Pir(anha)'s Tank

[pir]

Now that the decision has been made to maintain this site for good, I can buckle down and create a language log. I am not certain yet what to keep here. but I'll start with talking about ancient history and then move on to describe the current "plan". (I am not actually a planner.)

After decades of malign neglect, I have tackled French once again, starting 2 months ago. History: learned it originally in high school, with a teacher I despised, who had the most horrific German accent, and the methods of a drill sergeant. I didn't think somebody could make me hate languages, but she managed it with French. Fortunately I had other teachers for English and Russian. Dropped French like a burnt French fry as soon as I could. Perversely, a lot of that vocabulary stuck.

Fast forward some years and I found myself living in Gex, which is across the border from Geneva in the French Jura. I was working for a Dutch company in Geneva, and living in France was much cheaper. I thought I might pick up French again, and was excited about it. But the native French speakers were not. I'm still not sure what went wrong; I've always had great success speaking their native language with people -- except in France. Also, I lived in an apartment building with lots of lower echelon diplomatic folks, and everybody spoke primarily English. So, paradoxically, my English and my Dutch improved while I lived in France, but my French sucked as hard as ever.

Now I live in Canada and think it's a crying shame to live in a bilingual country and not speak both official languages fluently. So here we go again. Since I live in BC, I can't properly immerse myself, but there are at least Francophones here, and they LIKE it when I try to speak French. I had a great time when visiting Québec and New Brunswick as well.

It's kind of difficult to assess my own level -- I've passed various random tests on the net as B1, and one even as B2, but I don't think that tells the right story at all. I can actually still manage to read much of a daily newspaper, and so my reading level is probably B1, but my other skills are generally no better than A1. My speaking skill has completely atrophied, so I am rebooting it doing what I usually do -- flashcards taped to things around my home and shop, and talking to myself, describing the world around me and what I am doing with the things in it.

Since I have a tendency for jumping too far ahead and thereby leaving gaping holes, I've restarted properly as a false beginner. I've discovered Duolingo and Memrise and am evaluating them. I am almost finished with the Duolingo French from English tree, and will start the reverse tree by this weekend. I've finished a basic French course on Memrise (~500 words), and have got those solid, and can produce them in speech as well. I've also started Memrise's new A1 course. I have an old Assimil course which I think I am now ready for. I am goldlisting (sort of) idiomatic expressions I come across.

I've been trying to watch various TV shows. When I came to the US, I practiced English by watching soap operas because they are dialogue-heavy, people enunciate clearly, and use everyday speech, without much slang. It was ... interesting. I am not a big fan of the genre, but it was indeed helpful, in more than one way -- it also gave me something to talk about with people with whom I had otherwise little in common (I'm normally more inclined to congregate with geeks), which also helped to expand my knowledge of English across class divisions.

I was thinking that this might work for French as well, but have so far been blocked by region filtering; have to learn how to circumvent that. I watched a few episodes of the reality show «Coup de foudre au prochain village» but oy, they speak much too fast. However, a lot of stuff repeats in reality shows, and parts are highly ritualized, so it's becoming easier as I go along. Again, not my favourite genre, but it's everyday language and not too demanding vocabulary-wise as soon as I can get up to speed.

[kimchizzle]

Bonne chance avec ton apprentissage de français.

I apologize greatly if this response is too short. I wrote a lengthy response once already but I am on mobile and was interrupted by some family members, and by the time I returned to submit the post my login info had expired and what I wrote was gone forever.

Here is my advice, from reading I think you said your French level is around A1-A2 depending on the skill (I hope I read that right), even though you scored high on tests. It seems like you may be in a similar position as I was with my Spanish. First, I'd wholeheartedly recommend you try the FSI French course at your level. If you never heard of FSI, it was language course developed by the US government for US diplomats to get them to speaking fluency in the most efficient way. I recommend it because I am actually shocked how much my speaking has improved in such a short time. The trick to the course is to listen to each lesson once a day for at least five days in a row, because the lessons work on a principle called overlearning. Some people use FSI in different ways, some people only listen to the lessons for certain lessons they want to study and others like me start close the beginning even though we understand a good bit reading. The only lessons I didn't do five days in a row were the very beginning pronunciation drills but I did go through the second pronunciation lesson I did three days in a row. I feel good though that by the time I finish the whole FSI Spanish course, I will have a fairly good accent because the courses are spoken only by native speakers.

Next bit of advice would be write a few sentences everytime you write your log here. I've noticed my vocabulary has grown a lot just by writing Spanish in my log. I don't always know words I want to use, so I look them up and use them in my writing. I have found that the words I look up I can still remember easily even a few days later.

[pir]

Merci beaucoup pour me donner ton conseil, kimchizzle. Sorry you lost your first attempt!

Yeah, I've heard of FSI, got it downloaded some years ago, started and ... I don't know what happened; I couldn't stick with it. Maybe it was the format, maybe the type of language used, maybe it was just me (not a good time in my life). I do better with Assimil now, though that's not ideal either. I quite like what I've seen of Glossika, which feels more modern, so I am considering that; will subscribe to their 30 day trial. It's odd how critical my mind now seems of dated language -- it's not like I am a spring chicken myself. I don't quite understand it.

I write every day; I make a journal entry trying to use most of the words I've learned the previous day. I don't really want to copy that all here; I am instead planning to put it on lang-8 once I have time to again do corrections for other people there. I really like lang-8, I get a lot out of it, and am hoping to get some native-speaker friendships out of it that will lead to actual spoken conversations.

I've been busy with other things, so I haven't made a study plan yet, and am just pounding vocabulary and watching some reality shows right now. I hate reality shows, but I gotta say the format really works (a lot of ritualized repetition), and the language is simple and colloquial. Come fall, I will have more time, and am intending to buckle down and push listening and speaking drills. I might give FSI another look.

[tomgosse]

Bon courage avec vos études.

I'm in a similar situation as you. I had a lot of false starts learning French, and a very boring teacher in junior high school. Keep us posted on your progress. If you want, you can read my log at http://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1185

À bientôt,
Tom

[pir]

Other than French, on which I am concentrating, I am also working on Japanese and Spanish.

Japanese writing, to be precise. I have a fair bit of vocabulary from watching a lot of anime and jdrama, as well as listening to audio drama while reading manga in translation (very faithful), and it's really fun to be able to write a lot of words now that I know hiragana. It took me longer than I expected to learn it, but I am making unfair comparisons -- sure, I learned the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets in no time, but I was young then; the depression really mucks with my memory now. In any case, I've got hiragana down, which should make katakana a bit easier. And then comes the really cool stuff: kanji. I am very much looking forward to it; I have a book with kanji in the bathroom and I peek every day, just browsing through it. I have a pretty solid plan for how to tackle kanji.

Spanish jumped me while I wasn't watching. I started it as an experiment, because some self-proclaimed expert pontificated at me about how one shouldn't learn more than one language at once, but at least the ones I was learning were not related. I already knew he was full of it about learning more than one at once; I learned three in high school. But I had to see whether the relatedness would be a problem. Answer: no, it isn't. At all. I don't get the new Spanish words confused with French. And I get a fair bit of cross-fertilization from French into Spanish. So I am continuing it now, but I am taking it slow so I am not distracting myself too much from French. 15 min of vocabulary a day won't hurt anything.

And then -- because I can't leave well enough alone -- I was wondering whether it just wasn't an issue since I am at a more advanced level of French, and I am not learning the same vocabulary at the same time. So I added Portuguese. And indeed, that was a problem, and I did get confused. So I dropped it again, but I am considering adding it back when I'm more solid in Spanish. It would be kinda neat to speak the whole passel of major romance languages at a basic conversational level. Spanish and Portuguese would also come in real handy if I actually make it down to South America once the boat is in the water.

Lastly, I came across a fantastic new resource for Romani: http://qualirom.uni-graz.at/ has A1-B2 materials for six Romani dialects. Not for the one I started learning originally (Sinti, the dialect of my ancestors), but among others Kalderaš which has developed into a sort of Inter-Romani. I grabbed those materials and am gonna have a look. Since my old Romani friends died, I have had no more contact with naive speakers, and materials were impossible to come by, so I stopped learning it years ago. I am pretty excited about this new find. But I gotta pace myself.

[Jar-Ptitsa]

Hi Pir

Your avatar is beautiful. Can you make this origami bird?

[pir]

Hi Pir

Your avatar is beautiful. Can you make this origami bird?

Thank you! Yes, I can. I have made quite a few. It's called a 折り鶴 (おりずる、orizuru) in Japanese. There are instructions here, if you'd like to try it yourself, it's easy: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... ki.svg.png

[pir]

I've had a good week. Despite being very busy otherwise, I put good effort into all three languages, every day. Fortunately the heat broke, and it's been cool and raining the last couple days.

French: Finished my Duolingo French tree, and started the reverse, which is a lot more productive. Duo says I am 61% fluent; that still cracks me up every time I see it go up or down by a point. I'm continuing both the Duolingo Vocabulary and the French A1 courses on Memrise, have also kept the Basic French in rotation to continue reviewing, and everything reinforces each other, so I don't end up with many "difficult" words. Memrise has added listen-and-type, and listen-and-multiple-choice exercises, which is nice. All the Memrise vocabulary I am learning is rock solid, and I can produce it in speech during my daily "talk to yourself" exercises. On Duolingo the only things that are solid are those which I've anchored through Memrise -- Duo's method does not work well for me, and were it not for the nifty grammar discussions in the comments for each exercise, I'd have dropped Duo already. I think as I am advancing I will instead move to LWT and get my sentences from sources I pick myself.

I've finished watching Coup de foudre au prochain village, and alas I can't bear to watch it again. Reality shows are just not my thing, it was ok once through, but any more would be like pulling teeth. I did catch a fair number of colloquialisms, and that was good, but for the most part it was too fast, and my parser was still on the first few words when people had moved on to the next sentence. If I had this on my hard drive, I could slow it down, but I streamed it. I need my input to be more comprehensible.

Watched a couple of episodes of Extra, which is so cheesy and exaggerated that despite my fondness for fromage, I can't bear watching more of it. @Arnaud recommended Hélène et les garcons, and that also has a high cheese factor, but less so than Extra, and people don't talk in such a horribly exaggerate manner, so I'll probably continue with it for a bit.

@tomgosse recommended French in Action, an old PBS series designed in the days when immersion was the new thing. I found a copy on Youtube, and it's quite good. A bit basic for me, but I think I will continue watching. The speech is very natural, quite speedy, but they repeat things so often that it sinks in anyway. And it's entertaining in a very kind way. Nous allons inventer une histoire de deux jeunes gens, Mireille et Robert! I don't have the accompanying materials, but I have put out feelers to see whether I can glom them from somewhere. Oh, I should check the library.

Wrote daily diary entries, a bit short this week because I was busy watching video, but still, using all the words I'd learned. I was considering taking up the daily challenge here, which I think is a spiffy idea, but I don't think that fits well with my current learning plan. I rather strengthen the new vocab for now.

[pir]

Spanish: Continuing the Spanish A1 course on Memrise, probably doing around 5000 points a day (my goal is set for 1500, but I consistently do more, I just don't want to lock myself into 6000 -- amusing how those little mind games work: i am more motivated by overshooting a lower goal than I am working up to a higher one). Since Spanish jumped me in a dark alley, I didn't start it properly, with pronunciation exercises, so I am catching up on that now. Found a decent set of lessons on Youtube, Professor Jason: https://www.youtube.com/user/languagenow/ -- now, he is not a native speaker, but he actually instructs well for somebody coming from English, and he sounds right. I'll start with him and then check out some native speakers. My trilled 'r' has always sucked, but I could fake my way through. I'm tired of faking it, and I don't think the average perro and burro will let me get away with it, so I put that on the agenda to finally conquer.

Also found a used book after my own heart (hack the language!): Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish by Margarita Madrigal. It's old (written in the 1950s) and illustrated by none other than Andy Warhol, which is amusing. It concentrates on starting with cognates and on how to easily change which English ending to which Spanish Ending, introduces past tense first so one can actually talk normally about things one has done instead of being awkwardly forced into present tense, has very clear and simple grammar explanations. I will probably outgrow it soon, but it's a quick start with a lot of the kind of stuff I usually have to ferret out myself.

Japanese: Continuing Learn Hiragana using Vocabulary on Memrise. I continue to be blocked on a couple of words that won't stick, so I think I need to actually make mems for them まゆげ (eyebrows -- oh look, there they are) and ひこうき (airplane -- huh. Ok, both no longer blocked it seems; funny). I keep practicing writing hiragana by hand; I feel (and write) like a first grader, so ugly. Got myself a ふでペン (brush pen for writing) from Japan, and a book on journal writing in Japanese (with furigana and English translation). The book is still a bit advanced, but seeing it sitting there inspires me.

[tomgosse]

I've had a good week. Despite being very busy otherwise, I put good effort into all three languages, every day. Fortunately the heat broke, and it's been cool and raining the last couple days.

@tomgosse recommended French in Action, an old PBS series designed in the days when immersion was the new thing. I found a copy on Youtube, and it's quite good. A bit basic for me, but I think I will continue watching. The speech is very natural, quite speedy, but they repeat things so often that it sinks in anyway. And it's entertaining in a very kind way. Nous allons inventer une histoire de deux jeunes gens, Mireille et Robert! I don't have the accompanying materials, but I have put out feelers to see whether I can glom them from somewhere. Oh, I should check the library.

Wrote daily diary entries, a bit short this week because I was busy watching video, but still, using all the words I'd learned. I was considering taking up the daily challenge here, which I think is a spiffy idea, but I don't think that fits well with my current learning plan. I rather strengthen the new vocab for now.

The French In Action videos can also be found at the web site of Middlebury College. They also have the audio files that are needed to use the workbook. You do have to register, but it is free. http://sites.middlebury.edu/french-action/

Tom