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

[smallwhite]

If you ran an extract-words-from-corpus magic on your cards and tested yourself on the genders of the nouns, how well do you think you'd do?

I think I know what you mean, but please explain "extract-words-from-corpus magic" in more detail please?

Sorry.
1. Copy all the sentences from the French side of your sentence cards
2. Put them through something like this: https://www.online-utility.org/text/analyzer.jsp
3. Receive a list of single words as output
4. You go through the list, and for every word that is a noun, you say what gender it is

[MamaPata]

Sounds like you might already be in a really good position with your speaking partner, but just in case, here are some italki tutors I've had a really positive experience with. Léa looks excellent, but way out of my price range sadly.

I have had quite a few lessons with Jonathan, who I really like. We basically exclusively talked about politics and Russia. But he works as a musician, so anyone more into music (which seems like a few given Dionysus' log!) would be able to talk to him about that. I also really liked Frédéric, though I found he used quite a few anglicisms. I'm sure this is true to life, but not great for a student! With all my French teachers though, I've never really done the big family discussion, we've always ended up at politics, I don't know why - maybe it's my face? (Probably it's the fact that I can't shut up about politics. This forum is hard for me )

I've also had a number of more structured lessons, that were really good: Christelle, Margo, Pauline, Matthais. Sadly, I can't afford those as regularly - maybe in the future. If you want links to their pages, let me know.

[rdearman]

Sounds like you might already be in a really good position with your speaking partner, but just in case, here are some italki tutors I've had a really positive experience with. Léa looks excellent, but way out of my price range sadly.

I have had quite a few lessons with Jonathan, who I really like. We basically exclusively talked about politics and Russia. But he works as a musician, so anyone more into music (which seems like a few given Dionysus' log!) would be able to talk to him about that. I also really liked Frédéric, though I found he used quite a few anglicisms. I'm sure this is true to life, but not great for a student! With all my French teachers though, I've never really done the big family discussion, we've always ended up at politics, I don't know why - maybe it's my face? (Probably it's the fact that I can't shut up about politics. This forum is hard for me )

I've also had a number of more structured lessons, that were really good: Christelle, Margo, Pauline, Matthais. Sadly, I can't afford those as regularly - maybe in the future. If you want links to their pages, let me know.

I've used Frédéric too, yeah he uses a lot of English words. I've used a couple of the others too. I never talk about politics, mostly because it bores me to tears so I rarely have an issue on the forum. Maybe I should talk about food, I'm a bit of a foodie and most living people eat, so might be a nice safe subject.

[reineke]

* Common French words with mixture of audio sentences and basic TL/NL cards.
* French audio cards. TL Audio on front, Back is sentence in TL & NL

I'm suddenly wondering if SRSing flashcards bearing sentences extracted from native material is "using native materials" or "studying / using study materials". The sentences are native, the SRS is artificial, but if one reads or watches tele for 8 hours a day that's pretty artificial, too, and if one re-reads and re-watches something then that's spaced repetition, too..

If rdearman's ankiing is naturalistic language learning the Texas chainsaw guy was performing fine cosmetic surgery. His extensive reading without a solid base in phonology is not great either.

The tutors will do what you ask them. I don't think you need to blow $50 to learn about nouns ending in -ier or to discuss Alexander the Great. I think you should consider finishing Mauger I or a more modern course with the help of your tutor and at most do some structured language practice. In your spare time you should concentrate on listening (with and without L2 subtitles).

[MamaPata]

Why wouldn't you want to talk about food?!

[PeterMollenburg]

Well I recommend Léa because a) she's a friend of mine and b) she always managed to get the best out of me, but I am sure everyone has their preferences.

Yep, and I felt she was very good at what she does as she genuinely appears to really care about teaching French to those who want to learn it, which is why I have a lot of respect for her. I just didn’t connect that well with her myself as I had too few sessions with her and when it came time for me to take on tutors again down the track, she was busy and I found someone else who suited my particular purposes really well.

I think one of the important non-linguistic skills at the advanced level is agency. Taking control of your learning process and ruthlessly weeding out what doesn't push you forward. That's the reason I told you to focus on writing. You suck at it and your grammar needs improving. Just fix that first, and you'll find it will bleed over into your other skills. B1-B2 is the skill level where writing gets REALLY important

Highlighting in red is my doing. I’ve found this phrase to become more and more pertinent to my advancement in French lately. And as time passes and I move forward, I still find myself continuing to revisit this concept while re-evaluating my study plan. So, what am I saying? You’re dead right tarvos! And for rdearman... if you want to move forward quicker, then economise, consider getting rid of anything that’s more of the same old thing (whether you’re studying French or Italian), and consider what’s going to give you more bang for buck, which as has been suggested is likely to be your writing. so....

If you love Anki, or find it gives results, or just want to continue with it, why not do (if you don’t already) type written responses on your cards. Attach a keyboard to your smart phone, or use your computer and this way you’re not slowing yourself down too much, but are working a weakness (spelling/writing)....

[rdearman]

An update to this log, and a response to some things which came up in my French log. https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=7701

I decided to write a log in French for the practice as Tarvos suggested. I'm responding to some of the comments here, because to respond in written French would take me until the end of the century. The first post took me almost an hour. I was surprised at the amount of corrections I received on my post since I'd specifically installed LibreOffice in French with French spell checking and grammar checking.

rdearman,
After reading your passage above, well done btw, I think what will help you is to work through a course or two with which you are frequently writing written responses to what would be essentially grammatical questions, the kind which force you to consider how to spell correctly what you are writing and how to construct your phrases in a grammatical correct manner. For this I recommend courses such as French in Action (making use of the workbooks in particular - the videos are a small component of the overall content) or Grammaire Progressive du Français. FIA would be my primary recommendation. Linking phonetics to graphical representation, i.e. 'spelling', goes a long way in helping spelling as well. To understand what you are hearing and then the ways that that sound can be written, well you get the idea I'm sure. I'm sure there's a course out there that may suit your tastes more. I'm not recommending a course because I've done 700 trillion of them, I'm recommending one as I feel it will help you remedy one of your weakest components of French. All in all writing practice is what you need, but around a strict structure. Given the amount of errors in your above text, writing 'freely' at the moment might not be the best move. You could fossilize mistakes, and numerous corrections could leave you exasperated. You need structure! Get a good course with plenty of written exercises and do a bit each day!

I have to write freely, since nobody would pay me! I can't do courses. I realise this is the same thing in reverse which everyone told you. Good advice, but I'm not going to take it.

Arnaud must be mellowing out with age.

I wrote that the most obvious problem was the misuse of the pronouns, then I deleted because perhaps Rick wants to be left alone...
I agree with PM : there are basic grammatical problems that can be tackled easily: pronouns, place of the adverb (j'encore), basic conjugaisons.
Another idea to improve the orthography is simply to copy a text (à la Scriptorium by Arguelles): When I started to learn russian, I was writing the text of each lesson of Assimil Russian to learn to write in cyrillic without too many mistakes. 5/10 minutes a day, no more.

I was surprised that the grammar checkers which I ran the text through didn't pickup on misplacement of pronouns. I cranked up the settings to the "Uber Grammar Nazis" and it didn't pick it up. I did find a better one this morning which did catch a number of the errors you've pointed out. https://www.languagetool.org/ so in future I'll pass everything through that. If you have another recommendation for a French grammar checking software I'd love to know. I don't have a problem using grammar books, of which I have a couple. So I'm happy to look up problems when they've been identified.

When I start out learning a programming language I rarely read the entire book. More often I start a simple project and try to make a program which works. Luckily for computers the compiler will give immediate feedback because the program will not compile, or if it is a scripted language it simply will not run. It will tell you where the problem is, and then I would go read the relevant documentation until I fixed the problem. I would do this again and again with increasingly more difficult projects and using more sophisticated constructs. This will not guarantee your program will run without crashing because there are more subtle problems which have to be tackled in a different way, but it will get you a long way. In terms of computer programming languages then I'm already a Hyper-polyglot.

I have not been doing anything methodical like this for language learning because I stupidly assumed that if 66.9 million French people could learn French I could too. Given this failure, I thought I would start using my programming language method with natural languages. The problem is that I don't have a compiler so there is no immediate feedback telling me where the problem is. I was hoping that a decent grammar checker would provide this feedback. I think this new grammar checker I found this morning will go some way to giving me feedback which I can then check against the documentation.

Humans are typically crap at giving feedback, so this method isn't going to help me with speaking or listening, but might move me forward slightly with writing.

[reineke]

An update to this log, and a response to some things which came up in my French log. https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=7701

I decided to write a log in French for the practice as Tarvos suggested. I'm responding to some of the comments here, because to respond in written French would take me until the end of the century. The first post took me almost an hour. I was surprised at the amount of corrections I received on my post since I'd specifically installed LibreOffice in French with French spell checking and grammar checking.

rdearman,
After reading your passage above, well done btw, I think what will help you is to work through a course or two with which you are frequently writing written responses to what would be essentially grammatical questions, the kind which force you to consider how to spell correctly what you are writing and how to construct your phrases in a grammatical correct manner. For this I recommend courses such as French in Action (making use of the workbooks in particular - the videos are a small component of the overall content) or Grammaire Progressive du Français. FIA would be my primary recommendation. Linking phonetics to graphical representation, i.e. 'spelling', goes a long way in helping spelling as well. To understand what you are hearing and then the ways that that sound can be written, well you get the idea I'm sure. I'm sure there's a course out there that may suit your tastes more. I'm not recommending a course because I've done 700 trillion of them, I'm recommending one as I feel it will help you remedy one of your weakest components of French. All in all writing practice is what you need, but around a strict structure. Given the amount of errors in your above text, writing 'freely' at the moment might not be the best move. You could fossilize mistakes, and numerous corrections could leave you exasperated. You need structure! Get a good course with plenty of written exercises and do a bit each day!

I have to write freely, since nobody would pay me! I can't do courses. I realise this is the same thing in reverse which everyone told you. Good advice, but I'm not going to take it.

Arnaud must be mellowing out with age.

I wrote that the most obvious problem was the misuse of the pronouns, then I deleted because perhaps Rick wants to be left alone...
I agree with PM : there are basic grammatical problems that can be tackled easily: pronouns, place of the adverb (j'encore), basic conjugaisons.
Another idea to improve the orthography is simply to copy a text (à la Scriptorium by Arguelles): When I started to learn russian, I was writing the text of each lesson of Assimil Russian to learn to write in cyrillic without too many mistakes. 5/10 minutes a day, no more.

I was surprised that the grammar checkers which I ran the text through didn't pickup on misplacement of pronouns. I cranked up the settings to the "Uber Grammar Nazis" and it didn't pick it up. I did find a better one this morning which did catch a number of the errors you've pointed out. https://www.languagetool.org/ so in future I'll pass everything through that. If you have another recommendation for a French grammar checking software I'd love to know. I don't have a problem using grammar books, of which I have a couple. So I'm happy to look up problems when they've been identified.

When I start out learning a programming language I rarely read the entire book. More often I start a simple project and try to make a program which works. Luckily for computers the compiler will give immediate feedback because the program will not compile, or if it is a scripted language it simply will not run. It will tell you where the problem is, and then I would go read the relevant documentation until I fixed the problem. I would do this again and again with increasingly more difficult projects and using more sophisticated constructs. This will not guarantee your program will run without crashing because there are more subtle problems which have to be tackled in a different way, but it will get you a long way. In terms of computer programming languages then I'm already a Hyper-polyglot.

I have not been doing anything methodical like this for language learning because I stupidly assumed that if 66.9 million French people could learn French I could too. Given this failure, I thought I would start using my programming language method with natural languages. The problem is that I don't have a compiler so there is no immediate feedback telling me where the problem is. I was hoping that a decent grammar checker would provide this feedback. I think this new grammar checker I found this morning will go some way to giving me feedback which I can then check against the documentation.

Humans are typically crap at giving feedback, so this method isn't going to help me with speaking or listening, but might move me forward slightly with writing.

Arnaud also made a mom joke! The joke contained a good observation: one would think you would have transferred something from Italian to avoid errors like "le maman" .

I see that you used an online grammar and spelling checker. I counted many references to computers and programming. Did you read your story top to bottom? Did you use a dictionary?

[Elenia]

I see that you used an online grammar and spelling checker. I counted many references to computers and programming. Did you read your story top to bottom? Did you use a dictionary?

Massively important! I'm less than virtuous when it comes to grammar in any language. I make careless mistakes, some of which are very obvious even only a few seconds after I've made them, others which I might need a bit more temporal distance to recognise. If you go for free writing, then give yourself an hour, go over your original text, correct what you can and only then put it through a grammar/spell checker. What does it highlight? Try to correct these issues on your own before seeing the solution. If you absolutely can't correct the issue, that's definitely something you need to look up and work on specifically. Then, get a human to look at it. Spell checkers are not perfect. 'I have a spelling checker, It came with my PC. It plane lee marks four my revue Miss steaks aye can knot sea' and all that. Whatever they correct you on should also be looked up and worked on.

[rdearman]

Arnaud also made a mom joke! The joke contained a good observation: one would think you would have transferred something from Italian to avoid errors like "le maman" .

I only saw one post by Arnaud, and I didn't see that. Perhaps it was in the part he deleted?

Massively important! I'm less than virtuous when it comes to grammar in any language. I make careless mistakes, some of which are very obvious even only a few seconds after I've made them, others which I might need a bit more temporal distance to recognise. If you go for free writing, then give yourself an hour, go over your original text, correct what you can and only then put it through a grammar/spell checker. What does it highlight? Try to correct these issues on your own before seeing the solution. If you absolutely can't correct the issue, that's definitely something you need to look up and work on specifically. Then, get a human to look at it. Spell checkers are not perfect. 'I have a spelling checker, It came with my PC. It plane lee marks four my revue Miss steaks aye can knot sea' and all that. Whatever they correct you on should also be looked up and worked on.

I am well aware of the short comings of spell-checkers. I did run it through a grammar checker and it came up with nothing. Subsequent, better, checkers did find some errors.

I did attempt to correct the errors on my own. However, it now appears this was a pointless exercise in futility with which I shall not be continuing.