The Bee's Knees: Lianne starts the 20s with French and Italian

[Lianne]

Oooook. That was more than a little break! And honestly I think I did pretty much nothing during that time away, so at least I don't have to struggle to write an update for months lol.

One thing I have done recently is start Ojibwe! Lest you think I've lost my mind, no, I did not think it was a great idea to add another language! Especially given how poorly adding Italian to the mix went last year. But, my school division offered a free online Ojibwe class for beginners, and I just couldn't pass it up. I haven't been spending a lot of time on it outside of class, but I have done 6 hour-long classes now, and am pleased to report that there are actually some things I now understand about this challenging language! (From what I've seen so far, verb conjugation is pretty straightforward. The hardest thing has been getting used to a highly agglutinative language and its resulting super-long words!)

Anyway, today, while enjoying the long weekend, I suddenly felt motivated to work on some French! So I continued a task I started a few months ago, which is basically going through all my old French class notes from various continuing education classes I took, recycling a lot of superfluous worksheets, and taking some notes on anything that I feel like I still need review on. At this point I'm still doing this for some pretty beginner classes, so I haven't been tracking the time or anything; it's very easy review and more of an organizational thing. But once I get through the beginner stuff, I have some much more challenging stuff from my intermediate courses to go through. There will be some real learning to do there. Having done that for a bit, I found myself wanting to jump back into my sadly neglected Super Challenge! Trying not to put too much pressure on myself, since it would be tough to complete it at this point, but I'd still like to take a crack at it.

French
May 23:
45 minutes watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Tabula Rasa)
60 minutes (ish) reading Les fantômes de Spiritwood by Martine Noel-Maw (33 pages, chapter 1)

Back to good ol' Buffy! And started a new book! This one's from my big bin of French books picked up from library sales. I think it's a perfect fit! Despite my lapse in French study (Buffy is once again difficult to follow), I'm having no trouble at all reading this book, with only the occasional word I don't know.

Side note: I've missed it here!!

[Lianne]

French
May 24:
45 minutes watching Angel (Lullaby)
60 minutes (ish) reading Les fantômes de Spiritwood by Martine Noel-Maw (50 pages, chapter 2)

May 25:
45 minutes watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Smashed)

May 26:
45 minutes watching Angel (Dad)
15 minutes reading Les fantômes de Spiritwood by Martine Noel-Maw (14 pages, chapter 3)

The book has gotten even easier as I've settled into it! I'm very pleased to find that my reading hasn't been terribly impacted by my break from studying, even if my listening comprehension has (which makes sense since my listening has always been weak anyway). I'll probably be done this book in a couple of days, and then I'm going to give the translation of Cinder by Marissa Meyer a shot and see how that goes. I just recently finished that series so the plot and characters will be fresh in my mind, but I have no idea what the reading level will be like. And I might get some fun sci fi vocabulary!

Ojibwe
May 25:
1 hour class

I also requested a beginner Ojibwe book from the library... So I might be getting slightly invested?? But not so much that this is going to take away from my French.

[Lianne]

It just figures that right after I request my next French book from the library, I find a bunch of other options! Well at least now I've got more stuff lined up! I had forgotten about a relatively recent addition to the public library's digital offerings, one which offers a small-ish selection of French ebooks and audiobooks. I added a bunch of audiobooks to my list for later! Some of them are ones that I own in French paperback form as well as in English, so that will be great for L-R. Much more convenient than getting audiobooks on CD from the physical library.

Also, while I'm hesitant to jump back into Italian (I don't want to risk burning out again), I do have that half Super Challenge taunting me... So, I went looking for free Italian audiobooks (my public library has a small selection of Italian books but no audiobooks). I rediscovered the site Liber Liber. They have a bunch of books both in audio and as ebooks! For example, Jane Eyre is available in both formats! Possibly that's an outrageously ambitious choice for a beginner, but its sheer length appeals to me for this purpose. So, we'll see.

[Lianne]

French
May 27:
45 minutes watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Wrecked)
20 minutes reading Les fantômes de Spiritwood by Martine Noel-Maw (14 pages, chapter 4)

May 28:
45 minutes watching Angel (Birthday)
45 minutes reading Les fantômes de Spiritwood by Martine Noel-Maw (31 pages, chapter 5+epilogue)

I finished the book!! I'm very pleased with myself. I mean yes, it's a quick read, but it's still enough to count as 3 Super Challenge books, and I read it in less than a week! The needle on my progress graph is still firmly in the Danger zone, but slowly creeping up.

And with perfect timing, I stopped by the library today to get my holds, including the French translation of Cinder! I flipped through it and read a couple random paragraphs, and the level seems good. (It can be so unpredictable. A couple years ago I read Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, which in English didn't seem particularly advanced, but in French the vocabulary was a LOT!) This one will definitely take longer, though; it's 412 pages!

Ojibwe
The other hold I picked up today was Bi-Anishinaabemog: Bezhig Niigaan by Roger Roulette. It looks like more of a workbook than something with a lot of explanation, so we'll see how it goes. And it comes with a CD! I want to try a bit of it this weekend before my next class on Tuesday.

[Lianne]

So I started my new book, and decided to begin with a little bit of intensive reading. This book will likely have a lot of vocabulary about mechanics, androids, spaceships, etc., so I figured it's best to front load that as much as possible. And sure enough, the first page was a mess of new words for me! And once again I spent 30 minutes studying one page, so apparently no matter how much my extensive reading improves, intensive reading continues to be a massive chore.

Interestingly, even with all the new-to-me words, the French translation is one of the most simplified translations I've ever seen when compared to the original! Here's the first paragraph in English (from an advance reader copy so not necessarily exactly the final version) and French:

The screw through Cinder's ankle had rusted, the engraved cross marks worn to a mangled circle. Her knuckles ached from forcing the screwdriver into the joint as she struggled to loosen the screw one gritting twist after another. By the time it was extracted far eough for her to wrench free with her prosthetic steel hand, the hairline threads had been stripped clean.

La vis de fixation qui traversait la cheville de Cinder avait rouillé, et son empreinte cruciforme était presque effacée. Les doigts douloureux à force de serrer le tournevis, Cinder dévissait avec peine. Quant elle eut suffisamment sorti la vis pour l'extraire avec sa main en acier, le tournevis tourna à vide.

New vocab (some of which I probably could have figured out from context but I wrote it down if I wasn't confident):
une vis de fixation - a screw
une cheville - an ankle
rouillé(e) - rusty
cruciforme - cross-shaped
effacer - to erase, rub out, delete
à force de faire - by dint of doing
serrer - to grip, hold tight, squeeze, clench
un tournevis - a screwdriver
dévisser - to unscrew, undo
extraire - to extract (ok that one's pretty clear)
en acier - made of steel

I honestly can't explain how I'm able to read extensively when my vocabulary is still so lacking. Maybe this is just a particularly tough paragraph. I've never read about tools before.

Anyway, someone please interact with me. I was so excited to return to the forum after so many months away, and almost my only interaction has been an argument that makes me want to bang my head against a wall.

[iguanamon]

Hello, Lianne. I'm happy to see you are continuing your adventure in learning French. I have always enjoyed reading your log. Yeah, I've done that before too. I remember when I was reading "Robinson Crusoe" in Haitian Creole. There was all kinds of vocabulary about sailing, navigation, muskets, etc. I simply had to look it up to get words like "paddle"; "shipwreck"; "keel", etc.

There's nothing wrong with intensive reading. It is a valuable tool for me at times, though it does interrupt the flow for sure. Still, it can be necessary when you are reading a new genre or about a new situation for the first time. The good thing is that vocabulary repeats. The first third of that book was quite difficult. I persevered and the next third was easier, the final third was quite easy. All I can say is that sometimes we have to do things we don't necessarily like to do in language-learning- like looking up a bunch of words that we can't figure out through context alone, or with help from a parallel text, in order to get to where we want to be in a language.

There are alternatives available to make for perhaps easier reading- reading in parallel with the English original. This can be done by making your own parallel text if the two books are electronic. You can also read in English first, then French or vice versa. I usually still look up the L2 so I can see why the translator's words were chosen. It's part of how I learn. My advice- try to figure out what you are able to and look up what you have to. If it gets too frustrating for you, you can always just set it aside for now and come back to it later after more reading. If you can manage to get through the first third of the book "by any means necessary" then, from my experience, it should get easier... in theory, YMMV!

Again, welcome back, Lianne!

Edit: For a big language like French, Google images works quite well... better for nouns and adjectives than verbs and adverbs usually, though verbs can also be rendered quite well by Google images- sometimes. At least it's fun.

une vis de fixation



effacer



rouillé

[Xenops]

Welcome back! Honestly, I've been largely avoiding the arguments in the General Forum: instead, I think of this meme a lot.



Regarding intensive reading, I've finally accepted that I need to do it, partly because there aren't very many graded readers for Japanese and Norwegian, and partly because I hate graded readers. So I finally gave in and purchased my first-ever e-reader: I should get it by tomorrow.

[IronMike]

Good to see you back. I've been "Liking" your posts. Hopefully that counts as interacting.

[Lianne]

Hello, Lianne. I'm happy to see you are continuing your adventure in learning French. I have always enjoyed reading your log. Yeah, I've done that before too. I remember when I was reading "Robinson Crusoe" in Haitian Creole. There was all kinds of vocabulary about sailing, navigation, muskets, etc. I simply had to look it up to get words like "paddle"; "shipwreck"; "keel", etc.

There's nothing wrong with intensive reading. It is a valuable tool for me at times, though it does interrupt the flow for sure. Still, it can be necessary when you are reading a new genre or about a new situation for the first time. The good thing is that vocabulary repeats. The first third of that book was quite difficult. I persevered and the next third was easier, the final third was quite easy. All I can say is that sometimes we have to do things we don't necessarily like to do in language-learning- like looking up a bunch of words that we can't figure out through context alone, or with help from a parallel text, in order to get to where we want to be in a language.

There are alternatives available to make for perhaps easier reading- reading in parallel with the English original. This can be done by making your own parallel text if the two books are electronic. You can also read in English first, then French or vice versa. I usually still look up the L2 so I can see why the translator's words were chosen. It's part of how I learn. My advice- try to figure out what you are able to and look up what you have to. If it gets too frustrating for you, you can always just set it aside for now and come back to it later after more reading. If you can manage to get through the first third of the book "by any means necessary" then, from my experience, it should get easier... in theory, YMMV!

Again, welcome back, Lianne!

Edit: For a big language like French, Google images works quite well... better for nouns and adjectives than verbs and adverbs usually, though verbs can also be rendered quite well by Google images- sometimes. At least it's fun.

Thanks!

I think I could handle intensive reading more if it just weren't such a hassle. Like maybe if I were doing it on a computer with an easy way of looking up words right there, like in Learning with Texts. But doing it with a physical book, sitting on my couch juggling the French book, the English book, a dictionary, a notebook, and sometimes my verb book, is just such a pain lol. I'll try it for like a page and then inevitably revert to extensive reading, either just with the French book, or compromising by holding both books and looking back and forth.

Anyway, with Cinder, after a page I switched to just glancing back and forth, and then that got tiresome (especially with how indirect this translation is!) and I wound up just reading the French one. And it's going OK! I've already seen those page 1 words show up again!

I've definitely used that Google Images trick! I mostly use it when I don't know the difference between two words; it helps to see a visual comparison.

[Lianne]

Welcome back! Honestly, I've been largely avoiding the arguments in the General Forum: instead, I think of this meme a lot.



Regarding intensive reading, I've finally accepted that I need to do it, partly because there aren't very many graded readers for Japanese and Norwegian, and partly because I hate graded readers. So I finally gave in and purchased my first-ever e-reader: I should get it by tomorrow.

Haha! That reminds me of one of my favourite XKCD comics, which I quote often: https://xkcd.com/386/

I do have a Kobo, and have not used it for reading in French. I don't know why! The ability to tap words and look them up would be SO helpful. I already do it a lot when I read English ebooks, so I know it's convenient enough to be worth the effort!