Amanda's 2023 Log: Mostly French, Some German

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philomath
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Re: Amanda's 2023 Log: Mostly French, Some Spanish and Esperanto

Postby philomath » Fri Mar 24, 2023 1:34 pm

Currently on my flight back to Boston! I didn’t do daily updates after all, so I’ll just summarize my trip in one post. Overall, it was a great trip, mainly consisting of bookstores, food, and walking around.

Bookstores. I made multiple trips to Foyles and Waterstones, and I also visited some smaller bookstores like Oxfam Bookshop. The only French books I bought were Claudine à l’école and a French grammar book. I spent some time looking at Greek courses, but I think I have enough resources to start with next year.

Food. We had a lot of good food, which is one of my favorite things to do when traveling! Notable places: Borough Market, Candella Tea Room, Dishoom, NOPI.

First time in Paris. We only had 24 hours in Paris, but we managed to do a decent amount: got breakfast at a cute café near Le Marais, looked at art in Le Centre Pompidou, saw Notre-Dame, walked around a lot. Because of the protests happening, some of the streets were full of trash, but besides that the city was just as pretty as I expected. Contrary to what I’d heard, I didn’t find Parisians to be rude at all! Just not over-the-top friendly like sometimes in the US.

Like I said before, I didn’t want to pressure myself to speak French the whole time. But I did speak French a little bit! Just for touristy interactions: asking how to buy a metro pass, getting a table at a restaurant, etc. We encountered a few people who didn’t speak English, so knowing French was useful. But overall I was disappointed by my speaking ability. I was really nervous and ended up getting tongue-tied during many interactions. I think it was due to self-consciousness about my pronunciation. This gives me extra motivation to work on it when I get back home!
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Re: Amanda's 2023 Log: Mostly French, Some Spanish and Esperanto

Postby tastyonions » Fri Mar 24, 2023 1:54 pm

philomath wrote:But overall I was disappointed by my speaking ability. I was really nervous and ended up getting tongue-tied during many interactions. I think it was due to self-consciousness about my pronunciation. This gives me extra motivation to work on it when I get back home!

The same happened to me when I went to Paris, and also other places (Spain, Mexico, Italy). It's too bad you were only there for a day, because after a day or two I got over the nervousness and spoke better every time, so maybe you would have experienced the same thing.
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Re: Amanda's 2023 Log: Mostly French, Some Spanish and Esperanto

Postby philomath » Sat Mar 25, 2023 1:55 am

tastyonions wrote:The same happened to me when I went to Paris, and also other places (Spain, Mexico, Italy).

I'm glad I'm not the only one who's experienced that. :D
tastyonions wrote:It's too bad you were only there for a day, because after a day or two I got over the nervousness and spoke better every time, so maybe you would have experienced the same thing.

I think you're right: my first interaction was definitely the worst, and I started to feel more confident as the day went on. I definitely want to stay longer next time!
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Re: Amanda's 2023 Log: Mostly French, Some Spanish and Esperanto

Postby jmar257 » Sat Mar 25, 2023 2:57 am

philomath wrote:Like I said before, I didn’t want to pressure myself to speak French the whole time. But I did speak French a little bit! Just for touristy interactions: asking how to buy a metro pass, getting a table at a restaurant, etc. We encountered a few people who didn’t speak English, so knowing French was useful. But overall I was disappointed by my speaking ability. I was really nervous and ended up getting tongue-tied during many interactions. I think it was due to self-consciousness about my pronunciation. This gives me extra motivation to work on it when I get back home!

I can definitely say, being intermediate in French myself, that on short trips it's definitely tough to "get into" the language the first day. The second day is normally better, although when I travel with family/friends who speak English and I'm speaking a bunch in English it's still hard. Much easier if you're alone and have a day or two under your belt...but traveling with people is more fun.

philomath wrote:I think you're right: my first interaction was definitely the worst, and I started to feel more confident as the day went on. I definitely want to stay longer next time!

The worst for me is always customs--tons of background noise at the airport, your very first interaction in the country, and the stupid glass that's always in between you make it hard to hear what they're saying (iirc that actually pre-dated Covid, so I can't blame that).
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Re: Amanda's 2023 Log: Mostly French, Some Spanish and Esperanto

Postby philomath » Sat Apr 01, 2023 3:54 pm

25Mar23–31Mar23

French
25Mar23: I did some more pronunciation practice with InnerFrench, reading one sentence of the transcript at a time and then listening to the recording. I stopped after 15 minutes, but I think it was a useful exercise. Afterward, I watched two episodes of The Ultimatum: France with French subtitles.

26Mar23: It occurred to me that my lack of motivation is probably due to the fact that I've hit the intermediate plateau. I just don't feel like I'm making any progress in French lately, especially not from listening and reading, which are pretty easy for me now. Therefore, I think I need to change my study habits to push past this stage. Today I wrote 159 words about what I did earlier (gardening and going to a cool stationery store). I also read an article from Slate France about daylight savings time and wrote down interesting words.

27Mar23: Today I spent my entire morning commute reviewing Anki cards, as I had let over 300 accumulate for French. On the way home, I started reading Les années by Annie Ernaux. I only read the first 10 pages or so, but it definitely seemed more difficult than L'événement in terms of vocabulary. I have the paperback version instead of the ebook, so it was also harder to look up words. However, I've noticed that the first chapters of a book tend to be more difficult than the rest for whatever reason, so hopefully that's true for this book as well! I also spent 10 minutes or so practicing my pronunciation with Speechling.

28Mar23–31Mar23: I continued reading Les années. It's kind of boring, compared to L'événement? After a couple of days, I gave up and downloaded the ebook version so I could look up words more easily. I'm currently around 10% done with the book, and it seems to be a little easier as I predicted.
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Re: Amanda's 2023 Log: Mostly French, Some Spanish and Esperanto

Postby philomath » Sun Apr 02, 2023 4:23 pm

01Apr23

French
01Apr23: Had some fun with AI today. First, I tried chatting with Quazel AI. I told it that I wanted to talk about knitting with a friend. The conversation was fun, but I still found the speech-to-text distracting. For example, if I asked a question and then said something else, it didn't insert a question mark; instead, it made my whole response into one long sentence. So I felt the need to edit my response, adding punctuation marks, before sending it. I feel like speech-to-text could be a useful tool for identifying pronunciation errors, but it's hard to tell when it's actually picking up on mispronounced words. I think my first French teacher, Tom, often incorporated speech-to-text into his language-learning routine.

I also tried ChatGPT. First, I asked it to ask me questions about knitting. Then, I told it to correct my writing, and I answered each question one at a time. I ended up writing a total of 300 words, and I took some notes on ChatGPT's corrections. Many of them were related to word choice, like saying "j'ai opté pour" rather than "j'ai choisi". I thought that was helpful, since I'd like to expand my active vocabulary.
Last edited by philomath on Sun Apr 09, 2023 2:57 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Amanda's 2023 Log: Mostly French, Some Spanish and Esperanto

Postby philomath » Sun Apr 09, 2023 2:43 am

02Apr23–08Apr23

French
I haven't done much lately. During my commute last week, I tried chatting with Quazel by typing my messages rather than using the speech-to-text feature. I also discovered a French podcast about language-learning, called La Fabrique à Polyglottes. The fifth episode is an interview with my first iTalki teacher, Tom!

I also continued reading Les années, but after page 56 I decided to stop. The book is a little too difficult for me, and I don't have enough motivation to struggle through 200 more pages. I'm too excited to read the other books I've bought.

Last week I heard a lot of people speaking French around Boston. In fact, I encountered Francophones four days in a row! At the convenience store, in a greenhouse, and twice on the train. Of course, I didn't dare speak to any of them in French, but I had fun trying to eavesdrop. :)
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Re: Amanda's 2023 Log: Mostly French, Some Spanish and Esperanto

Postby philomath » Wed Apr 12, 2023 11:59 am

09Apr23–11Apr23

French
I spent six hours on a train from Philadelphia to Boston, during which time I started reading Claudine à l'école. I have a physical copy of the book, and every time I encountered an unknown word, I underlined it and looked it up. That got pretty tiring, but I kept it up for 34 pages. Then I flipped through those pages and made flash cards for the words that stood out to me. Many of them appeared several times, but I still didn't remember their meanings. However, I was glad to see that I did remember some of the words: farouche, velouté, etc. Anyway, I think I should move from intensive to extensive reading. I'll never finish the Super Challenge if I continue at this pace!

Esperanto
I deleted my entire Anki deck for Esperanto on a whim. :| I think I had gone a bit overboard with making flashcards: there were so many new ones, and so many to review! I need to re-think how I use Anki for Esperanto.

Writing
I'm trying to get back into writing. It's always on my mind, but I never make time for it. However, the other day I opened Scrivener on my laptop, and when I noticed it still open a couple hours later, I decided to write a little bit. I ended up working on a short story I started a long time ago but didn't finish. So just opening Scrivener every day might help me write more. This week, I want to come up with some kind of schedule for all the writing projects I want to work on. That includes working through the craft book I started at the beginning of the year.

Other Projects
I've started learning Python again, partly because it will help me with work, and partly for fun. I learned Python during university, but I quickly forgot it in favor of MATLAB and Visual Basic. Right now I'm reviewing the basics using two books: Automate the Boring Stuff with Python and Python for Everybody.
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Re: Amanda's 2023 Log: Mostly French, Some Spanish and Esperanto

Postby rdearman » Wed Apr 12, 2023 12:19 pm

philomath wrote: Anyway, I think I should move from intensive to extensive reading. I'll never finish the Super Challenge if I continue at this pace!

I used to alternate, I would read extensively then every 25 pages of the book read one or two pages intensively and look up everything. This generally helped because a lot of the words I just looked up appeared again in the next 25 pages, so reinforced it immediately. It also doesn't slow you down as much as intensively reading an entire book.
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Re: Amanda's 2023 Log: Mostly French, Some Spanish and Esperanto

Postby tastyonions » Wed Apr 12, 2023 2:35 pm

Sometimes I'll look up the first unknown word on every page rather than every single unknown word. That way I get through at least a couple dozen pages before I decide that I've hit enough new words for the day.
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