My return to this site, coupled with my return to "formal" study has begun well.
FrenchThis week I opened up my
Hugo French in 3 Months for the first time in almost a year, to work on week 8 which starts with the imperfect tense. I think the book is good, but I've never been sure of how to use it. For each section I read the explanations, I think though the example sentences, and then I try the exercises and end up making stupid mistakes for about half of them. So I put it down, try again the next day, and make the same mistakes again! My intention in using this book has been to gain a solid grasp of the basics of French grammar, and it clearly hasn't been working. I was wondering if the book was really for me.
So yesterday I tried something different: I began an Anki deck for Hugo. First I made a table of the imperfect endings: front = "imperfect endings", back = each subject with its ending, e.g. je -ais, tu -ais, etc. Then I entered each of the example sentences French-->English. I flicked through them a few times, then I added the accompanying exercises, which are English-->French. I've worked through them 5-6 times in the past 24 hours and I'm finding it's actually sticking! I think doing the examples in the context of reviewing the table mentally is helping it to stick.
Today I made cards for two relative pronouns que and qui (the back gives the translation + "subject" for qui and "object" for que). For each example I put whether the que or qui refers to an object or subject. For example:
Front:
Voici le permis de conduire que j'ai trouvé.
Back:
Here is the driving license (object) that I found.
When I did this chapter previously, I understood the explanation and examples, but couldn't manage to produce the right answers in the exercises. I'll review the examples several times, and tomorrow I'll put in the related exercises and see how it goes.
So I expect my pattern with Hugo to be this: each day put one section of the week's lessons into Anki. Learn the day's lesson while reviewing whatever comes up from the previous work. Hopefully I should be able to complete each week in a real week, and hopefully it will actually stick! If I manage this pace, I'll finish the text at the end of April.
Besides this I did a few short sessions with Duolingo, having to go right back to the start since most of my tree is dead. I'm on the fence about whether it's worth rebuilding the tree or just dropping it altogether. I've also watched a fair bit of French TV this week. Season 2 of Braquo on Netflix was crap but not as bad as season 1. Full of gratuitous violence in a misguided attempt to be more gritty than anything else, the plot is actually driven by the screw-ups of the cops who nevertheless are "the best" (at least that's what someone said of them in season 1). I've also watched a few episodes of Cain season 4, but these have been disappointing so far compared to the previous seasons. I'll stick with it and hope it gets better as it goes along.
HindiI've begun my reopening of
Le Hindi sans peine by reviewing all the audio, shadowing where possible. After about lesson 10 it was getting harder to shadow, so I'll probably begin my review of the text at chapter 10, but go a bit faster until I get to where I was before (ch 24 or so). At the same time, I've been feeling the urge to reopen the
Routledge Intermediate Hindi Reader. So far I'm sticking to the one book at a time rule, but I'm reviewing my old Anki vocab cards from the reader.