A reflection on some progress that I've made:
I wanted to boost my moral and kind of gauge my progress, so here are some things I've revisited:
Fortheo wrote:One tree hill is frustrating me only because I know for a fact I understand what they're saying (I've read the scripts a day before) but I still need to listen to each scene about 2-3 times to catch what they're saying, and that takes a long time; a 40 minute episode ends out taking me close to two hours.
That was from 11 months ago, so almost a year. I've came back to One Tree hill in french and watched the first 13 episodes recently, and while not perfect, I've made a lot of progress: I don't refer to the script at all anymore, and while I do re-wind and re-watch scenes rather often, it's usually more-so just the perfectionist in me verifying that what I heard was actually correct, which it usually is. I'm spending about 50 minutes to an hour on a 40 minute episode and understanding around 98 percent (I miss a random slang word here and there), but if you compare that to the two hours I use to spend on an episode last year while also being overly dependent on the script, I'd say there's been definite improvement. I'm guessing watching 3 seasons of Avatar, a season of Maison Ikkoku, a season of Nana, and listening to a bunch of podcasts have helped bridge the gap
Here's something I revisited in the reading department:
Fortheo wrote:I feel like I'm knocking at the door of using real, authentic, french media (not translations), but my experience with Musso right now has sent me crawling back to translations for a little bit. I can read Musso, but I run away when there are numerous dense paragraphs of descriptive phrases
That was from August last year.
This is the book in question:
I picked this up two days ago, determined to finish it this time; and although I haven't finished it yet—I've been reading a chapter, then reading it again while listening to the audio book (the audio book is great, by the way)—I've already made it further than I did 6 months ago. There are still a few descriptive phrases here and there that give me problems, but they just seem a lot less intimidating now, and other than those few descriptive phrases here and there, I'm actually finding this book relatively easy. Don't get me wrong, it's at a good level for me, but compared to how much I struggled with it 6 months ago, I'm really happy with how simple the language seems to me now, so much so that I can actually enjoy the book this time around! I can't believe that it was only 6 months ago that I struggled with it
One last thing: do any of you notice that as your listening comprehension improves, your brain kind of starts to predict the end of peoples sentences before they're finished? A lot of times I'll hear the beginning of a phrase, which starts my brain off on a track, then my brain feels like it just fills in the rest before even hearing the rest, and after the person finishes the sentence my brain verifies, "yep, that was indeed what we expected, no need to pay extra attention to it." It's a very strange sensation to explain. It's almost as if my brain is economizing its resources as I don't really need to focus hard while I do this unless the prediction that my brain made turns out to be wrong, then my brain has a "hold up, what?" moment and I need to re-watch the scene.
Yeah, that's really abstract and difficult to explain, but hopefully someone understands it haha.
Russian:Slow, consistently slow. I hope to finish michel thomas within the next few weeks, but we'll see.