The great push to C2 (Extra French Edition)

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whatiftheblog
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Re: The great push to C2 (French)

Postby whatiftheblog » Tue Apr 11, 2017 7:40 pm

Arnaud wrote:The u of guyane is pronounced, it's not ги-yane, but г-ui-iane (Google translate says it correctly)
Accord sounds a little like "à coeur"
relayé: re-lai-ié, not re-le-yé (see below)
the è and é sounds are not totally stable: you sometimes replace one by the other. (objet, fermé: "objé", "fermè")
So be careful with the usual suspects: o/e and é/è, you (very) occasionally mix them a little
Needless to say that it's very good... 8-)


Thank youuuu! Super helpful! Will keep working on all of the above. My bad on Guyane, I definitely knew that. Thanks again :D
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whatiftheblog
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Re: The great push to C2 (French)

Postby whatiftheblog » Thu Apr 13, 2017 6:08 am

Exciting progress!

So it used to be that it would take me at least 4-5 hours of nonstop French input before I had what I call my "bursts", which are basically these weird states where I'm all ~inspired~ to write and/or record myself speaking. Today this happened after about 3 hours of political shows, which is a big shift! I sat down to write a long email to a family friend I'm hoping to see in Paris next week (NEXT! WEEK!), and even though I had to linguee some really basic stupid letter-writing stuff, when it came to the meat of the email, I raced through it. He wrote back saying "Quel français parfait !" and I was all :D

I also walked myself through an oral rendition of my answer to the "where do you see yourself in 5-10 years?" question I know the school is going to ask, and I was shocked by the ease with which it came out. There were a couple of times I probably fumbled the gender, but otherwise I had all these rather elegant constructions flying at me in my mind, which I suppose is what is formally referred to as the... activation? of vocabulary? In any case, it was cool. I was pleased with it. I should record it next time and maybe even share it...

I'm continuing my italki lessons, even though scheduling has been tough with the time difference and all of the days France gets off. I think I'm going to start scheduling more lessons early in the morning to prepare myself for what might be a 9 am interview - i.e. I won't necessarily have the luxury of feasting on Macron for 6 hours straight before I have to go in there, so I should prep ahead.

I'm also a ball of nerves over this election. Really excited to get there, see this family friend, and then just have it be over with already. I guess this is what following professional sports teams must feel like? Even though listening to Jean Lasalle has been great practice, and the richness of the language used in general has been excellent.

TLDR: The AJATT/whatever you want to call it method works. It just does. I think you have to be at B2 to get the most out of it quickly, but it really does work. And I'm now convinced that it's essential to constantly feel emotionally engaged with the material you're using, because I notice that when I start reading things I think I "should read", but ones that don't necessarily interest me, I immediately feel worse about my skills. The only "exercises" I've done this entire time are online ones I've found for French high school students on the trickiest grammar/spelling concepts; those I specifically sought out and I've really enjoyed them. I've always really enjoyed dictées, which is a very Russian thing, so I'm hoping to do a few of those soon.

Hope everyone's having nice weather!
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Re: The great push to C2 (French)

Postby DaveBee » Fri Apr 21, 2017 6:50 pm

whatiftheblog wrote:I'm also using this time to start filling in some of the knowledge gaps I have in French history - I don't know much about the early 20th century domestically (I studied/worked on colonization so I'm better with the colonies), and there are many gaps prior. If anyone knows of a Peter Calvocoressi-style French history magnum opus in French, I'd be grateful for your recommendations!
There was a radio programme about Marc Bloch earlier. Apparently he was the first french historian to suggest that geography has an effect on society/history.
En 1931, son ouvrage le plus maîtrisé, Les Caractères originaux de l'histoire rurale française, innove une fois encore, car il exploite une interdisciplinarité peu courante à cette époque (botanique, démographie, etc.) pour mieux comprendre l'évolution des structures agraires de l'Occident médiéval et moderne.
The other historians/academics participating in the programme are: Georges Duby, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Pierre Toubert, and Jean Robert Pitte.
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Re: The great push to C2 (French)

Postby whatiftheblog » Thu Apr 27, 2017 4:34 am

So I'm back from my amazing trip to Paris (which was amazing, have I mentioned that it was amazing?), and since I can't talk about the meat of it due to forum rules, I'll just note a few quick items:

1. This is impossible to watch, and yet it is very necessary to do so. If you're prone to emotion, no shame in breaking it up. Took me three sittings. Possibly the most beautiful thing I have ever - or will ever - hear, in French or otherwise.

2. If you happen to be in Paris between now and July-ish, go see: Vermeer at the Louvre, Picasso Primitif at Quai Branly/Jacques Chirac, everything at Palais de Tokyo, and Tomboctou - Zanzibar at IMA. I had set aside two free days for culture, and I was so enamored with the exhibits I saw that I forgot to eat lunch two days in a row.

3. The speed with which I can walk into and out of a Fnac EUR 200 lighter is astonishing.

4. AJATT is continuing to work very, very well. After a few completely avoidable hiccups where I was just tired, not paying attention, and/or in brainfreeze mode, I had absolutely no trouble carrying on complex professional conversations for hours and hours on end. In each case, there were entire periods of time where I forgot I was speaking French at all, I was just... talking. I got to meet a lot of the people I watch on TV every day, which was insanely cool, and I got a lot of compliments on my French. I was twice mistaken for an actual French person, which was probably the highlight of my year/life, once after a particularly intense political conversation - the guy was like, "well, it's up to you and your generation to fix things here, you need to participate in XYZ to make that happen", and I was like, ummmm... THAT SAID:

4-a. Don't make the same mistake I did and get frustrated/depressed after one or two hiccups. I wasted hours thinking/consuming social media in English afterwards because I was too upset with my French, which was entirely counterproductive and really dumb.

4-b. Do give yourself a 2-3 minute grace period at the beginning of each conversation to "click" into it. Eventually the need for this will go away, but if you spend the rest of the conversation obsessing over some complex phrase you tried to include in the beginning of your sentence and somehow fumbled, the rest of it won't go so hot, either.

4-c. My Twittering has actually turned out to be super helpful to pick up more informal, but also professional, speech and practice it reflexively. I now feel perfectly comfortable entering into Twitter discussions with random French people, and I even got retweeted by a top campaign activist and liked by a sitting Cabinet member. I'd highly recommend this as a fun supplementary activity - create an account, follow accounts in your TL related to whatever you like, and start tweeting yourself.
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Re: The great push to C2 (French)

Postby whatiftheblog » Tue May 16, 2017 6:10 am

Hi everyone! I'm stuck with a weird case of insomnia, so I wanted to drop by and list out some things:

1. These past few weeks have been crazy with my real job, my freelance, the campaign, and all of the usual stuff I've been watching/listening to/reading. I had some massive deadlines and was under a lot of stress, but this period was useful in showing me just how much of this language acquisition process is affected by your psychological state as you approach it. On really busy days, I'd have one momentary blank and decide that that was proof enough of my French sucking incorrigibly; on much more relaxed days, I could write out a nice page-long email without any major issues, double-checking Linguee only a few times to confirm intuition (all correct). All of this to say, if you feel you've hit a bump, it might not be the language, it might be something else. I really wish I'd paid attention to this earlier.

2. Speaking of campaigns, from a linguistic standpoint this one was an absolute gem. My top phrases used throughout the campaign are below, in no particular order. Note that most of these come from centuries-old French and aren't really used anymore, which makes them all the more wonderful :D

- La belle affaire!
- C'est de la poudre de Perlimpinpin
- Pis que pendre
- De grâce
- Les chicayas
- Un galimatias - this was actually a cool discovery, it's the same in Russian
- Antienne
- En conchiant
- Saut de cabri
- Une liste à la Prévert

I definitely used "la belle affaire!" and "ces chicayas" in Paris, and I definitely got little smiles from people. "La belle affaire!" just feels like such a me expression that I'm keeping it close by forever.

3. On another campaign-related linguistic point, I had a lot of fun with #RadioLondres on election day. French media are in blackout mode and there are strict rules banning the publication of polls or basically anything beyond participation until the results are announced. As a result, Belgian, Swiss and other neighboring media outlets take over the airwaves, and they announce things like exit polls and their own estimations. Persons subject to French law could get fined for posting this info, but some folks took to Twitter to creatively~* disseminate it, which led me to pick up some super interesting phrases and even new vocab! People were "disguising" the preliminary results as weather forecasts, sales projections for various kinds of sweets, regionally famous recipes, etc - it was really cool to follow from a language learner's perspective. I won't post any here to stay within the rules, but if you'd like to check them out, search Twitter for the #RadioLondres hashtag, specifically for posts from May 7th.

4. Twitter has really become a key part of my daily routine, and I now even have actual French people following and retweeting me. I've found it really helpful, and I now try to tweet several times a day - sometimes it's surprising how easily I can construct phrases I didn't know I knew. Heh :mrgreen:
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Re: The great push to C2 (French)

Postby tastyonions » Tue May 16, 2017 8:37 am

whatiftheblog wrote:1. This is impossible to watch, and yet it is very necessary to do so. If you're prone to emotion, no shame in breaking it up. Took me three sittings. Possibly the most beautiful thing I have ever - or will ever - hear, in French or otherwise.

I knew what video you were talking about just by the description. Saw it not long ago in Le Monde. Indeed, it is very moving.
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Re: The great push to C2 (French)

Postby whatiftheblog » Tue May 30, 2017 6:03 am

Bon, bref, voilà, quoi.

Ces trois derniers jours fériés auraient dû être consacrés à la préparation de tout mon dossier et de toutes mes fiches afin que je puisse 1) formellement postuler et 2) vraiment commencer l’étape suivante, la préparation de l’entretien devant le jury. Sur le premier point j’ai plutôt réussi, ma lettre de motivation est prête pour une rédaction finalement finale-finale et mon CV devrait être assez facile à réviser ; il me reste juste quelques points à préciser sur le dossier de candidature qui ne ressemble pas du tout à ce dont on est habitué aux Etats-Unis, c’est presqu’un deuxième CV, mais je ne veux pas y utiliser les mêmes phrases. Je dîne avec mon pote français demain soir pour procurer sa bénédiction finale sur le dossier, et après on va commencer une série des dîners-entretiens – du coup il a besoin de conseils sur son propre avenir professionnel, lesquels je devrai pouvoir donner en français, donc ça tombe bien pour nous deux.

Sur le deuxième point… en fait je n’ai rien fait sur ce sujet, ce que je dois impérativement remédier demain, sinon mes dîners-entretiens ne serviront à rien. J’ai une liste de 35-40 questions recueillies sur internet/youtube qui me semblent les plus probables, et je dois préparer une fiche de réponse avec quelques faits/arguments clés pour chacune. Le truc c'est qu'une partie de ce que je fais au boulot n'est pas un concept très répandu en France, même si ça commence à bouger doucement après cette campagne de ouf, donc c'est un peu plus difficile d'en parler sans anglicismes, et je cherche à les éviter à tout prix.

Je n’ai pas réussi non plus à lire, ce que je trouve particulièrement bizarre – je ne peux même pas vous expliquer pourquoi il est soudain devenu si difficile pour moi de me faire lire des livres que j’ai achetés avec tant d’enthousiasme, c’est une espèce de blocage psychologique pour lequel de je ne trouve pas d’explication. Je vais donc faire autrement – voici la liste des livres que je dois absolument lire avant le 9 juillet, et en le publiant je me donne un moyen de me contrôler :

Dans quelle France on vit – Anne Nivat
Mémoire de paix pour temps de guerre – Dominique de Villepin
Les salauds de l’Europe – Jean Quatremer
La fracture – Gilles Kepel
Géopolitique du moustique – Erik Orsenna

Ça fait presque 2000 pages de lecture assez dense, ce qui ne doit pas poser le moindre problème si je gère mon temps correctement sans gâcher des heures avec des vlogs sur, bah, l’apprentissage du japonais par une étudiante française par exemple. Je crois que j’ai déjà tiré tout ce que j’ai pu des vlogs au niveau du vocabulaire et des tics du français parlé – maintenant j’utilise « machin » correctement et spontanément, mais ça ne sert pas à grand-chose pour mon entretien, c’est même contreproductif en quelque sorte. Pendant les quelques semaines qui viennent, je vais donc me focaliser sur un registre un peu plus, ehm, soutenu.
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Re: The great push to C2 (French)

Postby whatiftheblog » Tue Jun 20, 2017 11:33 pm

Not a whole lot to report over these past few weeks. I did have a lesson with a new teacher on italki yesterday, and she said she thought I was a C2, given that I only made a handful of mistakes in the 2-hour session we had, and none of them were new to me - they were all things I knew were incorrect (and minor, thankfully). I really liked her style, actually - she used the last 3-4 minutes to go over the mistakes I made, but didn't interrupt me during the session, and that made things flow better than with my other teacher, who corrects mistakes instantly but can sometimes throw me off track. So yeah, the AJATT method works.

I'm 40 pages away from finishing La Fracture, and I really have no idea why it's so hard for me to get myself together to read, since I always enjoy it once I actually commit time to it. I'm not giving up on my goal yet, so that means a lot of reading ahead for me. Whooo.

I should know sometime next week whether I've been invited to interview or not. I really hope so, since I don't have a backup plan for this year and would probably have to wait another year :? I think I put together a strong application and I have high GPAs, so hopefully that'll count for something. I'm still not even remotely done with all of my fiches, though! That'll be the plan for tonight.

I'm also thinking that I'll do a mix of italki and in-person tutoring during the last week I'll have before the interview - I'll be in France for it, and I have plans to spend a couple of days with francophone friends, but the rest of the time will be devoted to reading and soaking everything in and cramming, basically.
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Re: The great push to C2 (French)

Postby whatiftheblog » Mon Jul 17, 2017 12:17 am

Hi folks! Sorry for the hiatus. Some news:

So I finally had my interview! It happened over Skype, though, which was probably better for me anyway. It's hard to say how it went because I'm normally loathe to praise myself anyway, so that might be a part of it. It all happened so quickly, over 20 or so minutes, that I can't really even remember all of the details, but I know I could have prepared a more elegant explanation of why-France-why-now, and I probably messed up the gender somewhere. However, there were some good signs - they asked me how come I spoke French so well (#win), they asked me how long I would need to resign from my job and they correctly guessed that I would "need to know soon, right?" at the end. I think I waddled through the answers on some things, though, like why not find a similar program in America (I thought the answer to this was obvious, since they don't really exist, so I didn't prepare it, really). In any case, I hope maybe my gigantic smile when I talked about my passion for France earned me some of those points back. There was one part that we sped through, when they mentioned they didn't think foreign students could work in France, and then we immediately moved on to the next question, so I didn't have time to indicate that they could... and that seemed like an important point for them, since the program is built for working professionals. After much oscillation and googling of cultural norms surrounding thank you notes in France (apparently, this is a super hot topic?), I finally erred on the side of overly polite and sent a thank you email, clarifying also as a follow-up to the question that I would be able to work part-time - I figured that would help me avoid being rejected on a technicality. I spent about 2 hours on these three paragraphs and drove my francophone friend crazy with text messages like "nan mais confirmer ou vérifier ???", because I've been particularly obsessive about hyperpolite professional writing as of late.

Anyway. I will say that I think my actual application (lettre de motivation, CV, dossier, diplômes, notes) is quite strong, and it seems my French was good enough, so I just reeeeeeally hope it doesn't come down to a technicality like I can't be employed 75% of the time but only 60% or something... It was a really helpful experience either way, and I am developing a plan B for next year, so... idk. We'll see!

I get the strong sense that I'm the first non-EU applicant they've possibly ever had, because my case seemed to raise some questions. I used to work in the admissions office of my grad school in the US, and I generally know how programs around the world structure their app requirements for foreigners. Here there was no language test requirement, no specifications on types of foreign diploma (re)certifications accepted (I just had my transcripts professionally translated), and no information on visas. Maybe I'll at least be exotic. Who knows! I reeeeeeeally want this, though. They promised to tell me this coming week.

FWIW, on the pure language side, my Airbnb host for this most recent trip to France also didn't believe I'd never lived in France. AFATT works! I did let myself marathon The Handmaid's Tale in English the day I was done with my interview, and I finally turned on some Spanish/Afrikaans music as a reward, but I only lasted two and a half days, really, because today I've already watched 3 hours of C dans l'air, to which I have developed a strange addiction. It's gonna suck if I get rejected, but at least I'll know I'll be able to keep going and hopefully do even better the next time around.
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Re: The great push to C2 (French)

Postby Ani » Mon Jul 17, 2017 4:34 am

That's amazing! Congratulations on getting your interview done. It does sound like you did really well. Is this the big program interview that you've been pushing to prepare for, or are there other opportunities coming up also?
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