B1 French from (false) A0 until 06/2020 (FR with small doses of KO/JP)

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nagoyana
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B1 French from (false) A0 until 06/2020 (FR with small doses of KO/JP)

Postby nagoyana » Sat Oct 26, 2019 6:03 am

Hello everyone,

I have been lurking around here and HTLAL for a long time. Until I got a very good reason to finally register ;)

The reason in question is an opportunity (read: job-chance) for which I will have to reach at least a B1-level in French by June 2020. Since I will be tested then, I’d certainly prefer being as comfortable B1 as possible :lol: However, 4 years of French in school a long time ago notwithstanding, what little has remained currently places me around A0 at best.

Which is why
a) I am going to need all the accountability and additional motivation that I can get and
b) I have decided to start this language log

I am looking forward to being an active part of this great community :D

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Edit1: I am currently considering myself reasonably proficient in 3 languages. I am studying a further 2, of which with one I am stuck on the intermediate plateau and one I have just started.
I am going to use a 8-point scale below with 1-6 being the CEFR-Levels A1 to C2, 7 being a proficient user (something like C2+ or limited native proficiency?) and 8 being educated native proficiency.

DE/German
My mother-tongue and currently the language I mostly use at work as well. There are rumours that I have never actually spoken German but some kind of weird personal variant mixed with several other languages, which I am sometimes inclined to believe... ;)
-- Reading: 8/8
-- Listening: 8/8 (although some accents get me)
-- Writing: 7/8 (not enough writing other than work e-mails!)
-- Speaking: 8/8

EN/English
After 9 years of instruction in school, university lectures, a lot of native content and both a bachelor’s and a master’s thesis in English, English has become a language to use instead of study. I am certainly consuming more content in English than in my native German outside of work.
-- Reading: 8/8
-- Listening: 6/8 (might have difficulties with unfamiliar accents or bad audio quality sometimes)
-- Writing: 6/8 (not worse than German but still takes a bit more time)
-- Speaking: 6/8 (currently de-rusting!)

JA/Japanese
All added up I spent about 4 of the last 14 years (2005 being when I started studying Japanese) in Japan. The second non-native language I am simply using, although I am still keeping up with 漢字 reviews in anki to keep everything I don’t encounter regularly while reading fresh in my mind. Working in Japan has helped getting my writing a bit more up to speed but that is an area that could still use some work.
-- Reading: 7/8
-- Listening: 7/8
-- Writing: 5/8 (feels excruciatingly slow)
-- Speaking: 6/8 (slightly rusty recently due to lack of use)

KO/Korean
Korean is the first language I decided to “learn” (I would not call my experiences with English and Japanese learning for the most part since I had to do one in school and had quite a long immersion experience for the other). And since it feels so slow-going, I have spent quite some time stuck on the intermediate plateau already, but to get off that I would have to stop gravitating to content in English or Japanese when I was originally planning to do something in Korean.
-- Reading: 4/8 (I am missing too much vocabulary for the Topik 5 level but my reading speed and ability to get the gist of difficult texts as well are surprisingly decent)
-- Listening: 4/8 (I can hear what is said but often my mind takes too long to decipher the meaning; can watch dramas without subtitles and follow the plot)
-- Writing: 2/8 (not enough practice at all)
-- Speaking: 3/8 (I can have simple conversations but stumble over missing vocabulary words or Japanisms way to often)

FR/French
I had to take French in school (since I was bent on avoiding Latin) but the language never really interested me. Consequently, after going to Japan in the 11th grade, I lost about 99,9% of my French through sheer disuse. Recently, I have come to appreciate that French is still seen as one of the main languages of diplomacy/international relations which might finally motivate me enough to learn it.
-- Reading: 3/8 (gotta love the roman script and all those cognates!)
-- Listening: 3/8 (Assimil is way too easy but real French still way too hard - Inner French seems to be slightly below my current level)
-- Writing: 1/8 (some short texts so far but I sorely need more practise)
-- Speaking: 2/8 (mostly shadowing and feeling so very not eloquent during language exchanges)

-- Last update: 2020/05/23

Besides the above I admit to having dabbled in Swedish and Croatian. Both are still on my list of languages to learn one day but shelved for the time being due to time constraints.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Edit2: I passed my French B1 exam in May 2020 and decided to discontinue this log in July due to time constraints. The process is still here, though :lol:
Last edited by nagoyana on Sun Feb 07, 2021 4:25 pm, edited 7 times in total.
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nagoyana
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Re: B1 French from (false) A0 until 06/2020 (FR with small doses of KO/JP)

Postby nagoyana » Sat Oct 26, 2019 7:49 pm

So how am I planning to proceed?

I am currently working through FSI French Introduction to Phonology (planning to reach unit 4 this weekend) to make sure that my inner French voice does not mix up any consonants and vowels with German and Japanese any more.

After that I am planning to use
- Assimil Französisch ohne Mühe (French without toil)
- Grammaire progressive du français - Niveau débutant
- Grammaire progressive du français - Niveau intermédiaire
- Assimil Französisch in der Praxis (Using French)

Depending on my mood I might mix in a bit of the following:
- FSI French Basic
- Grammaire progressive du français - Niveau avancé

It seems like skipping Grammaire progressive's Niveau débutant is sometimes advocated in this forum, so I might re-evaluate the above depending on how familiar the first few Assimil lessons feel and how much of my long-forgotten French grammar learned in school decides to come back once I start in earnest.

Besides the courses I have the French translations of Harry Potter and a couple of YA fantasy books which I am going to read as I see fit. I am thinking about getting the audio book for at least one part of Harry Potter as well to further consolidate my listening comprehension and pronunciation.
Oh, and of course not to forget Star Trek Voyager in French on Netflix, since every French learner needs to know the words for warp drive and photon torpedo, right? ;)

Since I already know that I will be quite busy at work until around the end of November, I am not expecting progress to be very quick until then. I am planning to at least finish FSI French Phonology and the first couple of Assimil lessons, though, to hopefully ease the progression into the Grammaire progressive books.
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Gustav Aschenbach
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Re: B1 French from (false) A0 until 06/2020 (FR with small doses of KO/JP)

Postby Gustav Aschenbach » Sun Oct 27, 2019 6:38 am

Sounds feasible.
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nagoyana
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Re: B1 French from (false) A0 until 06/2020 (FR with small doses of KO/JP)

Postby nagoyana » Sun Oct 27, 2019 10:29 am

Thank you, Gustav Aschenbach, I sure hope that this whole plan turns out to be feasible.
However, knowing myself I am pretty sure that instead of simply sticking to it, I will feel the need to tinker with everything regularly until next June ;)


I just finished part 3.2 of FSI French phonetics and the exercises simply fried my brain. I guess the most probable explanation why that happened is that my understanding of French pronunciation has never been great to begin with :D

The funny thing is that I start noticing mistakes in my pronunciation that were probably already there when I was still studying at school. I tend to get lazy when I encounter longer sentences, for example, and start pronouncing all “e”s as “é”s since that is closer to how they would be pronounced in German.
Also, I don't remember finding the nasal vowels too difficult but I have realized that I have a really hard time distinguishing between the nasal sound in words like “non” and the one in “temps”. Not so much when listening but certainly when speaking, which is when I tend to gravitate towards pronouncing everything like “on”. No idea whether that is German interference, too, or something else, but since my sister does tell me “on” feels easier, German probably is the culprit.
Anyways, FSI French phonetics so far does a great job of reminding me of the basics of pronunciation, so I am glad that I tried it out.

On a completely non-French note, it is quite funny as well how committing to studying a new language (=French) makes it a lot easier to start studying another (=Korean) instead.
Don't ask me how much time I have spent watching Korean dramas and going over my grammar notes since I told myself I am going to concentrate on French for the time being :lol:

Actually, I had such a hard time to make myself study for the October Topik II that I wonder whether that would have been no problem at all had I just started studying French earlier...


Edit: Tinkering.
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nagoyana
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Re: B1 French from (false) A0 until 06/2020 (FR with small doses of KO/JP)

Postby nagoyana » Sat Nov 02, 2019 7:15 pm

I spent the better part of the week preparing for and playing Cello at a concert so up until now all I did language-wise was part FSI French Phonology part 4.1 twice and 4.2 once.

Although I looped part 4.1 point 45-53 several times I still cannot hear the difference between some of the sentences in the right/wrong-contrasts. Especially 45 and 46 sound exactly the same to me...
Maybe someone who has used FSI as well could enlighten me what the difference is supposed to be?
(In case any French speaker/learner who hasn’t used FSI wants to check: the respective points start at the 7-minute-mark of the recording.)

Anyways, I think I am going to have to start Assimil soon. Otherwise I might get frustrated by my apparent lack of talent for proper French pronunciation and give up prematurely :lol:


Apart from French I actually finished the Japanese novel I had been reading lately: ICO – 霧の城 (下) ICO – Kiri no shiro by 宮部みゆき Miyabe Miyuki. It was fun to read but I am still amazed at how much faster I am able to read 東野圭吾 Higashino Keigo compared to 宮部みゆき. When I first tried one of her novels years ago I did not enjoy it at all although I was reading 東野圭吾 more or less effortlessly at that time. While that isn't a problem anymore, it still seems to take ages to finish any of her books.

But back to the book itself. When reading the explanatory essay at the end, I learned that ICO – 霧の城 apparently is the novelization of a video game of the same name.
I liked how the narration switched between the two main characters and between different points of time in the storyline. The story stays interesting and leaves the reader (given they haven’t played the game) wondering about certain key points for quite some time.

So, if any Japanese learner around here is searching for Japanese fantasy novels, I’d say it was a good read. Although if I had to choose I’d probably rather recommend reading Level 7 ;)
(That one is more of a mystery than a fantasy novel, though.)

But now I better get back to studying French – I am almost out of Japanese reading material in any case :)
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Arnaud
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Re: B1 French from (false) A0 until 06/2020 (FR with small doses of KO/JP)

Postby Arnaud » Sun Nov 03, 2019 6:22 am

nagoyana wrote: Especially 45 and 46 sound exactly the same to me...
For me, 46 sounds like "de quelqué minutes" with an "é" sound instead of a "e".
Between 7:00 and 8:00 there is a variation with e/é: de quelques minutes/des quelques minutes/de quelqué minutes, something like that (for me).
After 50, there is a kind of english accent (one syllable is stronger than the others and then the "i" (ship) and "u" (run) of minutes are english)
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joecleland
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Re: B1 French from (false) A0 until 06/2020 (FR with small doses of KO/JP)

Postby joecleland » Sun Nov 03, 2019 7:14 am

Welcome to the forums!!! It's nice to see another French learning who is tracking their progress. I wish you the best of luck!!!
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nagoyana
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Re: B1 French from (false) A0 until 06/2020 (FR with small doses of KO/JP)

Postby nagoyana » Sun Nov 03, 2019 9:39 am

Arnaud wrote:For me, 46 sounds like "de quelqué minutes" with an "é" sound instead of a "e".
Between 7:00 and 8:00 there is a variation with e/é: de quelques minutes/des quelques minutes/de quelqué minutes, something like that (for me).
After 50, there is a kind of english accent (one syllable is stronger than the others and then the "i" (ship) and "u" (run) of minutes are english)

Thank you very much, Arnaud. I replayed part 4.1 again this morning and I think I might have finally figured out the difference between the de quelques minutes/ des quelques minutes portions, but the de quelqué minutes still eludes me.
I am going to try to replay the sentences some more times and focus on the é/e contrast :shock:


joecleland wrote:Welcome to the forums!!! It's nice to see another French learning who is tracking their progress. I wish you the best of luck!!!

Thank you for the warm welcome! I have been following your log with interest. It is nice to see another fellow French learner also using Assimil.
Keep up the great work :D
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nagoyana
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Re: B1 French from (false) A0 until 06/2020 (FR with small doses of KO/JP)

Postby nagoyana » Sat Nov 09, 2019 2:24 pm

In the end, I did not start Assimil. Instead, I grabbed my translated YA fantasy novel as well as the German version and started reading. Hopefully my inner French voice won’t mind (or does remember at least part of FSI :D).
While I wouldn’t have gotten far without consulting the German paragraphs before reading the French version, I think I reached about page 60 before I decided that maybe pronunciation practice might not be such a bad idea after all :lol:

The funny thing is that it took me years until I managed to read my first 60 pages in one go in both Japanese and Korean (to be honest, I am not even sure whether I have read 60 pages of Korean in one go so far...).
Studying languages that are quite different from one’s native language first has the great advantage of all closer languages feeling almost easy afterwards!

However, even though thanks to Arnaud I know what to listen for, I still can’t hear the difference between “de quelques minutes” and “de quelqué minutes” in FSI part 4.1. Which is why I am still looping the recording at the beginning of my study sessions ;)
By now, the recording of “de quelqué minutes” sounds a bit as if the speaker was placing a slight emphasis on the -qué. So maybe I am getting there.

Other than the above I managed to finish FSI up to part 6.2. If the long sentences they started springing on the learner in part 5.1 and 6.1 had not been there I might have actually been inclined to say it starts feeling easier :lol:
At the moment, I am listening to the audio from the first 6 Assimil lessons. Compared to FSI, they feel very slow.

On a non-French-related note, I realized that I had not included any information on my languages in my posts here so far, so I decided to edit the first post to mitigate this.

Happy language studies, everyone!
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nagoyana
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Re: B1 French from (false) A0 until 06/2020 (FR with small doses of KO/JP)

Postby nagoyana » Tue Nov 12, 2019 5:00 pm

I actually started Assimil after my last post and did up to lesson 4. Lesson 5 is planned for tonight. Unfortunately that means that I kind of slacked off on FSI, since I only did part 7.1 and a bit of revision since Saturday.
I had to redo both part 5 and part 6 twice until I felt more or less comfortable, so I guess I might have been unconsciously searching some easier material when I decided to do Assimil :lol:

Two thoughts on how FSI and Assimil compare so far:
1) The FSI recordings are way quicker than the Assimil ones
For the last FSI parts I did (starting from part 5) I did not manage to keep the complete dialogs memorized and the final conversations went on without me as soon as I had to start thinking about what I was supposed to say. Fortunately, this usually improves at the second or third try.
And yes, I guess this lack of time to think is kind of the point of all FSI courses, isn’t it? ;)

Anyways, starting Assimil after doing part of FSI French Phonology, the dialogues feel even slower than usual. I might, however, start to proclaim the opposite as soon as I have reached lesson 15, which is about when, I believe, Assimil have the nasty habit to suddenly increase the speed of the speech in their recordings ;)

2) The Assimil recordings are almost too clear
After FSI started introducing even more “e”s that are omitted in speech in... part 5(?), I found myself wondering if the Assimil recordings couldn’t have used some less pronounced “e”s :D
Overall, I have the feeling that shadowing Assimil makes me pronounce a lot of sounds that the FSI recordings seem to omit (though I am not sure whether it might simply be the audio quality); mostly the silent-or-maybe-not-so-silent final “e”s in a lot of words.


Oh, and by the way, I was kind of shocked when Assimil suddenly presented me with a list of gender exercises (inserting le/la or un/une) for the previously introduced vocabulary in lesson 4.
Coming from my previous experiences with Assimil, this seems like a lot of grammar very early :lol:


フランス語以外の勉強はあまりしなかった. だからこのログを書く時,英語だけじゃなくて,日本語も少し使おうかと思うようになってきた (笑)
韓国語はTOPIKが終わってから勉強と言うより韓国語でメディアを楽しむ方が多かった気がする. 前見たドラマを終え,新しいのを見つけて,今ちょこちょこ見ている.やっと字幕なしで大分わかるようになったので勉強した成果が出たと言えるかもしれない.

日本語と来たらずっと前から正式に勉強していないが,「ナナメ読み日本文化論」を読んでからそこに紹介された本の一部も読みたくなったので,この間ラフカディオ▪ハーンの「日本の面影」を読み始めた.元々英語で書かれた本なんだけど,日本語訳もよくできたと思う.
そうじゃなくても,外国人が見た明治時代の日本について日本語で読むのは中々おもしろい.
また,500ページ以上の分厚い本なので,多分少なくともお正月までもつと思う(笑)

ではまた今度;)
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