Eifrose's Journey to Understand and Speak French

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eifrose
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Eifrose's Journey to Understand and Speak French

Postby eifrose » Sun May 09, 2021 10:44 am

Hey! ^^ I’m new to this forum, and I wanted to start logging my progress since the day I’ve first started lurking here. I read the other logs on this forum and will try to follow a similar structure in mine. I’ll try to be as systematic as possible and probably update every week to every two weeks.

Why French?
Long story short, I plan on studying French literature/philosophy for my Masters. I am a literature and film student in the UK, currently in my second year. I realised that a lot of the French academic content is not being translated. So, I decided to learn French myself to read the papers, mainly philosophy--and maybe even study in France.

My language background.
I am a native Czech speaker, C1 English and B1 Russian, both foreign languages certified. I also studied Mandarin Chinese for a year during my first year at uni. It was great, but I didn’t get the subject again in my second year, so I put that on pause. But, I plan on returning to Mandarin one day (hopefully!)

What is my level now?
Now, it’s approximately one month since I’ve started studying French, so my level is the lowest of the low!

The overarching goal.
Eventually, I’d like to reach C1 in the DELF exam to read academic papers, study and live in French with minimal effort. I hope to visit France in 2022/2023, perhaps as an opportunity to take one of the DUEF programmes.

Short-term to mid-term goals.
The ambitious goal is to reach A2 in three months, starting from now. The less ambitious goal is to be somewhere between A1/A2 but hopefully leaning into A2. After three months, I will test my language skills to see the progress.

Resources I use/will use.
- Speakly (Paid version) for vocabulary, phrases and listening.
- Drops (Free version) for vocabulary.
- Czech coursebook for French that should get me to A2 (if anyone’s interested, it’s called Allez Hop!). My tutor recommended me this book.
- Two tutors - one of them is a native speaker I have for phonetics and conversation. The other one is teaching French in my native language.
- France TV for TV series and films (I use a VPN service).
- Journaly for writing.
- Anki for revision.
- Assimil French with Ease for listening, one chapter a day, starting with the passive wave.
- YouTube for comprehension with French/English subtitles as needed.

How I use the resources.

I have a lot of time on my hands now!

- Speakly - 15 words a day, reading along with the sentences.
- Drops - 5 minutes a day of essential vocabulary, reading along.
- 1 chapter of the coursebook a week -> putting most of the vocabulary to Anki, the Language Atlas version.
- 40 new cards a day for Anki (I have 4 cards per 1 word, so it’s only 10 new words a day) + revision of due cards. I downloaded the Anki deck from Language Atlas for the complete A0 and A1 grammar drill.
- Consumption of native content weekly with French subtitles.
- 2x30 minutes of phonetics and conversation with a native tutor a week.
- 1x60 minutes with my main tutor a week.

That's all for now! I will log back in after a week or two to update this thread and reassess if I've been way too ambitious. :D

Happy language learning! :)
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eifrose
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Re: Eifrose's Journey to Understand and Speak French

Postby eifrose » Sun May 16, 2021 10:28 am

Hello again! :D

After a week, I’m posting an update. It’s been a rough week since I’ve dealt with some health issues, but I still managed to do French.

Textbook

I’m still going on strong, even though I missed a day because I was sick. The lessons in the book are very dense—after lesson 4, I should already be at A1. I’m now finishing lesson 3. The chapters are around 20 pages long with loads of grammar, vocab and exercises. I started to feel tired throughout the week from all the new information, but I found a great method of staying on top of things that I’ll write about later in the post. See the paragraph for Anki and Verbs.

Vocabulary & Grammar

Speakly
I am on a 31-day streak on Speakly. Even though I love the app, it has some technical issues as it freezes constantly. I’ll probably contact the developers to see if they could fix the issue. I am now on 481 words, Beginner II.

Drops
This week, I haven’t been as consistent with Drops. I lost my streak and had to start again, then I always missed one day but never two days in a row. I did some vocab for shapes, colours, and days in the week. I find it difficult to stick to the Drops ‘schedule’ as you cannot skip topics in the free versions. Sometimes I can’t do the vocab I need because of it.

Anki
I wanted to try another pre-made deck, and I found the popular 5000 most common words in French. I’m trying it, but it doesn’t stick well. I think I’ll drop it in the future but try maybe for another week.

Generally, I know Anki is beneficial for learning, so I do it every day, first thing in the morning. I know that making your own decks is super helpful, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it! But I finally found the way out of the torture of making cards! My problem was that I wanted audio and an example sentence for every word had to add audio manually and make up an example sentence. I now use the AwesomeTTS add-on and copy the example sentences from an online dictionary. It improved my relationship with Anki drastically! Now, I can even add words from my textbook, which I was too lazy to do before.

Verbs
I needed to find a way to practice the conjugations I know I needed for my tutor session. I love the pre-made deck by Language Atlas, but I needed something more personalised (and, again, was too lazy to do my own deck with conjugations). Today, I found a website that allows you to add verbs you need to practice, choose the tense, and you’re ready to go!

Listening
I guess people are familiar with the channel Piece of French. Well, I finally understood the first half of a Q&A video without subtitles! I know that Elsa speaks super clearly and slowly, but it is a massive achievement for me as a beginner! I also listened to the InnerFrench podcast and understood most of the messages, which motivated me a lot.

Writing
I posted an entry to Journaly and was given corrections. I found myself making elementary mistakes I should no longer be making (forgetting to put an apostrophe if the word starts on a vowel), but well, that’s the learning process! I am yet to do my writing exercises for this week. My tutor assigned me to make up sentences for professions, and I will also answer some questions in the textbook.

Reading
I started reading The Graded French Reader: Première Étape by Camille Bauer. I tried to find a graded reader for a long time, and I finally found the one that suits me. The first part consists of a shortened and simplified version of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo. The texts are not too challenging or too easy (as I found in the other graded readers). For every chapter, there are exercises for comprehension, vocab and grammar.

Italki
I had two 30-minute lessons on Italki for pronunciation and reading. It’s been great to speak French! However, I will probably cut the Italki lessons due to financial reasons as we’re tightening the budget with my partner. I will probably restart once I have a higher level of French. I still have my main tutor, so it’s not that big of a loss.

Main tutoring
My tutor was impressed by how much I progress week by week! She decided to make the lessons more challenging and give me more homework for the week. French has started to be my main focus for the day, and I’m honestly grateful that I can do something meaningful with my time.

Wow, that was a big update! I’m still coming to terms with my learning methods, so I’m sorry if the post is too elaborate. I’ll check in again in a week!

Happy language learning! :)
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Re: Eifrose's Journey to Understand and Speak French

Postby rdearman » Sun May 16, 2021 12:25 pm

Don't know how familiar you are with anki, but you may want to put a cap on the number of reviews each day so it doesn't become a torture machine.

Good luck.
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eifrose
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Re: Eifrose's Journey to Understand and Speak French

Postby eifrose » Sun May 16, 2021 12:47 pm

rdearman wrote:Don't know how familiar you are with anki, but you may want to put a cap on the number of reviews each day so it doesn't become a torture machine.

Good luck.


Yes, I capped my decks as needed. You're right, it can become a torture machine very easily once you start adding words :D

Thanks!
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Re: Eifrose's Journey to Understand and Speak French

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Sun May 16, 2021 4:15 pm

Check out Clozemaster. I had a great experience with their French deck. Includes sentences and TTS.
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eifrose
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Re: Eifrose's Journey to Understand and Speak French

Postby eifrose » Sun May 16, 2021 4:56 pm

Lawyer&Mom wrote:Check out Clozemaster. I had a great experience with their French deck. Includes sentences and TTS.


Thanks a lot, I'll check it out. :)
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Re: Eifrose's Journey to Understand and Speak French

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sun May 16, 2021 5:42 pm

eifrose wrote:
Verbs
I needed to find a way to practice the conjugations I know I needed for my tutor session. I love the pre-made deck by Language Atlas, but I needed something more personalised (and, again, was too lazy to do my own deck with conjugations). Today, I found a website that allows you to add verbs you need to practice, choose the tense, and you’re ready to go!
An alternative or second way to practice verb conjugations exists in Memrise. A compatriot of yours who is a member here named Cavesa created a comprehensive and thorough verb course on Memrise called "Conjugaison française / French Conjugation." I started the course. It is very well done, but beyond my skill level so I never finished it. :(
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eifrose
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Re: Eifrose's Journey to Understand and Speak French

Postby eifrose » Mon May 24, 2021 2:21 pm

Hi all!

It's been a week, and I decided to review the three chapters from my book and work on my weaknesses which are prepositions and articles. It has been challenging to remember which verbs have default prepositions and the shortened versions of a preposition/article.

I am progressing with Anki and Speakly as usual. I finished Beginner II on Speakly and am moving onto Beginner III. I am still transferring new words to Anki.

I started transcribing audio from Speakly. I started with the one about tea and coffee, and it was fairly successful. I did not catch a word only rarely, but I did make some little mistakes, mainly not realising that a noun is feminine and needs a feminine ending in the adjective.

I am progressing with the Graded French Reader, one chapter at a time. I do the exercises and will hopefully post on Journaly once I have something to say about the story.

That's all for this week! :D
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eifrose
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Re: Eifrose's Journey to Understand and Speak French

Postby eifrose » Mon May 24, 2021 2:23 pm

An alternative or second way to practice verb conjugations exists in Memrise. A compatriot of yours who is a member here named Cavesa created a comprehensive and thorough verb course on Memrise called "Conjugaison française / French Conjugation." I started the course. It is very well done, but beyond my skill level so I never finished it. :(

Thank you so much for the suggestions, it sounds great! I'll take a look at Memrise :)
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eifrose
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Re: Eifrose's Journey to Understand and Speak French

Postby eifrose » Sun Jun 06, 2021 3:45 pm

Hello all! :)

Just wanted to check in about my week so far. It’s been pretty okay. The neighbours are still drilling, so I have to commute somewhere quiet for my French lesson :D The biggest updates are:

- I ditched the 5000 most common words in French on Anki. Instead, I started adding a lot of my own words I came across in reading, listening and journaling. I felt no benefit going over random words I didn’t have any connection to.

- I am slowly approaching the intermediate phase of Speakly, which is kind of bizarre. I am still on A1 leaping into A2 level in my textbook, so it’s a little bit funny to see Speakly tell me I will be intermediate in a week. However, I found a real benefit in using Speakly. It goes faster than my textbook, so I often become familiar with new material even before I reach it in the book. For example, I am already somewhat familiar with the difference between le passé composé and l’imparfait, thanks to Speakly. I can use them correctly half of the time if I look up the conjugations! The same goes for le futur proche, which has only been introduced in my textbook in the lesson I’m doing now. I am on a 53-day streak on Speakly today, still doing 15 words a day.

- I started journaling in French. I write about what I’m doing on a particular day, about how I feel etc. The sentences are still really simple. Given that I am not yet comfortable using l’imparfait, it equals a child explaining what they plan to do for the day. But, it’s still massive progress for me. I sometimes post the entries to Journaly. Given that I sometimes write about personal stuff, I only post less private things.

- My tutor regularly assigns me little essays. This means I write A LOT. For this week’s lesson, I had to write a text about the concept of time, time travelling, etc. It was challenging, but I managed to make only a few mistakes! For next week, I need to write a text about my dream life. Usually, I write one page in Word.

- I do transcriptions regularly. I simply listen to the audio on Speakly, transcribe what I hear, and correct the mistakes and put unfamiliar words to Anki. I do this maybe 3x a week but transcribe only one minute in a go because it gets exhausting quickly.

- I started Le Petit Prince. I really don’t like the book, so I don’t know if I’ll stick with it, but I can see that I understand most of it just glancing over the chapters.

That's all for this week! I hope your language learning is going well! :D
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