wwiding's French log

[wwiding]

Yeah, if you want to improve your output, then having a solid understanding and feel of the grammar will only help you as a lot of grammar exercises are basically prompts for output.

Good luck.

Do you have any grammar book or website recomendations? I'll probably try to match DLI drills to the grammar points I'm studying because I have a really stubborn brain and things don't like to stick.

[tomgosse]

Yeah, if you want to improve your output, then having a solid understanding and feel of the grammar will only help you as a lot of grammar exercises are basically prompts for output.

Good luck.

Do you have any grammar book or website recomendations? I'll probably try to match DLI drills to the grammar points I'm studying because I have a really stubborn brain and things don't like to stick.

There are a lot of recommendations in the French group, Les Voyageurs.

[wwiding]

There are a lot of recommendations in the French group, Les Voyageurs.

Thank you. I'll take a look at the suggestions and check some reviews on amazon.

[Fortheo]

Yeah, if you want to improve your output, then having a solid understanding and feel of the grammar will only help you as a lot of grammar exercises are basically prompts for output.

Good luck.

Do you have any grammar book or website recomendations? I'll probably try to match DLI drills to the grammar points I'm studying because I have a really stubborn brain and things don't like to stick.

Whichever grammar book you can stay consistent with is my recommendation. I don't mean to be vague, but it's the truth in my opinion.

[wwiding]

Well I made it to the first review lesson of DLI Basic French. I did the lesson first without the audio to test my knowledge and then again with the adio to check my answers and shadow the dialogue. I did ok, I only made one or two mistakes and I knew enough of the material that I modified some of the questions/answers to respond in the negative and affirmative. I also picked up a copy of easy french step by step to study grammar but after looking at the FSI French Basic course I think I'd learn the same grammar points while also having drills to pound the information into my brain. I guess it comes down to how much I learn vs how much effort I have to put in to learn it. I tend to understand grammatical points better if I have lots of examples. For now, I'll use all three to learn while I decide which ones help the most.

Do to my work schedule my extensive and intensive reading is limited to weekends but thats ok for now, two hours of dli + grammar study on weekdays plus reading books and watching tv shows/movies on the weekends should have a positive impact on my French.

[wwiding]

I did some of the translation exercises from the DLI book. I find translating to be the most difficult thing I've done so far, which means I need to work harder at it. The most difficult part for me isn't really in translating the words, but in how to word the translation. An easy example would be translating the phrase: "The major's children are learning French in high school". I think the translation would be: "Les enfants du commandant aprrennent le français au lycée".

I would think things like this would be more obvious to me after doing the passive phase and a little of the active phase of assimil and some of French in Action as well but as I've said before, my brain is stubborn and it takes a while for some things to sink in. I WILL GET IT. It'll just take some more time translating. I feel that working through DLI will solve a lot of this as well.

I bet by the end of the month the translation phase will be much easier.

[wwiding]

I've been skipping the exercises in DLI that don't include audio, but after doing some of the review exercises I think I'm going to start. It'll slow me down in terms of how many "tapes" I can get through per week but will probably be beneficial in the end.

[wwiding]

I dictated the dialogues from tape five today. Some of the audio was hard for me to understand but over all I did well. I've stopped dictating the smaller exercises because I don't think it helps and I'd like to spend that time on the non-audio exercises at the end of the lessons instead.

So far I'm really enjoying DLI. I find that I'm focusing on things I've never noticed before due to the repetition. I'm reading through Easy French Step by Step as well, sometimes skipping to chapters that highlight grammar from DLI.

My progress has slowed down some what since I've been doing the non-audio exercises but my understanding has increased so I don't mind the trade off. I'll probably read some Harry Potter tonight and watch a few episodes of what ever random French tv show catches my interest.

[wwiding]

I did some grammar from the book "Easy French Step by Step" today before work and then dictated my way through most of the dialogue on lesson seven of DLI Basic French. I find that I can only dictate for so long before I kind of check out and I just can't pay attention any more. If I have the time, I may try to clean up some of the audio from the lessons so I can hear it a little better. I may also try to cut out the dialogues so I can shadow them.

[wwiding]

I did more of the questions and exercises from lesson seven today. I think I'm moving through the lessons quickly enough, given the time I have to devote. I do work four twelve hour shifts every other week though which seriously slows down my progress. I'm hoping I can spend more time on the weekends doing the lessons and shadowing the dialogues but I need to find the time to extract the dialogue portions from the audio. I did manage to find an old tape deck adapter to plug my phone into my car stereo but the headphone jack on it doesn't work, it shouldn't be that hard to wire in a new one though.