eebeejay learns French (again)

[Alina Kuimova]

That's a great goal! But it seems like you already have a pretty solid level of French, so you can shift to actually listening and reading some content in French. It will help you to pick up new vocabulary in more natural way.
Have you tried watching videos of Français Authentique? The guy speaks very slow, he explains things in simple French, plus he launched subtitles now, so it's almost impossible to not understand!
You can check his YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/francaisauthentique
I hope you'll find it helpful

Thanks! I'll check it out. A short video a day might be a manageable amount for me to add into my day.

Oh, yeah! Honestly, I wish I could find this resource earlier (preferably before my DELF exam). I didn't completely fail the listening part of the test, but it clearly wasn't one of my strongest skills.

And after I started listening to Français Authentique my understanding of speech improved significantly. So I moved to other French YouTubers even though on 0.75x speed. And then on the normal speed.

I don't know how it works, but I guess the brain just gets used to the language. Especially if you listen to a single speaker, so there's no variation and crazy accents.

[eebeejay]

It's been a pretty busy couple weeks. I'm still working on this at a snail's pace. The only thing I'm doing consistently at the moment is vocabulary flashcards in Lingvist each day, at a rate of a minimum of 50 per day. Because I took about 2 years off from practicing any French I still have 1061 review cards before I get to try out any new vocab, but that number is decreasing steadily.

I've also signed up for the super challenge and watched Le renard et l'enfant. Beautiful film, though I'm always amazed by my ability to find French films that don't actually have very much dialogue in them at all, so it feels a bit like cheating. I have access to foreign language film streaming through my library so I have a lot more films to watch.

[eebeejay]

Still continuing with my daily Lingvist flashcards. I've gotten the number of review cards down to 900, so I'll get into new vocab eventually.

I also started watching Extra French. It's kind of dumb but I'm starting to get into it. I'm never quite sure if I should be using material that is reasonably comfortable for me to understand, or if I should be watching something harder and risk missing lots of stuff. I'm having a hard time figuring out what level I should be studying at right now. I feel like in the past two years of not studying my French has atrophied massively. It's a bit frustrating, even if it's exactly as expected. But maybe it's also that stress is messing with my brain right now.

My dad had a stroke last week. This might end up being good for my French studies because I'm finding that I don't have the headspace right now to do any writing for my course. But rote memorization... I can do that. So more flashcards, more drills. Maybe I should reattempt FSI...

[eebeejay]

Still plugging along.

Lingvist: I'm down to 600 review cards. They've been really easy lately so I'm hoping I can burn through them and hit new vocab soon.

Super Challenge:
Watching: still watching Extra French. It's really corny and dumb but I'm understanding it. Just finished episode 9. Hoping to finish up the series soon so that I can move on to something a little more interesting. I recently discovered a pop science show on Youtube called C'est pas sorcier, which might do the trick. There are 300ish half-hour episodes. My friend also recommends L'épicerie pretty highly.

Reading: Les récrés du petit Nicolas. I'm about 10% in.

[eebeejay]

Didn't get a lot of study in this week. It's the first week of school and peak busy time for me at work. My course has started up again too.

Super Challenge:
Watching: Still Extra French. Almost done with the series now and looking forward to starting on something else.

Reading: Still working through Les récrés du petit Nicolas, via ReadLang. And since I kind of hate reading on the computer, I took out a stack of paper books from the library. Just finished Les manigances de Cloé by Aline Charlebois, about a girl who likes to be mean to her little brother.

[eebeejay]

I've been short on time and a bit unmotivated the past couple weeks, so I've been focusing on reading native materials, like an informal tadoku. I pretty much cleared out all the French books at my level from the local library. When I'm through with them I guess I'll have to go to another branch. My best strategy for remembering to read them has been to just leave them on the back of the toilet, that way I'm pretty much guaranteed to do at least a little bit of French reading each day.

So far I've read:
Les manigances de Cloé 1&3 by Aline Charlebois
Touti le chien magique by Dominique Demers
Tordus cherchent tordus by Christiane Duchesne
Le poulet fermier by Agnes Desarthe
Saturne, le cheval de cirque by Jennifer Tremblay

I'm now onto Un héron, deux tortues, trois amis by Renée Charboneau, which I'm actually quite enjoying. I have another 5 books in my stack to get through and then I guess I'll reassess my reading level and see if I want to jump into something a little bit older.

[Carmody]

Is Le renard et l'enfant available on YouTube anywhere? All I can find is movie trailers. Thanks

[eebeejay]

What is this... January?

April begins and suddenly I'm practicing French daily and running a couch to 5k. I'm trying to figure out what it is that has sparked this and the only thing I can think of is our annual cabane à sucre potluck at my old house. My friend's son was there. He's quite young and shy but he glommed onto me. He's not speaking yet, but I know his mom speaks to him almost exclusively in French so I started speaking French to him, which was really hard at first but got easier. I'm fluent in baby French and he was a nice, non-judgemental audience. I wish speaking to adults was that easy.

I haven't really thought about or used French in any meaningful way for months. Too busy. I was accepted into a writing program at university and trying to write a draft of my manuscript while working full-time has been really taxing on my brain. But studying French is a great way to procrastinate when I just don't want to write.

So right now...

I'm grinding away at French in Action. Duolingo changed up their French tree so I'm working my way through regilding it. I have mixed feelings about the new tree. I think it would have been easier and more engaging when I was a new learner, but since it's all review for me it feels incredibly repetitive, so I work on each topic for a little while and then test out. I still haven't memorised all the vocabulary in Lingvist, so I'm grinding away at that.

I don't have a lot of time to spend on this, right now so I'm limiting myself to the above. When I finish those I will figure out what the next step is in terms of input and further study. It's hard though, because my favourite way to procrastinate is to just keep researching different learning materials and resources without ever using them.

[eebeejay]

Is Le renard et l'enfant available on YouTube anywhere? All I can find is movie trailers. Thanks

Carmody, I'm not sure where it might be available to stream online. I found it through Criterion on Demand, which I accessed through my library. Maybe your local library has access to this, or a similar service?

[munyag]

How goes your French my friend?