Who's on First? (Jack's French Log)

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Cerebral_Arbitrage
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Re: Who's on First? (Jack's French Log)

Postby Cerebral_Arbitrage » Mon Apr 04, 2022 8:07 pm

jackb wrote:The other show is a Canadian show called Heartland...It's pretty terrible right now, but it's getting better.


Heartland is also in Spanish, and it comes up in my searches. I've been wondering about it. By terrible, do you mean the plot, characters, etc?
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jackb
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Re: Who's on First? (Jack's French Log)

Postby jackb » Mon Apr 04, 2022 8:42 pm

Oops....I don't mean the show, I mean my off the cuff audio description of what is going on. A lot of native french shows have an audio description track that helps describe what's going on so blind people can enjoy the show/movie. I'm adding my own and it just happens to be terrible.

The show itself is pretty good. The main character is a teenager who is really good with horses. She helps run the ranch with her city mouse sister, grandfather and some ranch hands. It's not the kind of show I would watch in english, but it's right up my alley in french.

Sorry for the confusion.
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Cerebral_Arbitrage
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Re: Who's on First? (Jack's French Log)

Postby Cerebral_Arbitrage » Mon Apr 04, 2022 11:50 pm

That's good to know! Thanks! I'll check it out. Yeah, it's funny how some shows are perfect for language learning but not so great in one's native language.
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Re: Who's on First? (Jack's French Log)

Postby jackb » Thu Apr 28, 2022 11:22 am

So I haven’t been doing much other than watching Heartland and I started reading D’un monde à l’autre. It’s a fun easy read. I didn’t think the super challenge would interest me again, but it has. The worst part was the tracking. I’m not a good tracker of time/pages/etc, but the bot is up and running so that changes things. I’m probably going to shoot for a double. Finishing Heartland gets me almost all of the way through a whole video portion of a full challenge and I was going to join the DC Alliance Française in the summer so there won’t be a shortage of native books/dvds. Ten thousand pages and 300 hours of video…..what’s the worst that can happen?

The only thing that will derail me is if I seriously start talking to people. The opportunities are there, but meh.
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Re: Who's on First? (Jack's French Log)

Postby jackb » Fri May 06, 2022 2:38 am

The double challenge is a lot of content. My strategy for the reading part will be to alternate reading books for adults with books written for teens (YA). Initially the adult books will be translations and the YA books will be for natives. I tend to like long fantasy series so that's what I'm going to stick with. I restarted D'un monde à l'autre so it would count for the super challenge. I've been threatening to read Dune for the past few months so that will be the adult series to start. The next one will be the Expanse with Erik L'homme book in between. At this point all of the book will be electronic to help with any pesky vocab lookup. Hopefully, reading without lookup will happen towards the 7/8 thousand page mark.

For the video portion, Heartland will take me almost half way there. On the side I'm going to watch the 52 minute Les 100 lieux il faut voir on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ6owlDtoIA&t=310s). They're really good because the pacing between the narrator and l'enfant du pays who acts as proxy for us while talking to to local guide. L'enfant du pays talks fast like a normal person most of the time while the narrator makes sure to be clearer.

If this all goes to hell, I'll come up with something else!
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Re: Who's on First? (Jack's French Log)

Postby DaveAgain » Fri May 06, 2022 4:45 am

jackb wrote:The double challenge is a lot of content. My strategy for the reading part will be to alternate reading books for adults with books written for teens (YA). Initially the adult books will be translations and the YA books will be for natives. I tend to like long fantasy series so that's what I'm going to stick with.
I was just browsing for books, and noticed there's a fantasy "pour les nuls" book. That might suggest some titles for you.
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Re: Who's on First? (Jack's French Log)

Postby jackb » Fri May 06, 2022 12:57 pm

Cool! I didn't know there was a 'for dummies' series in French. I must have been in college when they first came out and I wondered why anyone would announce their 'dumbness'. Then I looked at one and realized it's just an American 'teach yourself' series. And as an American, I knew (even 30 years ago) that we love leaning into our dumbness.

Thanks DaveAgain for the link.
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Re: Who's on First? (Jack's French Log)

Postby LanguageLearner0007 » Mon May 09, 2022 9:40 pm

Hi Jack, are you doing any official exam to certify your French knowledge?
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jackb
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Re: Who's on First? (Jack's French Log)

Postby jackb » Tue May 10, 2022 7:47 pm

Hi LanguageLearner. The way you phrased the question is very interesting. No, I will not be certifying my skills.

I'm going to take this opportunity to give my 2 cents on certification. It seems to me that certification was created as way for businesses to easily thin out applicants. It's entirely possible to gain the skills without following the certification path, but someone will have to screen candidates manually. This happens much more often with dedicated recruiters that have little to no subject matter experience doing the thinning.

Some people use certifications as a goal in itself. I don't see anything wrong with that, I just don't think it's for me. The problem I have is that when people assume the level of someone is 0, if there is no certification. Or that the certification means that they know everything simply by having it. This can be applied to a good number of degrees, certifications or endorsements including language certs.

I look at levels as more of a Beginner/Novice, Intermediate or Advanced based on the perceived rate of learning and how you study/practice/rehearse. When you are a beginner, you learn something new every session, day or week. The goal of practice is to get things right. Intermediates pick up/solidify new skills over months or quarters. At this stage you are still practicing to get the new material right and build some consistency with the beginner material. Advanced users measure their progress in 6 months to a year. When advanced, you practice to not get the easy/intermediate stuff wrong and minimize/avoid them in the hard stuff.

It's vague and imprecise. I could over or under estimate my skills and I won't know how I stack up to others. I'm OK with that. I don't need it for a job. I do this for me.

Certification conversations always remind me of the Karate Kid when Daniel asks Mr. Miyagi what belt he has:

Daniel: Miyagi. Hey, what kind of belt do you have?
Mr. Miyagi: Canvas. J.C. Penney. $3.98. You like?
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jackb
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Re: Who's on First? (Jack's French Log)

Postby jackb » Fri Jun 10, 2022 12:16 am

Wow, I didn't think it's been a month but I guess it has. I've been pretty watching a ton of video. I have 50 movies and some change. I've made progress already so I'm pretty happy about it. So far it's just been Heartland and Stranger Things. I hadn't soon 1 episode, but I decided to catch up and I'm glad I did. The whole time capsule effect was pretty cool. I'm the same age as the kids in the show were supposed to be. It really made me want my old bike with a banana seat and walkie talkies. My walkie talkies didn't work that well though.

I've noticed a couple of things while binging. Binging is better than slow and steady. There's some overhead to starting over where you are getting into the groove of things. It could be the show, language, or characters, but it takes anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes to really lock in. When you watch an hour a day, as much as 1/2 of it may be overhead time. When you watch 5 hours, the 30 minute over head is still there, but you get much more time to drink in the language. I've experienced this with reading, but it's new when watching.

Dubs mangle the language to fit and sometimes you lose something in translation. This was really apparent in Stranger Things. Some of the 80s slang just didn't sound right when translated. I had to flip to English to really get some of it. This happens much less on Heartland.

I read much better after having listened for a while. Initially, I thought it was because I had been in the groove while listening, so reading was just an extension. I did the reverse and I got nothing. Listening started over from scratch. Not sure what or if anything will change for the rest of the challenge, but I know that I'll be listening differently from the beginning on the next language (if there is one).

I did some shared watching with my wife during a few episodes of Stranger Things season 4. Shared watching is what I call watching the same thing in different languages. It was fun. I think we'll do it again. Disney plus has a feature where you can set up watching a show with someone else, but I've never tried it.

Watching TV with headphones is great no matter what language you are listening in. I used to think it was a crutch, but I'm not so sure now. We're big subtitle users in English and headphones makes them unnecessary. The only problem is that wearing them kind of isolates you if there are other people in the room.

I'm going to push reading until I get to 50 'books'. Not sure how long that will take but it's Summer here and I'll be spending time at the beach. There are few things better than reading outside in the Summer.

I'm 200 pages into Dune and I'm really enjoying it. The only problem is that the books aren't cheap or at the library. The Pierre Bottero books will mix in nicely. They read like a conversation or movie script. After that I'll join the Alliance Française and just borrow books. That'll encourage me to try different things and home my preferences.
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