2017 L4, L5, and L6

[James29]

Your last two posts make me think I just need to charge into reading in French and stop messing around with courses. My goals are the same as yours, but I'm definitely behind you in French. Maybe this weekend I'll buy an easy book in French and see what happens. Thanks for the motivation.

[reineke]

Le Petit Prince is a good first book. I would strongly recommend the audiobook version.

http://www.fluentu.com/french/blog/easy ... -learners/

http://www.fluentu.com/french/blog/best ... rn-french/

[arthaey]

http://www.fluentu.com/french/blog/best-books-to-learn-french/

Merci pour tes suggestions ! J'ai acheté deux livres : « Pietr Le Letton » , c'est le premier livre de la série des 75 romans policiers avec Commisaire Maigret, et « Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes » , c'est fiction spéculative.

[sfuqua]

Hey, thanks for all of the great suggestions. I'm desperate to start extensive reading again, so I may have jumped into French "too early", but I'm enjoying it.

So, how do I go forward? I need to listen a lot and I need to read a lot. If I have proper support, I can enjoy reading French. My comprehension fades in and out, but if I like the book and I repeat a couple of times, I can (somehow) understand the French.

I really enjoy listening reading, especially the L-R that follows the pattern of Listen L2 and Read L2. This provides listening to the language and reading it at the same time. The audio drives one through the reading at a pace faster than is comfortable, but the reading supports comprehension of the speech. I've decided to try to do 10000 minutes of LR in both Spanish and French. My Spanish is light years ahead of my French, but I'm going to use Spanish to support my French (at least part of the time). For the first couple of books, I'm going to choose things that I have electronic copies of in both languages. To start, for a book or two, I'm going to read (and listen to) a chapter in Spanish and then follow up by reading (and listening to) the chapter in French. At 150 words a minute my French comprehension is very ragged, but I hope it will improve rapidly.

Probably am excited by this more because of the fact that I am back reading again, but I think that it can't hurt my French, especially since I am keeping up my grind through ASSiMIL in both French and Spanish.

10K SRS Challenge ES FR
10K cards: 4916 / 10000
Super Challenge
FR 10K minutes: 75 / 10000 LR
ES 10K minutes: 140 / 10000 LR

[reineke]

I believe that all your languages may get activated (including Tagalog and Samoan) while you're consuming French content.

The origin of English vocabulary - based on roughly 80,000 words in the third edition of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary:

- Latin, 28.34 percent (22,400 words). These words may have easily recognizable French equivalents. Sometimes they're not easily recognizable since these words may have changed substantially through time.
Lat pictura >Eng picture but in French pictura>pinctura>peinture
Spanish, which developed from vulgar Latin, will be of help with a lot of these words and their French equivalents.

- French, 28.3 percent (22,400 words); Around 2000 of these words are spelled identically in English and French. Some are less easily recognizable. Spanish will be of help here too.

- Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Dutch, 25 percent;
Some basic words like house, door, leg, and dead belong in this group. In my experience, these words are easily learned. Spanish will be of help here if you're studying French but not always. For instance, in Fr. house = maison. In Spanish and Italian the word for house is casa (different pronunciation). Also, some French words like "maison" are internationally known. This includes many expressions.

Internationally used French phrases:

http://www.orbilat.com/Languages/French ... ional.html

- Greek 5.32 percent;
Again, some of these words or word particles may be recognizable in French.
- no etymology given: 4.03 percent;
- derived from proper names: 3.28 percent;
- all other languages: less than 1 percent.
In this group you'll find words like "gringo" .

Forgive me for tooting the horn of phonology and listening comprehension here but I believe that's the Achilles' heel of most language learners. English speakers who are studying French and other Romance languages have few excuses not to go overweight on pronunciation and listening comprehension practice right from the start. The same goes for the speakers of Romance languages studying English, French etc.

[sfuqua]

There is plenty of evidence from research and from users of this site that it should take at least 3 million words of input to reach an advanced level in a language; some suggest as many as 6 million words. I changed my long-term goal to reflect this.

I spent about an hour today doing L-R listening to French and reading French. I have been through this chapter twice in Spanish and once before in French. The first half of the chapter was surprisingly good and then I fell apart during the third quarter. The words wouldn't make sense and I got a strong feeling of fatigue in the brain. I pulled it back together for the last part of the chapter.
I'm not really that worried; I'm very early in this process. I'm pretty surprised that I can read any French

[sfuqua]

I watched an episode of my old favorite, La reina del Sur, last night. Of course I'm a lot better at comprehending it than I was when I first watched it during my first year of Spanish.
When it was time for my hour of L-R today, I felt more like French than Spanish, so I went through the same chapter again. My comprehension was better, of course. I would loose track of things for a sentence or two, but I would always come back. Maybe about half of the sentences in the chapter were completely trivial. This was all at 150 wpm. I've been reading the first book of the Aubrey Maturin series, which is not an appropriate first book. It has long sentences and a lot of vocabulary. I want to read this right now, so I'm reading it. I can read it pretty easily in Spanish, so I can easily enjoy the process. I'm probably going to stop rereading so much pretty soon; it slows down the process.
I did my anki cards today, 215 cards in 44 minutes.

[sfuqua]

OK, I'm not really having any problems; it's just that it is hard to put in the time I want to put in with the challenges of work.
I'm also having a "the glass is half empty" time with my French right now. I keep grinding through Assmil; the reviews build up and it gets less fun...
I cut back my new cards from 40 a day to 20 or 30 for a while, and things got much easier. I suspect that if I'm going to finish these Assimil decks, I'm going to have to slow down my new card feed. It isn't the reviews so much as it is the pain of getting the new sentences into the brain enough to repeat them aloud. A long Assimil sentence can be a pain in the backside to repeat aloud.

Today I tried shadowing instead of reading and it reminded me that I do know something. The French rolled off my tongue and it sounded good, at least for me. Maybe I'll change lunch into a shadowing session instead of a staring into space and doing anki session.

I need to find some easier stuff to read in French. There have been a bunch of good suggestions here and in Jame29's log. I'll try some of these...

[sfuqua]

Last time, I was admitting that I've been a little ambitious starting out doing L-R L2/L2. I looked for something easier to read, and yet again tried Harry Potter. I can read it much more easily, but I have to admit that HP is not my cup of tea. It is not a wonderful memory from childhood, as it is for many people. I read it to both my kids, and about book four they got tired of going through the story 15 minutes a night with Dad reading. They both took off at that point and roared through the last 3 books. My son is 25 and if anybody reads him to sleep, it is his girlfriend. I'm reading Chernow's Hamilton to my daughter right now (she's 10). She is obsessed with Alexander Hamilton.

OK, so I tried what worked in Spanish, cheezy, overly sexed romance novels (for me learning French, not for my daughter). Uh, my first attempt at this was not very interesting, although I did learn some vocabulary.

I needed to look more at cheating (in the emk meaning of cheating)http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=39069&PN=1. There is, of course, stage three of L-R.. http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/!%20L-R%20the%20most%20important%20passages.htm

It, works; I L-R-ed _Bonjour Tristesse_, and, of course, I don't catch everything with one listen, but I can follow the story and I can even understand a bunch of the French. It's fun even if It doesn't work (and I think that there is a lot of evidence that it does). Since I think that it is really more important to find a way to study that is fun than it is to find the most effective (efficient?) method. I did L-R with _El Rey Debe Morir_ also. I can read it without the support of the English text, but there is a certain symmetry in doing to same thing for both languages.

I'm still annoyed at the crummy attitude that French publishers have about selling ebooks outside of France.

Is there anything I can do about buying ebooks that I can read later in the United States if I am in Europe (or France)? I'm going to be roaming Europe a bit this summer and it would be nice to score some decent books to read.

I am really looking forward to summer.

[sfuqua]

I'm probably going to end up the SRS challenge with 5000 cards or something. I have found that I hate doing reviews on cards I already know. When I delete them, my deck gets smaller. Oh, well.

I've slipped a bunch of cards into my learning queue that were constructed from Michel Thomas Spanish and French.

I'm spending an hour or more a day listening to Spanish and reading Spanish and then listening to French and reading French, all from the same book (two translations). The Spanish is helping me get the story and then recognize what is going on in the French. Right now I am aware of rapid improvement in Spanish and less so in French. I suspect that my comprehension in French is worse than optimal for i+1 comprehension.

It is cool what happens after you have been listening and reading in a language for a while. For me the sounds of the words almost take on a three dimensional shape in my mind, the Spanish more than the French. I'm going to keep charging into French for a while and I hope that my comprehension picks up a bit.