Lou's language log (French, Japanese)

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handa
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Languages: Swedish (N), English, French, Japanese, Albanian
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Re: Lou's language log (French, Japanese)

Postby handa » Mon Jan 04, 2021 8:02 pm

Xenops wrote:...


Thanks for your encouragement! I realise that my expectations of myself are quite unreasonable, but it's still hard to let go them. It's hard being a perfectionist but I'll persevere! :) That book looks interesting, I'd like to get more in-depth knowledge of kanji eventually so I'll keep that one in mind.
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handa
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Re: Lou's language log (French, Japanese)

Postby handa » Thu Jan 07, 2021 3:50 pm

Japanese:
- JfBP1: I'll see if I have the time to redo the first half of the book before my course starts on Monday.
- Wanikani: finished level 3, the last free level. Since I got the coupon that I hoped for I thought that I'd get a one year subscription but my card was declined. I contacted my bank but my card should be working properly so it seems the problem is with Wanikani. I'll finish the new vocabulary lessons and try again tomorrow. If it still doesn't work I'll have to contact their customer support. A bit annoying, honestly.
- Duolingo: I will probably drop this one for a bit, maybe just do enough to keep my streak and/or from falling out of the diamond league.
- Anki: My deck is at 795 cards now (vocabulary taken from JfBP1), 38.2% are mature, 2.93 hours studied the past month.

French:
- French Review and Practice: Haven't done much since I prioritised finishing JfBP1 in Japanese and I might have to put it away for the timebeing. The textbook for my course (Génial 4) is on its way and I don't think I'll manage to work with both simultaneously. I'll finish Génial 4 before I pick up this one again.
- Duolingo: Same as with Japanese.
- Listening practice: Watched 14 episodes of Winx Club dubbed in French :oops: (and an episode of Wakfu and 14 minutes of the second episode). I used to love Winx Club when I was little so this has been fun (though the animation in the first few episodes was absolutely atrocious and I had a good few laughs!). I was subscribed to the comics and saw the first two seasons on TV, and I just have a lot of fond memories of it. I think I'll watch the first two seasons, and maybe the third and forth too, but I doubt I'll watch the other four seasons since from what I've read the series deteriorated after the half-way point. There aren't closed captions for French so I'm doing without subtitles. About 5.2 hours in total.
- Anki: The deck is at 375 cards, 50.7% are mature, 1.48 hours studied the past month.

Albanian:
- Anki: Added a whole bunch of vocabulary from Colloquial Albanian (1991) last night. I looked through the book's grammar sections and some of them are really lacking and don't actually explain what the charts show. I was thinking of ordering the textbook Discovering Albanian 1 but it seems to have disappeared from Swedish online bookstores. They only have the accompanying workbook. Seems like I'll have to order from Amazon but I would have liked to avoid that. I had also received a gift card for Adlibris that I thought I'd get the chance to use but I'll have to save it for later it seems.
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handa
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Re: Lou's language log (French, Japanese)

Postby handa » Sun Jan 10, 2021 7:18 am

Seems like I won't be able to get a Wanikani subscription unless I get the chance to use a card from a different bank than mine. I'm really annoyed about Wanikani not really providing any information the first time around, and only mentioning 3d secure the second time I contacted them. No information whether or not other people are having the same issues either. I've googled it myself, trying to see what that's about and what my bank says about it so I have a slight hunch about what the issue is but I'll contact my bank to see if mentioning the 3d secure-thing will change anything. I guess I'm just really disappointed because of this, I did like the first levels. :( I'm also very apprehensive about using Paypal so that's not an option for me. I'll get over it soon but this honestly sucks right now.

The Albanian textbook I'd been planning on buying is also completely unavailable now from Swedish bookstores and Swedish and German Amazon. I'd have to buy it from the British Amazon but I don't know if it's as straightforward of a process as before now that the United Kingdom have left the EU. Seems like my plans collapsed in on themselves.

French:
- 2 more Winx Club episodes (40 minutes)

Japanese:
- reviewed one lesson in JfBP
- added vocabulary from 2 Imabi lessons to my deck

My courses start tomorrow and saying that I'm nervous would be an understatement. Being judged on my skills in anything is very, very scary.
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handa
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Re: Lou's language log (French, Japanese)

Postby handa » Tue Jan 26, 2021 8:19 pm

The last couple of weeks or so haven't been the most productive. I've fallen behind in my French course since I only just received my French books this afternoon. I have about 40 or so pages to work through in the textbook and 5 chapters in Le Petit Prince to read before next week. I wrote a short text in French (370 words or so) for my course, detailing a trip to London I made a few years back. Have yet to receive feedback for it. On another note, I downloaded the game Stardew Valley and I've lost an embarrassing amount of time from playing it but I changed the language to French so I've been getting some practice that way at least.

I have some catching up to do in my Japanese course too, but I don't really have an excuse in this case. I wrote a text of about 55 words for an assignment that I also have yet to receive feedback for.

I've done my Anki reviews every day but I only spend a few minutes on that because there are very few reviews since I haven't added any new words in quite a while. I have a spreadsheet of about 1000 words that I've taken from Imabi Beginner I that I'll add to my Japanese deck soon., and as for my French deck, I think I'll add the vocabulary from my textbook and new words from Le Petit Prince as I go through them.
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handa
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Re: Lou's language log (French, Japanese)

Postby handa » Wed Feb 17, 2021 10:04 pm

It's about three weeks since my last update.

Last week, I had my first speaking assignment which went about as terrible as it could have possibly gone. I didn't fail the assignment but it went a lot worse than I thought it would. I had 30 minutes for preparation before calling my teacher and we were supposed to plan a trip and make a case for a type of destination. I went with a skiing trip but my teacher "couldn't ski" so my preparation went bye-bye. I managed to stumble through the assignment but it was pretty bad. The feedback I got was that I needed to work on my vocabulary and to be able to make more complex sentences. She also needed to speak pretty slowly in order for me to understand. The only positive thing was that she noticed I used the conditional mood correctly. The whole thing really brought me down, I don't know how to fix this before the course ends. There's only a month left. My main issue with speaking is that I'm so afraid of making mistakes. I have social anxiety so speaking in these kinds of situations is difficult no matter what language but I get so anxious when it comes to French that my brain basically stops working, which means I can't even show off what little actual skill I do have.

I got feedback for my first written assignment which was about 370 words long. I got an A which made me feel quite relieved after the speaking one. I had feared that I'd overestimated my writing skills too but I don't seem to be lagging behind in this area. It made me laugh a bit, the range of my skills!

I've done a little bit better in Japanese. I got an A on the first speaking assignment. My teacher mentioned specifically in her feedback that I made an effort to use conjunctions such as ~kara and that I used different ways of structuring my sentences. Had no trouble understanding her either which was good!

I got a bit of a confidence boost after that but I'm back to feeling down again but that's mostly because I'm getting really worried about French and the fact that I was planning on continuing through to French step 7 at the end of this year. If my ability to speak French is this bad now, I honestly don't know if I can improve as fast as necessary.
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handa
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Re: Lou's language log (French, Japanese)

Postby handa » Sat Feb 27, 2021 6:15 pm

French:
- Génial 4: (4/6) The chosen textbook for my course. I don't think I like this one at all and I think it's because of the overall layout of the chapters. There are six rather large ones and they all feel very disorganised and there are too many exercises of the kind where you can't make sure if you're right or not. I don't like the vagueness and it all makes it difficult to get any kind of "flow" going. I've been trying out shadowing with the texts that have audio but I don't actually know if I'm doing it the right way or not. I usually don't like to try out methods that have a lot of details that you need to get right since I don't want to have too much to think about. So it's probably not even shadowing, since that seems to involve more steps. Rather, it's just me trying to read along with the narrator. I figure it's fine as long as I have a way to get more out of this annoying textbook since I'm still reviewing the texts and the grammar and vocabulary in them.
- Le Petit Prince: (17/27) The book I'm reading for the course. It's pretty interesting but I haven't really had time to think about it more in depth. I suspect two major assignments during the last week of the course will concern this book so I'll have to prepare for that. There are a lot of unfamiliar vocabulary and some grammatical structures that I can guess the meaning of but not really figure out more precisely.
- Anki: French deck is at 1067 cards, 35.5% mature, 4.93 hours studied

Japanese:
- Anki: Japanese deck is at 850 cards, 92.5% mature, 5.52 hours studies
I don't have as much to write down here. I'm mostly reviewing what I studied last year and doing reading and listening comprehension tests and I'm doing very well with them. I have a written assignment next week, and a speaking assignment scheduled on Wednesday that I'm a bit anxious about but it'll probably be fine as long as I prepare for it.

I'll be adding a bunch of vocabulary from Le Petit Prince to my Anki deck and then I'm off to watch Melodifestivalen with my friends on Zoom. I look forward to being able to hang out with my friends in real life when the situation gets better. Also, I got Japanese for Busy People 2 and 3 for my birthday last Sunday and it's been fun flipping through them. JfBP2 is the textbook I will use for the courses Japanese 3 and 4 later this year.
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handa
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Re: Lou's language log (French, Japanese)

Postby handa » Fri Mar 12, 2021 9:21 pm

French:
Génial 4 - (6/6) I should be doing more of the exercises, and reread the texts but I really don't want to. I'm tired of this book. Finally added the last new words to my anki deck, adding up to about 1000 in total.
Le Petit Prince - (27/27) Finished it yesterday and I quite liked it. Rather charming. The difficult part is that I now have to write and talk about it next week and my brain is not ready for any sort of analysis. About 340 words were added to my anki deck.
French Review and Practice - (11/28) Working on finishing the chapter on usages of the infinitive.
Listening Comprehension - 4 episodes of Winx Club (1h20min). I'm on episode 8 of the second season.
Anki - 1691 cards, 39.7% mature, 1 card suspended. 8.45 hours.

I improved my speaking in time for the second speaking assignment this monday but not enough to get a C on all three criteria.

Japanese:
JfBP1 - (25/25) Reviewing.
Anki - 880 cards, 93.0% mature, 30 new cards. 5.78 hours.

I have a writing assignment to finish before next week starts. I've already written it but I need to go over the grammar for a few sentences since I used some grammar points that won't be introduced until the next two books in the JfBP series.
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handa
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Re: Lou's language log (French, Japanese)

Postby handa » Wed Mar 31, 2021 9:58 pm

Finally got my results for the French course. I couldn't quite believe my eyes when I saw that I had received a B for the course as a whole, I hadn't thought that was possible. I got 85% (53/62) on the exam (grammar, listening and reading comprehension) and an A on the final test essay. I'm especially surprised over the exam result because I honestly thought I'd failed completely! French 5 will start the last week of May once my current courses (English 7, linguistics) are done.

I got an A in the Japanese course, which I'd expected since I'd done well throughout the whole course, but I'm still really happy about this and I'm looking forward to Japanese 3 which I'll be taking in July.

French:

Listening comprehension - Finished Winx Club season 2 (18 episodes). Started Miraculous Ladybug and I've watched 20 episodes during the past week. In total: 12.7 hours
Reading comprehension - Read around 100k words' worth of some fanfiction that I found in French, though I've dropped them now. Reading through Google Play Books so that I can look up words and I have amassed almost 1'500 new words that I'm now working on adding to my anki deck.
Anki - 1'982 cards, with 71.4% mature. 11.98 hours.

Japanese:
Japanese for Busy People 2 - (1/15) Will add vocabulary from the first chapter in addition to old vocabulary now written with kanji.
Anki - 879 cards, with 97.6% mature. 6.22 hours.
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handa
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Re: Lou's language log (French, Japanese)

Postby handa » Sun Apr 04, 2021 11:11 pm

Took the dialang test for English and am posting it for future reference.

Listening: C2
Writing: C2
Reading: C1
Structures: C2
Vocabulary: C2
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MorkTheFiddle
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Languages: English (N). Read (only) French and Spanish. Studying Ancient Greek. Studying a bit of Latin. Once studied Old Norse. Dabbled in Catalan, Provençal and Italian.
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 11#p133911
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Re: Lou's language log (French, Japanese)

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Mon Apr 05, 2021 4:59 pm

Lou wrote:Took the dialang test for English and am posting it for future reference.

Listening: C2
Writing: C2
Reading: C1
Structures: C2
Vocabulary: C2

Congratulations. What a great feeling, no?
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Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson


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