Moineau's language log (French and Japanese)

[Moineau]

Is this thing on? Okay...

Welcome to my language log.

My native language: Russian. Also fluent in: Hebrew and English. I grew up in Ukraine, when it was still part of the Soviet Union. At the age of 15 moved to Israel and have been living here since.

I've been trying to learn French for what feels like forever, but really must have been some measly 20 years or so. I tried college courses, I tried parallel reading, tried private lessons, tried Michel Thomas... always petered out quite early.

But this time, I'm much deeper in than ever before. In September 2016, I've decided to try again, and just to make extra sure I'll definitely fail, to study French and Japanese (which I'd been procrastinating about trying for a few years) at the same time. It's been 8 months, and I think I'm doing... okay. I'm not going to break any speed records, but I've got more French than I have any right to, judging by past experience; and while Japanese is limping behind French, it's limping forward.

My strategy, this time around, is to focus on the spoken language first and foremost. I thought I would start with some inexpensive Skype lessons with native speakers over Italki (in fact, learning that Italki exists gave me the motivation to try again). But the first French teacher I tried was a polyglot who mentioned Glossika to me, and now my secret weapon has been Glossika, for both French and Japanese, supplemented with Italki lessons and grammar books.

Glossika sells a package where you get 3000 sentences recorded by a native speaker at native speed, together with the 3000 original English sentences that are the same for all languages. Somehow that seems to work very well for me. After a careful study of another batch of 50 sentences (including writing them out into a notebook in a sort of ritual), I gain a miraculous ability to hear the word boundaries in a really fast native rendition of these sentences - something I could never achieve before with French - and more miraculously, this ability stays with me as time passes and even transfers, to some degree, to other sentences with the same words/phrases.

My routine for the past 8 months has been:
- study another batch of 50-100 Glossika sentences, until I can understand them easily in
random order and translate from English to target language in random order
- have a Skype lesson with a tutor who tests me on these sentences (English->Target) in random order, while at the same time offering
corrections and clarifications when Glossika have errors or blemishes (which happens quite a bit).
- every now and then, intersperse a chat lesson with the tutor in target language about simple topics
- read up on grammar way ahead of what Glossika does, but don't try to memorize or systematically test myself on grammar
- try to do this in parallel for French and Japanese.

The last goal didn't work out at all, but the rest of them did. I'm finished with the 3000 Glossika sentences in French, but only 1500 in Japanese, and those too are somewhat rusty as I've stopped the Japanese study for the last 3 months (just couldn't find the time).

My short-term goals are:

For Japanese, restart the Glossika study with Italki lessons, following some sort of review of the stuff I forgot in the last 3 months.

For French, test myself on the phrases and vocabulary of the entire Glossika course (rather than the latest 50-100 sentences as usual) to estimate how much I retain. Determine if it makes sense to spend any more time on Glossika and how. Schedule some lessons with
my Italki tutor to improve conversation. And start watching some video material in French with accurate subtitles/transcripts (one candidate is Buffy the Vampire Slayer in French, which has the benefit of an exact transcript).

Let's see how that works out.

[Moineau]

I'm going to try posting an update here every week, even if I don't have much to update, as is sadly the case today. I think if I don't start out with regular updates at least at first, I'll just never get around to updating at all.

I've reviewed some of the Glossika material to see how much I forgot since I stopped doing regular Italki lessons a month ago (surprisingly, not much). I also planned to extend some software I'd written to test myself on Glossika sentences. What I wrote is up at http://glossika.lovestwell.org/enfr/ (the French version), and I used that to good effect to test myself or have the teacher test myself during an Italki lesson. But I want to add support for arbitrary tags to sentences (so I could for example pull up just the sentences with the "Imparfait" tag and drill myself on those), and make a separate version for mapping words to sample sentences (vocab drilling). I never got around to any of that, sadly. Maybe next week.

I was in a library the other day, and picked up the French translation of "Catch-22". I even read the first few pages, looking up some of the unfamiliar words and relying on my memory of the original for others. But I'm ambivalent about continuing - I really want to ground myself thoroughly in sound this time around, and I think that if I only advance at reading passively, I'll just inevitably forget it all, as happened a few times already (though admittedly I'm much farther along this time than ever before). To my surprise, it seems there's no French audiobook version of Catch-22 to be had for love or money. So maybe a better idea is to use a classic text with a good audiobook version, like a Jules Verne novel, or something. But then I'm worried that it'll be completely filled with Passé simple and other constructs far away from the spoken language. Haven't decided yet what to do.

Tried to listen to the presidential debate between Macron and le Pen. I think something like 20% of the meaning was getting through. Both exciting and exasperating at the same time. Probably more exciting though. That's 19% more than before I started this attempt!

Sadly, nothing of substance to report on the Japanese front. Still very keen to restart it ASAP, before the basic grammar I'd internalized pretty well fades from memory. Hope to write a more upbeat update on Japanese next week.

[Batman]

I am not sure how http://glossika.lovestwell.org/enfr/ is supposed to work. It just gives me the list of sentences. Either in order or randomized. How do you test yourself with this?

I was thinking today about creating something Glossika-like from slicing some kind of TV-show(-s) into sentences, - pronounced with video (I think it is more useful, than just audio). Like a lot of short video-clips, that you can test yourself with. It is probably hard to create something like that for many reasons though.

[Moineau]

I am not sure how http://glossika.lovestwell.org/enfr/ is supposed to work. It just gives me the list of sentences. Either in order or randomized. How do you test yourself with this?

That's most of what I need. If I studied another batch of 50 sentences, for example, I test them by selecting this range and then randomizing. I look at the English column and try to come up with the French sentence, then check myself (I might to actual hiding with a button at some point, but really, a simple mental command "don't look there" seems to work fine so far.

I just realized the other day that I could add Glossika audio easily as a third column in that table, for French or Japanese. I can put the data in the same CSV file I use for original/translation (although maybe I'll just switch to JSON at this opportunity). Then at runtime I play it with WebAdio. The total size of French audio extracted by my other scripts is ~34MB, which is steep but not actively harmful as a web page, I think.
This is my task for the upcoming week.

Quick update over the last week. Finally restarted Japanese (Batman, thanks for encouraging me to do this again and again!). Spent ~3 hours going over Glossika sentences 1-1.5K, which is what I'd originally studied. Grammar and basic verbs are coming back virtually with no loss, nouns are a different issue, but I'd estimate I remember at least 70% of all vocabulary I'd studied before stopping 5 months ago. Need another 3-6 hours of review before I can study new stuff, but I'm getting there. French: read a few pages of "Catch-22" in French in random places, watched the first 5 minutes of "Buffy" S1E01 in French (need to free more time for this...)

[Moineau]

The last two weeks were hectic with work, but I did find a few hours here and there for French and Japanese:

- read about 10 more pages of Catch-22 in French. The absence of an audiobook is vexing enough that I'm going to switch to something I have both in audio and in identical text. Looked over the remains of my previous aborted attempts to study French on my disk and found Fahrenheit 451 in both audiobook and text form - this might do.
- reviewed random Glossika French sentences, retention is holding so far
- went over more of the Glossika Japanese sentences I'd studied and half-forgot, they come to the foreground quickly enough. I couldn't really find more than an hour or two for Japanese over these two weeks. My Ambitious Goal for the upcoming week is to schedule a real bonafide Italki study session with my previous Japanese teacher. Since an hour of lesson time, the way I structure it, really requires at least 3-4 hours Glossika study time around it, this should up my Japanese effort a notch.

[whatiftheblog]

Jumping in with a sort of off-topic message, but I just wanted to note how impressed I continue to be with how well Israelis (taken to mean people who grew up in Israel) speak English. My family went the Russia -> America route, but I have quite a few friends who did the USSR -> Israel ( -> +/- elsewhere) process, and I don't know what the Israelis are doing onsite, but it's clearly working. I'd have placed you as native just by the content of your posts. There are plenty within the Soviet diaspora in the US who don't speak English half as well as you do.

All of this to say that a) I'm genuinely curious as to how they do this - is it a specific instruction method at school/in college, etc; and b) maybe there's something we can all learn from that to get similarly impressive results. You've clearly mastered two very different languages at a relatively mature age, if I'm understanding this correctly - what's your secret?

[Xenops]

Welcome to the forum! I'm also studying those languages, but with French in Action, and probably Anki for Japanese for the meantime. Work hard!

[Moineau]

I feel self-conscious about posting every week even when there's not much to post about. But I'll do it anyway.

This past week I've started reading-and-listening to Fahrenheit 411 in French, which works out well - I remember enough of it to guess some of the unfamiliar words from the context, but not enough to make it boring. I'm only about five pages in, but with a bunch of new words copied out into a notebook, and it feels quite productive. This week, I want to try the technique I've read about on reddit half a year ago and never had a chance to try because I'd been focusing on Glossika before --

1. Read the transcript to a podcast/GLOSS-lesson/anything else really, write down all new words on paper and translate them
2. Read along as you listen to the audio
3. Slow the audio down to 80% speed and listen to it with your eyes closed
4. Speed it up to 120% and read along while it plays
5. Slow it down to 90% and listen eyes closed
6. Speed it up to 150% and read along
7. Listen to it eyes closed at normal speed, at this point you should understand almost everything

(source: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/51xml8/difficulty_understanding_spoken_french_help/)

I spent another 2 hours or so reviewing past Glossika sentences in Japanese and determining that the retention has been okay though nothing to write home about. No real progress with Japanese, as far as I'm concerned. Hope for a better update next time!

[Moineau]

Managed to eke out an hour of listening to French Glossika and another half hour to listen to Japanese Glossika this week, while commuting to work. That's it - probably not even replacement level studying, but real life has been relentless with its demands. Let's see if I manage to keep it at bay next week.

[Moineau]

Good progress this week. Learned 300 new Glossika sentences in Japanese, and read 10 more pages of Fahrenheit 451 in French. Still haven't managed to schedule an Italki lesson in either, putting that as the main goal for the next week.