Moineau's language log (French and Japanese)

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Moineau
White Belt
Posts: 13
Joined: Sun Dec 04, 2016 12:24 am
Languages: Russian (N), English, Hebrew (near-native), French (beginner), Japanese (beginner)
x 23

Re: Moineau's language log (French and Japanese)

Postby Moineau » Mon Jun 26, 2017 1:32 pm

Has there been another week?

Really?

All 7 days, 168 hours, 604800 seconds of it?

604800 seconds in which I did absolutely no language study of any kind?

No, there couldn't have been.

I refuse to believe it. Clocks be damned, I refuse to believe it!

:oops:
4 x

Moineau
White Belt
Posts: 13
Joined: Sun Dec 04, 2016 12:24 am
Languages: Russian (N), English, Hebrew (near-native), French (beginner), Japanese (beginner)
x 23

Re: Moineau's language log (French and Japanese)

Postby Moineau » Wed Jul 05, 2017 9:50 pm

This week I read a little more parallel Fahrenheit 451 in French and English, and then decided I wanted some variety, and ideally also something originally written in French. So I set up an Audible.fr account, bought two audiobooks I'd verified I could also download in French and in a translation, and converted them to MP3. Here's a list of actionable advice:

1. If you have an amazon.com account, you can log into amazon.fr with it, but it will sell you hardly anything unless you work hard to convince Amazon you'd just moved to France (and that carries its own problems).

2. Easier in the end to just open a separate amazon.fr account. Using the + trick in email works, i.e. instead of my usual [something]@gmail.com I registered under [something]+amazonfr@gmail.com, and Amazon happily accepted it as a separate address; meanwhile all mail to you will actually come to [something]@gmail.com anyway - this is an old, old email convention. If you want to buy Kindle books, you'll need a fake (or real, if you want) French address to give Amazon (Manage Content and Devices -> Settings -> Country). I created one using the first google result for "fake french address generator".

3. You can login to Audible.com with your Amazon.com account, and go into a free trial that gives you two "credits" (two books). If you don't cancel, they'll start charging $15/month in a month, while giving a new "credit" every month. But they have relatively few audiobooks in French, compared to Audible.fr.

4. You can login to Audible.fr with your Amazone.fr account, and go into a free trial that gives you two "credits" (two books). If you don't cancel, they'll start charging 10 euro/month in a month, while giving a new "credit" every month.

5. On either audible.fr or a audible.com, you can download the "Audible Download Manager", and then inside it, download some/all of your audiobooks to your desktop, in the .aax format. Once you do that, use the program "aaxtomp3" (Windows only, I think) to convert .aax to .mp3.

I now have, and started reading, a book+audiobook of short stories in French by Marcel Aymé, and another one by Jean-Philippe Arrou-Vignod. Seems much better than Bradbury, and I'm glad I invested the time to set things up properly.

Unfortunately, no progress in Japanese this week.
2 x

Moineau
White Belt
Posts: 13
Joined: Sun Dec 04, 2016 12:24 am
Languages: Russian (N), English, Hebrew (near-native), French (beginner), Japanese (beginner)
x 23

Re: Moineau's language log (French and Japanese)

Postby Moineau » Mon Jul 10, 2017 5:10 pm

Another week has passed.

I'm trying to give the L-R method (http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Listening-Reading_Method) a fair try. I've got two books that I like in French audio, French text and English/Russian translations. But after preparing everything, I've only had a few short hours to actually listen and read this week, and I'm not yet ready to say the method is or isn't working well for me. I've read/listened to about 5 pages of Marcel Aymé. It's frustrating, but it should be, at the beginning. I'm reserving judgement for now. Sadly, no time was left for Japanese this week either.
3 x

Moineau
White Belt
Posts: 13
Joined: Sun Dec 04, 2016 12:24 am
Languages: Russian (N), English, Hebrew (near-native), French (beginner), Japanese (beginner)
x 23

Re: Moineau's language log (French and Japanese)

Postby Moineau » Tue Jul 18, 2017 3:45 pm

Another unpromising update. The real world asserted its dominance with my daughter's 9th birthday, and meeting that challenge together with other assorted ones has left no time for languages at all. I'll be back.
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Moineau
White Belt
Posts: 13
Joined: Sun Dec 04, 2016 12:24 am
Languages: Russian (N), English, Hebrew (near-native), French (beginner), Japanese (beginner)
x 23

Re: Moineau's language log (French and Japanese)

Postby Moineau » Tue Jul 25, 2017 9:58 pm

Returned to reading of/listening to Marcel Aymé in French with the L-R method. Did several more spurs of this, covering another 10-15 pages. It's going OK and I feel real progress, but I need to devote more chunks of time to this, and have each chunk be more massive. Right now it's too slow.

Practiced Glossika drills for Japanese. Lots of words crossed over from active to passive vocab, but they're still there and close to the surface, too. Need more serious engagement with Japanese soon if they're not to fade away.
0 x

Moineau
White Belt
Posts: 13
Joined: Sun Dec 04, 2016 12:24 am
Languages: Russian (N), English, Hebrew (near-native), French (beginner), Japanese (beginner)
x 23

Re: Moineau's language log (French and Japanese)

Postby Moineau » Wed Aug 02, 2017 3:16 pm

This past week was another maintenance week. I managed to eke out an hour or two of French reading, and did practiced Glossika drills in French and Japanese here and there while driving. Nothing to write home about. Didn't learn much new but also probably didn't forget much I already knew.
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