Rdearman 2016-24 You Can't Have Your Kate and Edith Too.

[rdearman]

What have I done this week, seems like nothing to be honest. I've abandoned just about everything except anki cards and TV in French. I'm a couple hundred pages into my book and should complete it soon. I have managed about 40 minutes of FSI, but this is difficult when there are a ton of people home. Yesterday I had an entire day to myself, but spent about 12 hours writing out the instructions for creating subs2srs cards on Windows 10. The only language study I managed was doing my anki cards while waiting for software to install or films to encode.

My car is still an English free zone, but I just listen to the radio in French. Can't be arsed to do anything remotely resembling work in the car. I've booked two lessons a week with my local tutor for French lessons. I want an extra lesson to work on pronunciation. I still have a bucket-load of money in iTalki that I haven't used. I'm not really sure what level I should go in for. I'm not very good at taking instruction. I begrudge paying a lot of money for people who've listed themselves as "test preparation" experts, some of whom have only chalked up 10-20 lessons. So I don't know how to invest my money, so it is basically sitting there doing nothing.

It is annoying to learn a language because you can't really tell if you're making in progress over the short term. It is only after months of effort that you get feeling of progress.

So things I've been doing wrong:

1. Not doing FSI Daily.
2. Not listening to French 24/7 with headsets, etc.
3. Completed 4 pages of grammar book, haven't looked at it again.
4. Not reading enough.
5. Not using iTalki
6. Not doing Michel Thomas, or other course in car.

Things I've done right?

1. Work anki cards religiously every day.
2. Watch at least one TV show or listen to Podcast in French.
3. Do extra lesson with tutor for pronunciation.
4. Try to think in French.
5. Read 10-12 pages every day in French.

I haven't had a chance to binge watch anything, so the thing I experienced before where I was beginning to spontaneously thing in French isn't happening. This is annoying me. Of course this doesn't annoy me as much as the way the French count. grrrr... I hate having to do maths to figure out a number... let's see... that is 4*20+12 .... er... 92?

I was reading an article on pronunciation with Audacity. (re-reading actually) and I was thinking I really need to do something to fix my prosody in French. But of course, there are lots of things I need to do to fix my French!

OK, I've had a moan, so now I suppose I should say all the stuff I'm happy about. I've managed to complete the Subs2srs instructions, and I actually managed to get substudy working on windows. Which I think even emk had difficulty doing. I hope someone would take the time to put all that on to the wiki, but I'll put it somewhere shareable soon.

I think my listening comprehension is improving. Like I say it is difficult to tell, but I seem to be able to follow the news and podcasts for a little longer before they say something I don't know and completely derail me. I still find it hard to understand people if they go off piste on to a topic I'm not expecting. It takes a little while for my brain to realise we're no longer talking about political stuff and they're now talking about Wimbledon tennis.

I really like the AntConc program for corpus analysis which I got all the D&D words from. I noticed that a lot of the words were cropping up in both the fantasy book I was reading as well as my cards. I have another half a dozen books in French to read, but they are YA mysteries. So I'm thinking I should try to get some crime books and run them through AntConc to get some subject specific words to study. But this might not be as useful as it could be. However, if I could get the e-book version of some of these books I could do this prior to reading them, which would give me a boost. AntConc seems to be a bit of a hammer and I'm searching around for a nail, since the nail I already hit seems to have gone in without bending.

Perhaps a better use might be getting some French recipes and feeding it into AntConc. When I was in Sardinia I noticed I had a real problem with ordering food. Not because I couldn't ask for what was on the menu, but because I didn't know a lot of "ingredients" words. It was hard to know what was in the dish. Since I know I'm going to eat when I next go to France, this is probably a good method. I do really like the idea of cramming subject specific vocabulary.

I haven't done any essay work. This is going to become a real issue if I don't get started soon. However, I have switched my phone to French and using the French keyboard. This combined with the fact I'm approaching a lot of French people on HelloTalk I'm outputting a lot more in French. My tutor is OK with checking my writing, but I haven't done any!

Scoring my studies this week gave me something to think about:

Activity	Score 1-9
Reading	4
Writing	1
Listening	7
Speaking	2

I'm far to heavily focused on listening as a strategy and I need to work on some other activities.

[rdearman]

Quick update. I was a little annoyed with my anki deck for D&D because a lot of english words had gotten in and I'm trying to sort out my pronunciation in French. So with that in mind I searched around until I found a utility which would output IPA based on the French word. I found one called espeak. http://espeak.sourceforge.net/

I cleaned up all the data and removed the duplicates and the English words, then I wrote a script to generate the IPA into a file.

Code: Select all

for line in `cat DnDCorpus4IPA.csv`; do espeak -q -v fr --ipa \"$line\" >> MyDnDIPA.csv; done;

Now here is an anki deck with IPA. This might be a bit more useful, certainly for me. Although I was 250+ cards into the old deck, so I have to start again. *sigh*

My tutor has agreed to correct all my writing, so I need to start doing some essay work which I talked about before.

[smallwhite]

a utility which would output IPA based on the French word

That sounded interesting so I took a peek at your deck. It shows both /ɥ/ and /y/ as "y" - are you aware? And the card "I am = iam = [jˈam]" looked funny but maybe it's something specific to the game.

[Ingaræð]

Of course this doesn't annoy me as much as the way the French count. grrrr... I hate having to do maths to figure out a number... let's see... that is 4*20+12 .... er... 92?

I read somewhere that the brain actually uses separate areas for language and numbers, so I think the only way to get to grips with numbers in other languages is to actually do some maths. I think basic maths would be sufficient, as Pimsleur usually does this in Level I and (in my experience) it seems to work quite well. It might need to be done over a longer period of time in order to properly sink in, though. You could probably drill some calculations pretty easily with Anki.

[rdearman]

a utility which would output IPA based on the French word

That sounded interesting so I took a peek at your deck. It shows both /ɥ/ and /y/ as "y" - are you aware? And the card "I am = iam = [jˈam]" looked funny but maybe it's something specific to the game.

There was a margin of error listed on the espeak website about the IPA produced, but even if only 80% is correct it's still better than what I'm currently doing. I would still look it up if I was completely unsure.

[rdearman]

Of course this doesn't annoy me as much as the way the French count. grrrr... I hate having to do maths to figure out a number... let's see... that is 4*20+12 .... er... 92?

I read somewhere that the brain actually uses separate areas for language and numbers, so I think the only way to get to grips with numbers in other languages is to actually do some maths. I think basic maths would be sufficient, as Pimsleur usually does this in Level I and (in my experience) it seems to work quite well. It might need to be done over a longer period of time in order to properly sink in, though. You could probably drill some calculations pretty easily with Anki.

The problem is the French word for 97 is quatre-vingt-dix-sept which means, four-twenty and seventeen. So they don't actually (unlike the Belguims) have a word for ninety, or even eighty for that matter. So when I hear it my brain has to stop all other processing of information, switch into "maths mode" and try to calculate what the hell 4*20+17 = then try to pickup the thread of the sentence, but of course that is long gone. If I'm lucky I can re-wind but if I'm actually talking to someone I have to choose between figuring out the number, or staying engaged in the conversation and ignoring the number.

Of course when I was a child, I'm sure ninety-nine didn't come naturally and I probably had to get a lot of exposure before I could map 99 to the word ninety-nine.

The new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests how language augments our natural ability to understand numbers, Casasanto says. He says the brains of all people — and some animals — can tell the difference between, say, two cookies and three cookies on a plate.

The human brain is also very good at assessing approximate values, like the difference between 10 and 20 cookies, Casasanto says. But he says the brain needs some sort of counting system to tell the difference between 10 cookies and 11.

"What language does is give you a means of linking up our small, exact number abilities with our large, approximate number abilities," Casasanto says. And for people in developed countries, that's essential.

"It has been the tool that gave rise to the society we live in," Casasanto says. "The skyscrapers we work in and the computers that we're talking on right now — all of these things are possible because of exact large numbers and humans' ability to manipulate them."

I was actually planning to find some video of someone counting to 100 in French and just repeat is a few bazillion times until I just recognised it, and not need to calculate it.

[jeff_lindqvist]

I was actually planning to find some video of someone counting to 100 in French and just repeat is a few bazillion times until I just recognised it, and not need to calculate it.

(If you go to Youtube, there are many more in the list of related videos)

[rdearman]

Merci!

[arthaey]

There was a margin of error listed on the espeak website about the IPA produced, but even if only 80% is correct it's still better than what I'm currently doing. I would still look it up if I was completely unsure.

I don't know if it's any more accurate, but here's another site that will take French words (or phrases or sentences!) and output IPA: https://easypronunciation.com/en/french-phonetic-transcription-converter

[iguanamon]

More number use is the key. Haitian Creole uses the same French numbers. After I finished Genesis and the first chapters of Numbers in the Bible, I have no problems with them. The HC version of the Bible writes out the numbers in words alongside the numerical. Another key that I found helpful to me was not to think in terms of addition for 70-99 but that "swasandis" = seventy; katrevendisnèf = 99; swasankatòz = 74; etc. So in my mind it's not "sixty fourteen" but seventy four.