drills. 50+ French audio cards, while she shopped for photo frames. 50+ Italian audio cards while she shopped for birthday cards and presents. 30-40 miscellaneous other cards while she flipped through a clearance rack in TK Maxx.

Otherwise my language learning has been not a lot. Worked on some French with a tutor and watched Spin, trying to avoid reading the sub-titles.

I have to say, I'm really ready for the Super Challenge to start now. It keeps me on track and forces me to work each day on a TL. Roll on May!