Ketutar and languages

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Ketutar
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Bonjour mes petits choux

Postby Ketutar » Mon Aug 01, 2016 10:07 pm

How did the Frenchmen get chou of caulis?
And how did they get a cabbage of penis?
And why do they call their sweethearts little penes? The other way around I might understand :-D

Anyway, the first day of 6WC and I had a good day.
With other words, I had a normal day, but I wasn't aware I use that much time for language studies... I though I was just doing some little things, and mostly playing around, and suddenly I have logged in 8 1/2 hours! What? Really?
And I even had two naps today.
Apparently I do nothing but study.

What I have done today is Memrise and my 8th 100 words a day... to think that I have been keeping that up for a week already! Wow! (It takes surprisingly much time to learn the 100 words, especially when I go looking for stuff in the net. Like what is the difference of puisque, jusque and lorsque :-D

I have read a little logs here.

I watched an episode of Les filles d'à cöté, which is a very silly, very 90s sitcom, 20 minutes, pretty simple. And I find it amusing that I chose not to watch any more Extr@ because of the one "American", and there's one American in the Les filles :-D Apparently I am not to get rid of the American accent :-D

I listened to Chante France a couple of hours while playing games at Facebook. I thought of logging that in as study time, but, nah...

Then I did Duolingo and Lingvist

Then I read a little Yellow room...

And I have tried to watch movies...
I started to watch the Triplets of Belleville, and I find it boring.
I started to watch Persepolis, but I'm not in the mood of watching that. It's good, though. Interesting.
I tried to watch OSS 117, and that is so stupid I want to cry.
I tried to watch Asterix, a cartoon, but that too was stupid. :-( I rather read the books.
I started watching Strange Magic... and... neh... I might watch it later, but... right now, no.

So I think I'll skip the movie tonight and go to bed :-)

Bonne nuit!
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Memrise: 656 / 1657
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smallwhite
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Re: Ketutar and languages

Postby smallwhite » Tue Aug 02, 2016 5:04 am

Ketutar wrote:I didn't know you can copy someone's course at Memrise, unless it's word by word... which is almost as bothersome as writing one's own course.


* You can copy word by word, but I copy page by page. I just copied 11 pages of 20 words each, so 220 words, into an Excel spreadsheet and then re-aligned them. Took me 6 minutes. The next step would be to paste them into my own Memrise, Quizlet or Anki course. Quizlet is the fastest and takes maybe 1 minute.

* You can download other people's Anki decks to import into Memrise. Downloading would probably take 2 minutes. Choosing a deck takes longer ;)

* Or copy word lists from teaching sites like french.about.com to paste into Memrise.

* You can download Memrise courses using a browser script.

You can find instructions for all of the above in the Memrise Forum. The multiple-words-at-a-time paste / import function in Memrise is called "Bulk Add".
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Dialang or it didn't happen.

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Ketutar
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Re: Ketutar and languages

Postby Ketutar » Tue Aug 02, 2016 1:48 pm

Thanks, smallwhite ! :-)
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Re: Ketutar and languages

Postby blaurebell » Tue Aug 02, 2016 2:30 pm

8 1/2h is a long time! However, once watching stuff and reading isn't a strain anymore it's all just fun and games, isn't it? I'm not quite at that stage yet, so I only do 2-3h a day. Half of that is fun stuff though :) I'm not learning vocab by the way, it's way too monotonous. I notice that it sticks even when I don't try to memorise it, especially if I see it in the context of a story. That's the big downside of programs like memrise or anki. No context.
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Ketutar
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Re: Ketutar and languages

Postby Ketutar » Wed Aug 03, 2016 10:43 am

I just have to come here and vent a little!

Memrise France A1.
The sample sentences are horrible.
"il est triste parce qu'il n'a pas de petite amie"
"est-ce que ton petit ami a un travail ?"
"Pourquoi sont-ils si gros ?" "Ils sont gros parce qu'ils mangent trop de chocolate"
What?

Je suis triste parce que tu es bête.
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Ketutar
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Re: Ketutar and languages

Postby Ketutar » Fri Aug 05, 2016 2:44 pm

Right now I have been working on Memrise for two hours... Over 300 words to review. Pooh!

I'm starting to think it was really stupid to take on the 100 words a day challenge.

It's not that it cannot be done, because it can. It's that it's so time consuming to review the words. And surprisingly bothersome.

But it also has benefits; as I am reading books and watching movies/series at the same time, I recognize more words, because I just learned them among the 100 words of the day.
Like in the Depardieu Monte Cristo, Camille tells him "Le comte de Monte Cristo n'essaye pas, il réussit" (or something like that, I don't know enough to know if the grammar is correct. It could have been "le réussit" also, at least, it sounded like that, or something else.) :-D

Also, paired with Lingvist, it's very nice. It's often I have reviewed the words in one or the other, when they appear in the other one, and I know them because of the first one. (Now, that was a really confusing sentence...)

I don't like Duolingo much, and I'm considering quitting it, but on the other hand... it just takes 15 minutes or so, and i would like to add "golden French tree" to my achievements X-D
It actually has a double benefit to me - I learn English as well. There are things I say wrong and things I don't know how to say in English, too, so...

Another thing I have noticed is HOW MUCH I BENEFIT KNOWING SWEDISH IN STUDYING FRENCH. That was a total surprise to me, even when I know there was a huge francophile movement with the new French king of Sweden in the 19th century, (on top of the general admiration of everything French in the 18th century) and we (they?) adopted a lot of Swedish words and sayings. Like "nivå" - "niveau", "karaktär" - "caractère" or "sutenör" - "souteneur" (Yes, it means "pimp", both in French and Swedish. And English. And Dutch. Comes from French; soutenir = to support. But it's easy to learn because I know the Swedish word.)

Also, when I do this kind of routine stuff, I collect more minutes for the 6 weeks' challenge ;-) :-D
I just hope I can keep up with it.

Also, the Olympics open tonight. :-) That might take me away from studying French a little... Or a lot. Depends on what [the p-de tv channel who bought ALL the broadcasting rights to Olympics condescend to show us. They PROMISE "everything", but didn't keep much last time, so I don't trust them.
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Ketutar
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*Movie and Book list*

Postby Ketutar » Fri Aug 05, 2016 8:37 pm

Re: James29's Spanish and French Log
Sun Feb 07, 2016 5:43 pm
Cavesa wrote:You might like to try an "updatable post", similar to my booklist on the log. It is much easier to just add any book I finish to an already existing list, than to remember all I have read during a longer period of time.

Cavesa's book and movie list is here: http://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1870#p19562

Books I have read / am reading

Le Petit Nicolas de René Goscinny (still reading)
Les contes de Madame d'Aulnoy (still reading)
Le Mystère de la chambre jaune de Gaston Leroux (still reading)
Astérix le gaulois de René Goscinny et Albert Uderzo 2/8-16
La Serpe d'or de René Goscinny et Albert Uderzo 5/8-16
Astérix chez les Pictes de Jean-Yves Ferri et Didier Conrad 31/7-16
Le Secret de Ji de Pierre Grimbert (still reading)

Movies I have seen or have started to watch

La Belle et la Bête (1991) 12/7-16
Un amour de sorcière (1997) 14/7-16
OSS 117, Le Caire nid d'espions (2006) (didn't finish) 17/7-16
Les Femmes du 6e étage (2011) 20/7-16
Le Manoir Magique (2013) 20/7-16
Sur la piste du Marsupilami (2012) 20/7-16
Arthur et les Minimoys (2006) 21/7-16
Arthur et la Vengeance de Maltazard (2009) 22/7-16
Arthur 3 : La Guerre des deux mondes (2010) 22/7-16
Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016) 22/7-16
Les Trois Mousquetaires (2011) (didn't finish) 23/7-16
Tatie Danielle (1990) 26/7-16
Un monstre à Paris (2011) 27/7-16
Les Trois Mousquetaires (1959) 28/7-16
Les Douze Travaux d'Astérix (1976) (didn't finish) 30/7-16
Le Chat potté : Les Trois Diablos (2012) (short) 30/7-16
Huit femmes (2002) 30/7-16
Insaisissables (2013) 30/7-16
The Fall (2006) 01/8-16
Kiki la petite sorcière (1989) 02/8-16
Chair de poule (2015) 02/8-16
Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, un feuilleton, (1998) 03/8-16
Léon (1994) 04/8-16
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Re: Ketutar and languages

Postby blaurebell » Sat Aug 06, 2016 9:33 am

I thought that your Memrise challenge would go way beyond doable quickly because of all the reviews. Personally I think it's a waste of time. The brain is much better able to pick up words that it sees in context. If you spent those 3h on reading I'm sure it would be much more beneficial to you. So far I haven't done any flashcards with French and I'm still picking words up as I go along. I used to be all about the flashcards, but all they do is discourage me. They become overwhelming so quickly and then usually there is a huge mountain of them to climb - 3000 or 5000 or some such unrealistic numbers! Too much pressure. Sentences are also much better than isolated words and this is why I like Duolingo. I noticed that it helped me quite a bit with my Spanish, so I keep going, even though it sometimes can feel a little repetitive. What I notice is that the French tree has a lot of isolated words too which is annoying, but at least they re-appear in context later on. You know what I really like to pick up vocabulary? It's a software called Learning with Texts. You just stick a text in there - could be a novel - and then you can mark the words with colours according to how well you know them as you read through it. Also, when you click on an unknown word it brings up a dictionary in the same window. It helps me to read while I still need to look up a lot of words and I pick up a ton of new words in the process. Every day I notice that 50-100 new words end up being marked green. OK, it's word forms, so each new form counts as a "word", but still! So, you have the added motivation of seeing the Known Words count go up and it's super comfortable to have the dictionary just a mouse click away. And no damn reviews! The more important words re-appear over and over in the text anyway. This way you also don't waste your time learning words you might not ever need. It even has an integrated audioplayer so you can even add the audio if you have it and read along! I love it!
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Ketutar
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Re: Ketutar and languages

Postby Ketutar » Sat Aug 06, 2016 2:18 pm

I was going through some free resources to learn French online and read this on News in slow french (https://www.newsinslowfrench.com/)

"et enfin nous terminerons avec un sujet sur la Norvège qui envisage de donner un sommet de montagne à la Finlande pour le 100e anniversaire de son indépendance avec la Russie."

I understood everything except "envisage" and "un sommet de montagne" (though that I should have understood - DUH! :-D)
so I found out what those words mean, and started crying :-)

I SO SO SO SO SO SO much want them to do that! It was only a couple of years ago I told a Norwegian that the highest top of Finland actually lies in Norway... and that is the top they are talking about :-)

If they do, I will forgive them everything and love them forever :-D
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Ketutar
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Re: Ketutar and languages

Postby Ketutar » Sat Aug 06, 2016 3:47 pm

blaurebell wrote:I thought that your Memrise challenge would go way beyond doable quickly because of all the reviews.

:-D
Actually I noticed that I had so many words to review because I had done 200 words one day X-] So I gave myself a free day yesterday and now it's again comfortable and nice.

blaurebell wrote:Personally I think it's a waste of time. The brain is much better able to pick up words that it sees in context. If you spent those 3h on reading I'm sure it would be much more beneficial to you.


It probably is a waste of time in that there are better and more effective ways of learning a language, especially reading.

"If students read approximately a million words of running text a year, and if they know 96-98 per cent of the words, they will be exposed to 20,000 to 40,000 new words… If students learn one word in ten through context, they will learn somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 new words through extensive reading in a year."

I don't know "96-98 per cent of the words", I know about 85%, and at that rate I would be exposed to 150.000 new words, and if I learn 1 of 10 through context, I would learn 15.000 words reading 1.000.000 words... and at the moment it takes me about an hour to read some 20 pages, and there's about 250 words on a page, so it would take me 67 days to read the million words if I read 3 hours every day. And 1/3 of that to learn 5000 words... so I would learn my 5000 words about twice as fast through reading than through Memrise.

But, the question is, would I? Does one need the 96% (or some 3000 words) to understand the context well enough to understand the foreign words through the text? How much of the words one "learns" are cognates or "similar enough" to a word one already knows?

Anyway, I am OK with wasting my time doing something I like doing. :-D
I also think (believe? Want to believe?:-D) that learning the 5000 words will give me access to some 97-98% of the language and a better position to use what I read to strengthen the knowledge... so that after September 14th (or about there) when I have learned the 5000 most common French words and I "know" the 95% of the language, I will be able to plunge into reading more difficult literature and I will be able to quicker figure out the unknown words from context
----- like place names in Fantasy literature... they were talking about some assassins of some sort, and I tried to find out what
----- that "sort" was from Larousse before I realised that it's not a French word per se, but a name of an imaginary country. :-D
----- I would have known that if the text was in Finnish, Swedish or English...

One bad things with Memrise and Duolingo is that what one is learning is trying to remember the "correct" answer in a quiz/test :-D Which is not at all the same thing as learning a usable language. A word can mean so many different things and there are several things of expressing most of the thing... but I suppose it's the linguist part of me who likes "collecting words" and studying etymology and other such things. Because Memrise is practically "just" collecting words.

blaurebell wrote:So far I haven't done any flashcards with French and I'm still picking words up as I go along. I used to be all about the flashcards, but all they do is discourage me. They become overwhelming so quickly and then usually there is a huge mountain of them to climb - 3000 or 5000 or some such unrealistic numbers! Too much pressure.


It was a bit intimidating at first, but now with 1100 words under my belt, and after realizing my little misstep, I feel very confident and happy about it. I did the reviewing this morning, and it went easily, so I think the worry yesterday was because of the 100 words extra. :-)

This is also something totally new to me... I don't think I have ever studied some 8 hours a day FOR THIS LONG! :-D
It's really amazing and encouraging :-)

blaurebell wrote:You know what I really like to pick up vocabulary? It's a software called Learning with Texts.


Oh, I love LWT too :-D

----- I was using the online version before it... didn't work anymore, and didn't want to upload the program into my computer,
----- but now I decided to do that anyway, because if I had done it already when I started, all my Maltese would still be up there,
----- and now it's not and I need to put it in all over again, and I haven't been working with Maltese like for two years or so.
----- And then I couldn't get the program to work! Thankfully there was a good and kind person in here who helped me through it,
----- and now I have it on my computer, and I'm so relieved and happy and glad :-D

Though I find the colors a bit confusing, and I hate the fact that it doesn't recognize different forms of the word as the same word, and a couple other such things... or that the dictionaries are some times very confusing :-D

----- In French it's ok, but in Maltese it was a real adventure to try to figure out what the words meant...
----- you know Maltese is a mix of mostly Arabic and Italian with some French and English mixed in the soup,
----- and some verbs come from one language family and others from another, and there are times,
----- when you just have the Semitic root of three letters, that might or might not be the same letters in every form of the word,
----- and in Arabic or another Semitic language...
----- A lot of fun, a lot of work, a lot of frustration and irritation, and I suppose I learned a lot too, though it didn't feel like it.

With 5000 words it does (feel like it).
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