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

[rdearman]

Can I make a suggestion for something you can try for two weeks and see if it helps create some automatisms? Take Pimsleur or Glossika or FSI and go through 30 min in the morning and 30 min at night of pure old listen and repeat, listen and repeat. Something not too easy but that forces you to produce. Really just learn those sentences and make them come out right. BUT REALLY SPEAK OUT LOUD LOUDLY LIKE LoudyMacLoudy!

If it doesn't help, sure go watch movies silently.

And how exactly would this help my listening comprehension?

[zenmonkey]

Can I make a suggestion for something you can try for two weeks and see if it helps create some automatisms? Take Pimsleur or Glossika or FSI and go through 30 min in the morning and 30 min at night of pure old listen and repeat, listen and repeat. Something not too easy but that forces you to produce. Really just learn those sentences and make them come out right. BUT REALLY SPEAK OUT LOUD LOUDLY LIKE LoudyMacLoudy!

If it doesn't help, sure go watch movies silently.

And how exactly would this help my listening comprehension?

My French is terrible. Je parle en française comme un vache espagnol. So I can speak in French, big fecking deal, I don't understand people, tv, films. My pronunciation and accent are rubbish

Horses for courses. (and I think that listening to those drills and exercise for production also helps catch nuances...)

[StringerBell]

About how much time have you put into French and/or Italian?

[MorkTheFiddle]

I'm finding it very difficult to study languages. I did manage a couple of LE which to be honest were probably 80% English / 20% French. I watched a lot of French this week. Using Netflix on my laptop I watched Call my Agent and turned off sub-titles. When I got frustrated not understanding I turned them on and re-watched a little bit. This really annoys me. All this time with this bloody language and I still have to turn on sub-titles. Part of the problem is on Netflix I have that ability. On the Italian shows I was watching I didn't have that option and just had to watch it and deal with it when I didn't understand.

I have spent most of this last week in a blue funk.

Not knowing your level of listening comprehension in French makes this post iffy, but finding myself in your same funk, I spent the last month or so looking for French language that is faster than the average tortoise that I can understand at least some substantial amount of without subtitles. One video I stumbled upon was a 6-part tv show from 2014 called Le mystère du lac. I don't know where it originally aired. Without (the English) subtitles I couldn't have understood a thing, but watching it led to a documentary on the Maya. There were no subtitles, but I could understand about 60% of the dialogue and easily 95% of what was going on. I'm doing a thing of listening to French spoken fast for 30 minutes a day. I has to be comprehensible, though, so I use subtitles or transcripts if need be. But I listen only one time. Anyway, I found the doc about the Maya so interesting, and so understandable, that I watched the whole thing, about 90 minutes long. Tonight, from the same channel, I watched part of an equally interesting documentary on Ancient Greece.
I don't know whether the channel would have anything of interest to you. I should add that TVMonde thinks my overall level of French is borderline A2-B1. My understanding of just spoken French is probably B1-B2.

[rdearman]

About how much time have you put into French and/or Italian?

Years. About 15 for Italian and 10 for French.

[DaveAgain]

Part of the problem is on Netflix I have that ability. On the Italian shows I was watching I didn't have that option and just had to watch it and deal with it when I didn't understand.

I've recently found I can watch TV5Monde from a UK IP address, their catch-up service (TV5MondePlus.com) doesn't appear to offer subtitles.

To me you seem to be looking at your french skills as a glass half-empty rather than half-full. You have reading, listening and speaking skills in french that are imperfect, but you're not french so they should be imperfect.

But if time with french is winding you up, then absolutely spend time with italian instead.

[Bex]

As you know I've been really down as well about my progress over the last few weeks. You gave me some good advice suggesting I look back to see how far I'd come

I am coming to the conclusion that I will stop pushing myself for a while, I think that the pressure, amount of time on task, perceived lack of progress and so on, have all come together to produce great frustration when faced with native materials.

I'm going to just try and flood myself with the sound of the language, sometimes really listening and trying to understand but sometimes just background noise. And I'm going to stop "studying" for a while just to release some of the pressure and frustration.

If I don't understand I'm going to try and just let it go. If I really, really want to know I'll look it up - both purely to minimise frustration.

Still that's my plan because I have no idea what to do, and I don't want to give up. Do you have any thoughts on what you'll do to move forward? Or are you thinking of taking a break?

If you can read in your target language, I assume you got good at reading by reading? And that it took a lot of reading?

[StringerBell]

About how much time have you put into French and/or Italian?

Years. About 15 for Italian and 10 for French.

But how much actual time did you put in during those years and how consistent were you? Have you been doing something in French/Italian everyday for all those years?

I was "learning" Italian for ~6 years before I switched methods and started doing it consistently every single day. In those 6 years I would do a little bit here and there with long periods where I did nothing but feel crushing guilt that I sucked and was incapable...but all that time wallowing in guilt over Italian it gave me the impression I'd been studying Italian forever but in reality most of that time I wasn't doing anything with the actual language at all. It really warped my perspective. That's why I prefer to think in terms of hours spent with the language instead of years.

I haven't read through your whole log because it's quite long, so I apologize if you've covered this stuff at some point.

[rdearman]

About how much time have you put into French and/or Italian?

Years. About 15 for Italian and 10 for French.

Is that 10/15 hours? Total?

No. That is years.

[StringerBell]

Whoops, I realized it was years and changed my response but you were too fast for me!