French: Fresh, fun native media at my fingertips

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tastyonions
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Re: French: Fresh, fun & effortless media

Postby tastyonions » Tue Jul 21, 2015 12:47 pm

The majority of my French listening has definitely been done with downloaded episodes of radio shows. I find it works best if I choose a few shows that I like and listen to lots of episodes of each. I usually listen in my car but when I have time I also sit down in front of my computer and listen with headphones, noting any word or expression I am unsure about.

I have never watched a dubbed movie in French, but the other week I watched Pulp Fiction in English and today I was wondering if the French dubbed version is any good. I bet it would be fun to see how they translated Tarantino's dialogues.
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Serpent
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Re: The Cheating & Consolidating Method

Postby Serpent » Tue Jul 21, 2015 1:40 pm

emk wrote:That's a really interesting question!

Certainly, some audio-heavy resources work really well for many people: French in Action, Destinos, Assimil and subs2srs come to mind. On the other hand, I found news radio to be an incredibly inefficient use of my time around B1, and when I switched to TV, I starting making much faster progress. I can think of several things that might explain why some audio works, and some doesn't:

  • As a general rule, you need figure out audio at full speed. You can't easily stop and puzzle out a tricky sentence, or think about a vocabulary word. So with audio, there's less built-in "cheating" to give you a boost.
  • When audio comes with video, it seems to work a lot better. Well, it does require a fairly large volume of input—10 to 30 hours of a single series of videos seems to work well. But video provides many excellent opportunities for "cheating", by using the images to puzzle things out.
  • Overlearning audio seems to work best if it creates "earworms". Music is great for this, as are subs2srs cards.
So my guess is that perhaps audio works just fine, provided you either mine several hours of interesting audio with something like subs2srs or Assimil's method, or if you watch a few dozen hours of of video extensively. But you need to have some way to artificially boost your comprehension, and then repeat it enough to make it stick. And a lot of textbooks with CDs are pretty bad at that—they don't always offer enough audio, and it's not interesting enough to overlearn. Again, Assimil seems to work well, because there's lots of repetition built in.

Does any of this make sense in terms of your personal experiences? I know you make heavy use of audio (especially music and sports), and you get great results. So I'd be really interested to hear what you think.

(Honestly, somebody should license an awesome kid's TV show, and make a super-easy phone app inspired by subs2srs and Anki. It would be tons of fun, and it would probably work at least as well as the best courses and apps currently available. Watching TV by the 60 hour mark is a miracle, even if you're limited to just one show, and you only understand 50% of that. And yes, Sprachprofi's results with Japanese were more impressive than my results with Spanish.)

Hm, have you found earworms useful for listening comprehension? I think for me they're mostly useful for speaking.

I definitely agree that audio works fine if you can get cheating and consolidation, I was mostly speaking about audio materials for learners. I love the Assimil audio but no matter how much you cheat and consolidate, I can't see it being particularly helpful for real world listening skills. Basically my main point is that after a coursebook with audio you can begin to understand short written texts/articles but a comparable level of listening would require some extensive listening to non-textbook material. Although the best is always to follow the multitrack approach and get some contact with authentic materials while you're still working on your first coursebook.

Unfortunately many learners' conclusion is that they need to do even more courses, which will only widen the gap between listening and reading.
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Re: The Cheating & Consolidating Method

Postby daegga » Tue Jul 21, 2015 2:09 pm

Serpent wrote:I definitely agree that audio works fine if you can get cheating and consolidation, I was mostly speaking about audio materials for learners. I love the Assimil audio but no matter how much you cheat and consolidate, I can't see it being particularly helpful for real world listening skills. Basically my main point is that after a coursebook with audio you can begin to understand short written texts/articles but a comparable level of listening would require some extensive listening to non-textbook material. Although the best is always to follow the multitrack approach and get some contact with authentic materials while you're still working on your first coursebook.


I think one can get accustomed to real-world spoken utterances with only minimal exposure provided you got enough easy listening beforehand. The problem with textbook material is mainly the length. You just can't do 200 hours of listening with Assimil, this would be crazy. You probably also need more variation - even if you limit your input to a vocabulary of 3000 words or so, you want to get exposed to as much variation as possible so you listen to many different collocations (or pronunciation clusters). There are not enough textbooks out there to provide you with this kind of variation.
The main hypothesis behind this is that listening mostly works through prediction. Through extensive listening you acquire a statistical model of the language much like through reading, but without the additional abstraction of the written word. For reading prediction is not quite as important, but it certainly benefits from it, especially if reading speed and ease is important to you.
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emk
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Re: French: Fresh, fun & effortless media

Postby emk » Wed Jul 22, 2015 4:18 pm

I totally want to follow up on this very interesting conversation about audio soon!

But in the meantime, I just wanted to test out a new forum feature, and share an actual video of the stuff I talk about in my log:

Ulysse 31

This is an 80s kid's show from France, about a far-future Ulysses voyaging in space. Here are the opening credits, with Nono, "le petit robot":



Le trente-et-unième siècle. C'est parce qu'Ulysse a terrassé le Cyclop et ainsi sauvé Télémaque, Thémis et Noumaïos que les dieux d'Olympe imaginèrent cette terrible vengeance.
« Quiconque ose défier la puissance de Zeus doit être puni ! Tu erreras désormais dans un monde inconnu. Jusqu'au royaume d'Hadès, vos corps resteront inertes.
— Ulysse, le chemin de la Terre est effacé de ma mémoire.
— Papa ! Papa !
— Vivant ! Vous êtes vivant ! »
Ulysse, Ulysse, face au mal, face au bien
avec son cœur, avec ses mains.
Ulysse, guidé par la paix, la vérité.
Ulysse, même les dieux ne pourront t’arrêter.

(more)

It's pretty accessible: probably not a good first series, but fine as a second or third, once you don't need subs. It's available on DVD from Amazon.fr.

I could really get used to sharing (legal) music and videos in my log. :-)
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Φιλόσοφος
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Re: French: Fresh, fun & effortless media

Postby Φιλόσοφος » Wed Jul 22, 2015 4:50 pm

I for one have found I cannot concentrate on the speech if I am following the subtitles in a different language. Closed-captioning is ideal, but materials with it are scarce.

That's why I find it preferable to delay watching TV and movies until I have enough vocabulary to, in principle, be able to understand most of what I'm listening. Spoken language is subject to phonological rules according to which sound segments are assimilated and deleted, and this accounts for the difficulty most people encounter in deciphering speech. You tackle this through exposure, but unless you already possess the knowledge of that which you're being exposed to, you're left grappling with an unknown wrapped in a riddle.
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Gaedheal92
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Re: French: Fresh, fun & effortless media

Postby Gaedheal92 » Wed Jul 22, 2015 5:06 pm

emk wrote:It's pretty accessible: probably not a good first series, but fine as a second or third, once you don't need subs. It's available on DVD from Amazon.fr.

I could really get used to sharing (legal) music and videos in my log. :-)


8 disks @ 16€?! Sold! (Though I'd be willing to spend double that based on the intro alone 8-) ). Thanks for pointing this out.
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Re: French: Fresh, fun & effortless media

Postby Arnaud » Wed Jul 22, 2015 5:18 pm

deleted
Last edited by Arnaud on Tue Sep 13, 2016 5:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Josquin
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Re: French: Fresh, fun & effortless media

Postby Josquin » Wed Jul 22, 2015 9:18 pm

OMG, I recognize the intro! I used to watch this show as a little kid (in German dubbing, of course). Thanks for bringing this back to my memory!
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Re: French: Fresh, fun & effortless media

Postby SladeWilson » Thu Jul 23, 2015 1:00 pm

I'm glad you started a new log here. I've occasionally checked your logs out on the other site, browsing through pages that look interesting, but I've always wondered where would be the best place to jump on for good. Perhaps there's a spot where you turned over a new leaf previously?

emk wrote:I hereby declare this new log open for business! Please feel free to ask questions, or to suggest cool things to watch and read in French.

Absolutely. Editions LettMotif have a nice little collection of French screenplays for purchase, including the popular Le Fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain among others I don't personally know but might be good. You can buy in print or electronic. I personally opted for the pdf of Amélie (but they come in epub format also). I'm not sure if these are production drafts or not, but if not then they might not be as accurate as a transcript. But they do action rather than just dialogue.

Either one of the following links will work (both are from Edition LettMotif):

http://www.edition-lettmotif.com/nos-li ... n-scenars/
http://www.scenario-film.fr/scenarios-de-films/
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Re: French: Fresh, fun & effortless media

Postby astromule » Thu Jul 23, 2015 6:13 pm

Hi emk! I just wanted to tell you that I have read your log here and I really liked it. :) I want to thank you aswell for what you've done and for what you're doing for the community. Thanks to you, rdearman and the other members that are behind this, people like me has been encouraged to get out of the "language closet", as I was also discouraged by the archaic design of the original HTLAL and the many problems known by everyone. If I can add my two cents to the discussion (viewtopic.php?f=13&t=683&start=240), I'd like us -the members that are currently here- to initiate a "phase 2" regarding the language learning community. Let's put the old site behind and put all our capabilities and love into this new site.

One suggestion: would it be possible to see the new posts of the people that you're following in a sidebar or somewhere visible (such as the "follow" of Facebook)? Or is that function already present in notifications?

Best regards and thanks again.

Astromule.
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