Woodsei wrote:This is such a great idea! I don't know why it never occurred to me, since I do that pretty much for anything school or work-related, just to keep it all in one place and organize my thoughts. This would especially help here because I feel I have been spreading myself thin all over the place and my resources are scattered around. Just print, file, and thankfully look at
one resource for an extended, uninterrupted session
And your log is so much fun
So much. I am especially enjoying the positive tone and your progress is extremely significant and such a motivating factor. First PM, now you. So glad I'm doing French
Hey Woodsei, thanks so much! Very glad to hear this is helpful. I really like working with the binder - for instance, I have a separate section with materials for my application, including a few
fiches (still have no idea what to call these in English - pages of notes?) containing key takeaways from the school's own marketing materials and other sources. Really useful to keep it all in one place.
A couple more notes on my "
methods": I recently started writing out particularly interesting / useful expressions I encounter on little post-it notes and putting them up all over my desk; I've since run out of desk space, so I've instead cleared some wall space for a board instead. Having my eyes fall on these things has been really helpful in retaining everything.
I discovered another
podcast I absolutely love: it's called Transfert by Slate.fr, and it's basically people talking about weird things that happened to them. Fascinating!
On the
writing front, I think I've officially gotten to the point where I can just sit down and spit out 1,000 words on a pretty serious (though well known to me) topic in about 40 minutes with 1-2 lookups max. It's actually ridiculous - today I had
opinions about things I'd seen on TV, so I just sat down and wrote them out, only getting stuck once on the word "paresse"
of all things. So at the end of it all I sit back, check the time, check the word count, and think to myself, "alright, yeah, that was fine, I can definitely talk about this intelligently". And then, quite literally the very next thing in my mind is "but this probably wouldn't be sufficient to pass C1 writing...", even though I rationally understand that it absolutely would. It just stunned me that I'm still subconsciously thinking in terms of my skills at the
beginning of this cycle. Ugh.
Finally, on a slightly
odd note: I don't know how common this is, but I've noticed that when I listen to one specific person speaking for an extended period of time, I typically walk away with some of their behaviors stuck in my speech for at least a little while. It could be intonation or their accent or the positioning of their lips or a particular word they use frequently or whatever, but it just imprints in my brain. After every movie starring Blake Lively, I pout for at least a week straight; it's really strange.
Now it's started happening again. Fortunately for my purposes, the one single person I happen to be listening to the most in French these days is, in fact, Emmanuel Macron, and so if anyone's going to imprint their French ways on to me, might as well have it be him. He has a fairly distinctive speech pattern, a certain staccato to the way he forms sentences, and as I write my essays now, I'm noticing that that staccato has carried over to how my brain naturally wants to think in French, using the same sort of constructs. It's sort of freaky but also cool all the same.