French - B2 and beyond

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Amandine
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French - B2 and beyond

Postby Amandine » Wed Dec 01, 2021 10:07 am

I have always been super bad at logs and whatnot but they are also something I really feel would be very useful and now I have a more concrete plan and daily routine than I have ever had before it makes more sense.

Where I started: I am a dabbler in languages (Russian my first love, also spent time on Indonesian, Danish, Esperanto, Korean, Latin ...) but decided I had to put everything else aside to concentrate on getting where I want to be with French. This is fine by me, except for Russian for which I still feel nostalgic pulls. I did French, mostly via Alliance Français courses, seven or eight years ago got to A2 and then sort of stopped doing seriously, picking it back up again at the beginning of the year. I did the listening and reading exercises in a DELF A2 prep book I had and did really well on the reading and pretty good on the listening except for large numbers which was atrocious. In iTalki convos I could barely string together a sentence though. With a gun to my head, I could not have told you how to form the passé composé. But I probably had a retained a reasonably large passive vocabulary. So overall let's say weak A2?

My initial goal is to do the DELF B1 at some time in the first half of next year. Exactly when depends on when AF puts it on which they haven't said yet. It's previously always been May and October but since October was cancelled when Sydney went back into lockdown and they haven't put the dates up yet I'm wondering if they will bring it forward because otherwise it will be have been a year since they did. Anyway, I can only wait and see. I have no particular need for an exam but I do well with deadlines and concrete goals and expectations and I find I want some tangible to say, yeah I went from here to there.

What I'm Doing: This time round, I've shifted to much more immersion/mass input approach and I'm finding it's really working well as well as being a lot of fun. I am someone who likes focused grammar study though too so it's basically 20% specific "study" and 80% immersion.

"Study":
Weekly iTalki class, we've just started on a B1 textbook
Kwizq. A couple of weeks ago I started basically from scratch and am now at 65% in A1. Really taking my time. Everything in my Notebook (ie everything I have some degree of trouble with aka "beaucoup") I write out the explanations in a notebook and review. Even at the low A0/A1 level there are so many nooks and crannies I have either forgotten or, more likely, never bothered to learn. I really love Kwizq.

I have some Anki decks with audio I have made from various audiobooks/videos but I really think I'm going to just do the above two until I get through B1 Kwizq and then get back to it early next year.

Immersion:
From July - Oct when Sydney was in lockdown and I was working from home I had a huge playlist of French language things in a YouTube playlist on various topics of interest to me and just played it all day while I worked. Now back at the office I have to reign that in obviously. :lol: At the moment my major obsession is French quiz shows and I religiously watch at least two new episodes daily. There's a YouTube channel called Jeux Télévisée that uploads new eps daily. I always watch Questions Pour Un Champion and Tout Le Monde Veut Prendre Sa Place. Today I also watched Slam, but always the first two. I'm basically paying as much attention as possible to them so I consider it active immersion. But it is SO MUCH EASIER than active immersion in scripted things without subtitles. Not necessarily that my comprehension is more but because it's just much more fun really and the lack of comprehension just doesn't bother me. I'm also watching the Netflix series Le Bazar de la Charité. With French subtitles I can basically understand it all.

Passive immersion: At work I listen to Radio France and various podcasts and audiobooks although comprehension is still low.

There is no reading on this list and really I am in two minds about it. I am a big reader in English and like it to be a pleasure, which is not in French right now so I prefer I think to put it off. I have read various graded readers, some Olly Richards beginner/intermediate things. Of course not reading native material has not stopped me from BUYING native material, anymore than not having read half the English books I have stops me buying English books. In fact today I bought 5 French books I have no current plans to read:

From Recyclivre, a second hand place in Paris: A Voix Basse by Charles Aznavour

From Babel Books a second hand place in Melbourne: Alice en Ecosse and Alice au manoir hanté. Alice is what the French call Nancy Drew and these are 1960s hardbacks with cool vintage covers for only $7 AUD each so really I'd be mad NOT to have bought them.
Les Fruits de l'hiver by Bernard Clavel
La Honte by Annie Ernaux

So, yeah ... reading .. I'll get to it eventually ...

Ok, that's everything I think on where we're at. Much shorter updates from now!
Last edited by Amandine on Thu Dec 01, 2022 5:27 am, edited 3 times in total.
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: French - towards B1 and beyond

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Wed Dec 01, 2021 5:47 pm

Welcome to LLORG. Good luck with French.
Thanks especially for the names of the French quiz shows.
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Re: French - towards B1 and beyond

Postby Amandine » Thu Dec 02, 2021 7:02 am

Thanks Mork.

Today I did my five Kwiziqs but several areas I really need to review.

Listened to 2 eps of Duolingo French podcast

Watched Slam and Questions Pour Un Champion.

And that will have to be all for today cos I’m about to watch Dune, very much en anglais
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Re: French - towards B1 and beyond

Postby Kraut » Fri Dec 03, 2021 12:25 am

Amandine wrote:
At the moment my major obsession is French quiz shows and I religiously watch at least two new episodes daily.


This is the French version of Family Feud, it's a pity the videos don't have subtitles which they do on TV.

Une famille en or (2021)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlIyKwL ... C6XwAykAmq
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Re: French - towards B1 and beyond

Postby Amandine » Fri Dec 03, 2021 1:15 am

Kraut wrote:
This is the French version of Family Feud, it's a pity the videos don't have subtitles which they do on TV.

Une famille en or (2021)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlIyKwL ... C6XwAykAmq


Thanks Kraut! I've watched a few vintage 80s or 90s episodes of Family Feud I think but not any new ones, going to do that right now. I enjoyed watching some old French Wheel of Fortune La Roue de la fortune when everything was Francs and a giant magentoscope (VCR player) was an exciting prize. The answers in that were way too niche French for me to actually play along, I might have a little better chance with Family Feud.
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Re: French - towards B1 and beyond

Postby jeffers » Fri Dec 03, 2021 11:30 am

Welcome to the forum, and good luck with your French studies!

I was planning to take the B1 test myself, in London, but they have changed the dates this year and none of them suit me! Oh well, I'll keep studying and maybe take a B2 test in 2023!

Your study plan looks good, and I don't want to overwhelm you with suggestions, but I have three ideas that you might find useful. First of all is https://www.linguno.com/, which is currently free. I like Kwiziq, but it only tests your knowledge, and my one complaint is that there isn't really a way to drill and practice. Linguno is mainly a way to drill verb forms, so it fills this gap for me. You can work on the verbs by level (A1, B1, etc), or you can pick specific verbs and tenses you want to work on. When I make mistakes on verbs in Kwiziq, I make a lesson on Linguno covering the same verb(s) so I can practice before retrying in Kwiziq. I wouldn't use it a lot, but it is a nice complement to Kwiziq.

My second suggestion would be to occasionally do dictées using https://dictee.orthodidacte.com/. It is a nice way to do some very focused listening practice while working on your spelling. This website is good because it has a lot of dictations for many levels, and automatically marks your work. Create an account, start with Dictées FLE (dictations for non native learners).

My third, and best suggestion is in relation to reading. I totally get why you want to put off reading, and I used to do the same thing. However, at some point you will need to bite the bullet, or just never read. However, once you get into a regular reading habit, it will get easier and it will become pleasurable, assuming you enjoy the contents. My suggestion for starting out would be to begin with a book which has audio, and actually listen to the audio several times until you have a pretty good idea of the gist of the story. And my suggestion for a book to start would be Le Petit Nicolas by Rene Goscinny. The audiobooks are very fast paced, but they are so well done that they are amusing even when you don't understand large parts of what is spoken. I listened to the audiobooks while walking, and listened through them several times before I even picked up the physical books. At first, the physical books were a chore to work through, but now I read and reread the books in the series, and they were the first things that I could honestly say were a pleasure for me to read in another language. You can read and listen to Le Petit Nicolas for free on LingQ as long as you don't click too many words to look up (once you've used up your free lookups, it becomes unusable imo). However, the illustrations by Sempé are so delightful you really will want to have a physical copy.

Finally, many of us find reading on an e-reader such as Kindle really helps, and it's very handy for travel (remember that?!) Oops, I said I had three suggestions. It's hard to stop sometimes!
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Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien (roughly, the perfect is the enemy of the good)

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Amandine
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Re: French - towards B1 and beyond

Postby Amandine » Sun Dec 05, 2021 2:43 am

jeffers wrote:Welcome to the forum, and good luck with your French studies!


Hello jeffers and thanks or the welcome. I had an account here when I was in my first go at French and I always enjoyed your contributions. It was just easier to create a new account than recover the old one and also far less mortifying than confronting the negative progress made between then and now ... eek. I enjoyed reading for B1 DELF log and we seem to have not only a similar goal but a lot of the same methods and interests. It's disappointing about your exam! As I said in my intro the AF de Sydney usually does May and October dates but since October was cancelled this year because we were in lockdown I'm a little concerned they will bring the May one forward. If it was Feb or something I would still do it I think but with far less confidence.

Thank you for the Linguno suggestion, it definitely sounds like the targeted drilling that j'ai besoin.

Dictation - yes! I actually love dictations. Some wonderful person has put the whole of Assimil Using French in flashcards with audio as an Anki deck and earlier in the year I was using it as material for dictation. They got longer and more unwieldy after a while but dictation is the kind of thing I find really helpful. I was going to start from scratch the dictees on Kwizq but I will also check out Orthodidacte.

Reading, I totally get what you are saying. At the moment I feel like it is still a rational strategic decision however I could see it becoming a mental block. I was seriously thinking in the new year or a bit later of doing some kind of "12 books in 12 weeks" challenge to get through the stack of hard copy French books I already have. I also agree e-reader is great because of the ease of looking up vocab but I'm also increasingly thinking hard copy might be preferable to a) mimic how I prefer reading in English and b) get me away from the computer/phone and its distractions. So maybe hard copy for extensive reading and electronic for intensive? And Petit Nicolas is a great suggestion, I actually do have an electronic copy of it and the first page or two seemed delightful. When these vintage Nancy Drews arrive this week I might give one of them a go and see how I go.

Saturday/Sunday
I had a commitment from early morning to late night all yesterday so I did nothing but one quiz on Kwiziq to keep up my nascent streak. I have been hitting roadblocks especially with some irregular conjugations and getting like 6/10 recently so today's job is writing up all the lessons and focusing on those weaknesses. I have watched half an episode of Tout Le Monde Veut Prendre Sa Place (quiz show),will hope to finish that and hopefully watch one other. Looking at the week ahead I have social functions Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and all day Saturday so will really have to think about getting some work in consistently. Being Summer here, December/January is always a big time for such things so its to be expected (and a big change from the last six months mostly spent in lockdown and working from home with seemingly endless hours for French - so an adjustment to say the least)
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Amandine
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Re: French - towards B1 and beyond

Postby Amandine » Fri Dec 10, 2021 12:39 am

As predicted this week has basically been treading water with a lot of other commitments rudely taking away from French time. I lost my two week Kwiziq streak tant pis. Unfortunately my dodgy week has coincided with being at some Kwiziq areas of orthography I'm struggling with without having been able to sit down and really look at it. To quote from their email to me:

Je m'inquiète, et ensuite vous vous inquiétez.
Mes amis ne célèbrent pas Noël, mais nous le célébrons.
Tu révèles ton secret, et nous révélons le nôtre.

These are all examples from the lesson:
Conjugate -é(-)er, -e(-)er verbs in the present tense in French (Le Présent) (except -eter and -eler)

This one is in your StudyPlan to practise.

Your Kwiziq Score for this topic is -1.4%
Aïe ! Aïe ! Aïe ! Goodness! Well... A little focus will fix that.


:oops: Hopefully it will and I will focus on it this weekend. Next week is all clear in the evenings except for Friday and I plan to keep it that way. And Friday is Sydney's annual French festival, originally Quatorze Juillet but rescheduled due to lockdown so not I think it's going to have a more Noël en France vibe than a Fête nationale vibe.

I accidentally got confirmation the DELF will be in May. I idly did a placement test on the AF website without realising that would trigger them to contact me to "complete it" with an oral interview so I had to email an apology that I was only doing it out of curiosity. To throw them a bone I mentioned doing the Delf and they spruiked their Delf prep class which will run March-May so even though the dates are not up yet I guess the Delf is indeed May. So essentially four full months to get there. I'm not super worried, I could probably do the Reading and Listening bits now, speaking is in the ballpark I would say but needs polish to eliminate basic errors but writing would surely be a dog's breakfast (see orthography issues above) so all in all I feel OK about getting there by May.

Otherwise I have snuck in a few quiz shows and the occasional bit of a French podcast.

My books arrived and I have read the first 18 pages (small pages) of Alice en Ecosse (Nancy Drew, has the rather more whimsical title of And the Whistling Bagpipe in English). No real trouble following it, and most sentences I don't get the first time I can work out re-reading. Deliberately not stopping and looking things up but out of curiosity I did google one word which turned out to be the equivalent of "lucky devil"- a very Nancy Drew-esque word but probably not high frequency. :lol:
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Re: French - towards B1 and beyond

Postby Amandine » Sun Dec 12, 2021 9:53 am

Grammar
I got probably 80% of what I wanted to do with Kwiziq this weekend but bludged a bit this arvo catching up on my quiz shows instead of working on my notebook. But I got that -1.4% on those specific verb changes up to 65% currently but of course it will take more practice to consolidate.

Watching
Watched three episodes of Tout Le Monde Veut Prendre Sa Place and I think four of Questions Pour Un Champion. The champion on Tout Le Monde... is up to 45 straight victories. Personally, I think the rules of the show give WAY too much power to the carry-over champion which allows them to rack up big streaks like that but I like Isabelle and her breadth of knowledge is very impressive, so now this is the show I always watch first because I'm curious to see if she wins or finally loses. They should add "Has formed strong opinions on the rules of random French quiz shows" to the CEFR competencies somewhere.

The host of Questions Pour Un Champion, Samuel Etienne also does a review of the press several mornings Paris time a week live on Twitch. Looks through the front pages of a lot of the main newspapers and then focuses on a couple of particularly articles, sometimes from the front page but often longer profiles from within and discusses them with the commenters. They are long, like 2 or 3 hours each so I rarely watch all of one but I have probably paid attention to maybe 90 minutes over a couple of streams Friday and Saturday. I only understand about 30% but its definitely super interesting anyway.

Listening
Listened to an hour or so of L'Anomalie audiobook while falling asleep. I think I understood the main characters profession and a few lines here and there but I didn't expect any more than that so no big deal.

DELF
My preparation book Le DELF B1 100% Réussite (Didier) arrived in the mail, to be put aside until next year.

Reading
Read about another 30 pages of Alice en Ecosse. I never actually read Nancy Drew I don't think, I went straight from kid mysteries to adult mysteries and skipped the intermediate stage of teen detectives. It's quite childish of course and two pages can't pass without someone telling Alice what a unique genius she is but on the other hand so far someone (l'inconnu) has destroyed her car, planted a real bomb that blew up in her mail box, maybe tampered with the autopilot on her Transatlantic flight and just now ran her off the road into a hedge on the way to Loch Lomond. Rather violent, really! My iTalki teacher completely scoffed at me for it but actually I'm quite liking it in the sense its just above a comfortable level for me, maybe 30% of sentences has multiple unknown words and the sense is maybe a bit hazy. But I will definitely read the second Alice book I have after this and then revisit what I want to do with reading after that.
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Re: French - towards B1 and beyond

Postby Amandine » Mon Dec 20, 2021 12:43 am

I have been doing my usual Kiwiziq/immersion mostly via game shows/reading Alice thing. I did listen to the audio version of the political panel show C dans l'air, the episode about the Taubira quasi-announcement and was pleased with how much I understood. Watched Christmas Flow a not very good at all French rom com series on Netflix but the leads are charming and it had a lot of common slang.

At the mo I'm reading numerous old threads here about the best strategies for reading because I'm thinking about how to go about that going forward.

But the most important thing is that Alliance Française de Sydney has put up the DELF dates. So as of 10 minutes ago I am officially enrolled in the B1 exam for Wednesday 18 May! $285 AUD but luckily thanks to omicron (getting my booster on Wednesday thankfully) Christmas plans are mostly cancelled so I'll be saving a bit of money this week at least. :?
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