What next? (learning Spanish, maintaining German, random dabbling...)

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DaveAgain
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Re: Alors, ab jetzt Französisch? (German, French, SC, other things...)

Postby DaveAgain » Sun May 01, 2022 12:05 pm

gsbod wrote:I've been limbering up for French with RFI's Journal en français facile. It's definitely facile compared to regular news broadcasts, but that doesn't mean it's not challenging! To add to the challenge, after listening to the Journal I've been queuing up a German podcast to play immediately afterwords, to help improve my switching abilities. After a few days my listening is getting better attuned to French again, or at least, I am getting back to my previous best level. It has been a useful warm up activity. But the news is so depressing, I'll be glad now just to start on some mindless TV shows instead.
I watched some mini-series on Arte.tv switching between French & German halfway through an episode. :-)
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gsbod
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Re: Alors, ab jetzt Französisch? (German, French, SC, other things...)

Postby gsbod » Sun May 01, 2022 6:33 pm

DaveAgain wrote:I watched some mini-series on Arte.tv switching between French & German halfway through an episode. :-)


Not sure I could handle switching halfway through, that sounds unnecessarily hardcore ;)

Any Arte series you would recommend?
2 x

DaveAgain
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Re: Alors, ab jetzt Französisch? (German, French, SC, other things...)

Postby DaveAgain » Sun May 01, 2022 8:10 pm

gsbod wrote:
Any Arte series you would recommend?
At the moment I'm watching En thèrapie. The episodes are ~25 minutes which is my preferred length for TV.

I started out watching series one in German, and series two in French (I watched series one in French when it first came out, a year ago?). But then I had radio and film spree for French instead. (Le magnifique is a film I liked, AND it has Jackie Bisset speaking French).

-----
Beau Séjour (currently on Arte.tv) is a Flemish mini-series that I watched when it was on Channel 4, that was good.

I think someone else on the forum mentioned Foodie Love, but I've not watched it.
4 x

gsbod
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Re: Alors, ab jetzt Französisch? (German, French, SC, other things...)

Postby gsbod » Sat May 07, 2022 6:29 pm

Another long week at work this week, but hopefully after this I'll be able to get back to a better work life balance. I slept until noon today like a teenager, but I feel so much better and refreshed now.

I've made a good start on the "films" part of the Super Challenge. I ended up (unplanned) bingeing the series Missions on BBC iPlayer. I like that the episodes are only around 20 minutes long. It gives the illusion that you can stop any time, but in the end you just end up playing another one... I'm now half way through the second series. It's a bit daft and I wouldn't be watching it if it wasn't in French, but it's entertaining enough. The only downside is being on iPlayer, the subtitles are hard coded (you cannot switch them off) and the font is massive, so it's pretty much impossible to tune them out.

I've also started watching Vampires on Netflix. I watched a couple of episodes a couple of years ago, and now I've watched a couple more. The plan is, as long as the ending doesn't end up too ridiculous to bear, to watch once through with English subs, once through with French subs, and then once through with no subs.

I've not made much progress on the reading part of the challenge, but that's ok because historically I've always spent too much time reading French and not enough time listening to it.

I'm also thinking about doing some kind of study to support the reading and listening side of things. I don't really want to turn it into a big thing, but I think grammar is probably the most complementary thing to focus on for now. After reading a few posts mentioning Kwiziq on here I discovered I'd already made an account a couple of years ago, so have spent a bit of time on that (enough for them to give me premium access for a few days, which was nice). I really like the grammar explanations, but I'm not so keen on the way that the exercises work. There never seems to be enough of them for any grammar topic. I'm also not so keen on the way the system keeps seeming to change its mind about what I ought to be focussing on.

I've also been considering using one of the grammar books I already own. I've got an older edition of Grammaire progressive du français intermédiaire and I also have Didier's Grammaire essentielle du français at B1 and B2. I think the Grammaire progressive is probably the best place to start, but since it covers a lot of stuff I know really well, some stuff I don't know, and some stuff where I have baked in errors from learning it badly years ago, I'm trying to figure out how best to use it. Studying it cover to cover will be a waste of time (and something I ultimately won't stick to) but I do need some kind of system to beat my inner perfectionist. For now I'm thinking of using the bilans, which are summary quizzes every few chapters, to identify my weak areas and focus just on the chapters covering those.
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gsbod
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Re: Alors, ab jetzt Französisch? (German, French, SC, other things...)

Postby gsbod » Sun May 15, 2022 2:33 pm

gsbod wrote:Another long week at work this week, but hopefully after this I'll be able to get back to a better work life balance.


Nope, I was wrong about that! Last week was even longer... I've been too tired in my spare time to do anything more demanding than worrying about other people's opinions on the internet. :lol: :roll:

It's a temporary situation, and it will get better soon.

I got as far as doing the first two Bilans in the Grammaire Progressive Intermédiare. I am quite right that there is a lot of stuff I can skip. The main issues I need to revise are:

The difference between c'est and il est (and also to a lesser extent c'est and il y a, and uses of the demonstratives cet/cette/ces)
Prepositions of place (I mean, whatever level you are, if your language has prepositions in it you're going to need to revise them)
Les indéfinis (I don't know what these are called using English grammar vocabulary, but basically words like quelques, plusieurs etc)

No reading or watching French TV this week. I think I may have watched something on ZDF Mediathek in German about volcanoes. And I read a couple of pages of a German thriller that would double up as a door stop, but really I've just been too tired to deal with printed text in any language.
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gsbod
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Re: Alors, ab jetzt Französisch? (German, French, SC, other things...)

Postby gsbod » Fri May 20, 2022 6:48 pm

Much better week this week, both in terms of work and life in general.

I finished watching Missions on BBC iPlayer and...can't say I recommend it. I'd already accepted it was daft. It had more cliffhangers and plot twists than a soap opera. (But then so does Dark on Netflix, which I 100% recommend). But the script was dire and the acting not much better. To make matters worse, a couple of the episodes at the start of Season 3 had so much English in I doubt they even "count" as Super Challenge minutes!

Also, my ability to enjoy German podcasts seems to be a bit broken at the moment. For years, I've found podcasts from German radio stations to be perfect listening material while I'm trying to get to sleep, but this last week or so I've just found them intensely irritating. Maybe it's just because I've been feeling fatigued in general - maybe listening to anything would have been intensely irritating.
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DaveAgain
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Re: Alors, ab jetzt Französisch? (German, French, SC, other things...)

Postby DaveAgain » Fri May 20, 2022 9:08 pm

gsbod wrote:Much better week this week, both in terms of work and life in general.

I finished watching Missions on BBC iPlayer and...can't say I recommend it. I'd already accepted it was daft. It had more cliffhangers and plot twists than a soap opera. (But then so does Dark on Netflix, which I 100% recommend). But the script was dire and the acting not much better. To make matters worse, a couple of the episodes at the start of Season 3 had so much English in I doubt they even "count" as Super Challenge minutes!

Also, my ability to enjoy German podcasts seems to be a bit broken at the moment. For years, I've found podcasts from German radio stations to be perfect listening material while I'm trying to get to sleep, but this last week or so I've just found them intensely irritating. Maybe it's just because I've been feeling fatigued in general - maybe listening to anything would have been intensely irritating.
The (French) Trauma mini-series on Channel 4 was OK, my current fave German thing is radio drama of Pride and Prejudice.
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gsbod
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Re: Alors, ab jetzt Französisch? (German, French, SC, other things...)

Postby gsbod » Sun May 22, 2022 2:31 pm

DaveAgain wrote:The (French) Trauma mini-series on Channel 4 was OK, my current fave German thing is radio drama of Pride and Prejudice.


Thanks for the recommendations, I shall add Trauma to the "to watch" list.

As for Pride and Prejudice, if it's not the BBC adaptation from the 1990s, I'm not interested :D
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gsbod
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Re: Alors, ab jetzt Französisch? (German, French, SC, other things...)

Postby gsbod » Tue Jun 07, 2022 5:29 pm

Nothing much to report but I'm logging anyway. Managed to finally have some time off work and finally get away for a few days. Just a short break somewhere else in the UK, but still it was nice to have a change of scene after so long.

I don't think I'll be able to do a trip abroad just yet. Administratively it all just feels a bit too complicated at the moment, and I've had enough stress for now. I do miss the ease with which I was able to travel pre-pandemic, pre-Brexit, and I'm just hoping things improve again in the longer term.

My German ability is starting to noticeably decline now through lack of use. I haven't had a proper conversation with anyone since the class I took last year finished. Sadly, the pandemic seems to have permanently killed off the meet up groups and language cafés I used to attend. I'm sure eventually something will come up to fill their place (I bet there's still latent demand) but for now I feel almost as stuck as I was with Japanese - nobody to talk to, so no point maintaining, so you fail to maintain. Still, at least I can trust my abilities will return once I have a use for them.

Even my passive skills are declining now. I'm still pretty much off listening to podcasts - not just in German, but in any language. I think I'm a little tired of other people's opinions. The other day I watched an episode of Tatort on the ARD Mediathek and I actually struggled to follow it in places, which is a noticeable step back.

I'm not exactly planning to take a break from languages, but I'm thinking a break over the summer may be inevitable, and may be beneficial. There may be more opportunities come the autumn, anyway. And I'll still have time to do a half Super Challenge for French if I'm minded to stick with it.
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gsbod
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Re: Alors, ab jetzt Französisch? (German, French, SC, other things...)

Postby gsbod » Mon Jul 04, 2022 5:04 pm

Nothing much happening in terms of studying at the moment, however I did finally get to see Rammstein perform live last week, after a three year wait! As a general rule stadium shows are not my thing (I prefer gigs in more intimate settings), however you really needed a stadium just to contain the phenomenal pyrotechnics for the show. I did very much enjoy singing along to an acoustic version of Engel. Puppe, on the other hand, was full on nightmare material!

I first heard Rammstein some 20 odd years ago, before I knew any German, and I enjoyed jumping around to them in rock clubs without having a clue what they were singing about. So when I reached the point a few years ago where I could suddenly understand their songs, it was quite a strange feeling :lol:
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