French: Fresh, fun native media at my fingertips

[Ani]

1. Has Peter Rabbit been mis-filed, or is this truly an edition for ancient egyptiens?

It totally says "Heiroglyph edition" on the spine. Good catch. Now I want it

[Fortheo]

I've been meaning to read those Bernard werber books for a while now. Did you like them? I asked my Belgian friend for French authors similar to Stephen king and she recommended me Bernard werber.

I'll end up reading his books either way, but I'm still curious to know what you thought of his books.

Also, your shelf gave me some BD recommendations. Thanks

[emk]

1. Has Peter Rabbit been mis-filed, or is this truly an edition for ancient egyptiens?

Yes! It's an actual hieroglyphic edition, translated into Middle Egyptian. You can buy it online from the British Museum Press. The interior is absolutely gorgeous, and the pages are high quality.

I actually read through this page-by-page, and attempted to translate it the best I could, taking notes. It was way too hard for me, but I had fun! Here's an excerpt from my notes:

## Page 7

H: wn:n | p-w | s-X:a-t:E34 | n:D-s-t:G37 | 1*1*1*1 | ir:W | r:n:3 | s-n:3
L: wn | pw | sXa.t | nDs.t | 4 | ir.w | rn.w | sn
G: be.PCLE | PCLE | hare-FSG | little-FSG | 4 | make-PASS.3PL | name.MPL | 3PL
T: (There were?) four little hares named

I don't really understand {wn pw}, and there are no especially helpful
examples in a [corpus search][wnpw]. "Hare" and "little" are singular but
followed by a number, which is apparently how this works.

[wnpw]: http://aaew.bbaw.de/tla/servlet/s0?f=0& ... d3=1&d4=10

H: m | f:E23-wA-p:z-i-i-B1 | m-wA-p:z-i-i-B1
L: m | flopsy | mopsy
G: in.PCLE | Flopsy | Mopsy
T: were Flopsy, Mopsy

Here, the preposition {m} means something like "is." The names are
transliterated using using a [scribal convention for foreign
words][foreign]. (Or [try this site][foreign2], which actually seems quite
accurate.)

[foreign]: http://www.jimloy.com/hiero/yourname.htm
[foreign2]: http://www.amyallcock.com/projects/hieroglyphs/main.php

2. My tailor is rich - is that a history of the Assimil company?

Yes. I posted a review on the old forum. It's a pretty interesting biography of Alphonse Chérel, his experiences during World War II, his personal language learning methodology, and his goals for Assimil. Despite the English title, the book is in French. You can still find used copies on Amazon.fr, but I don't see it on Assimil's own website any more. And I don't think it's worth 45€.

3. English as a f* second language - is that a course for coarsening your discourse?

Yeah, it's basically a dictionary and grammar of English-language profanity, aimed at people learning English. As such books go, it's reasonably decent—it explains common idioms, and probably about 80% of the profanity was familiar to me as a native speaker from the northeastern US. It's available on Amazon.

I was less impressed by Hide This French Book (also on the shelf) which attempts to teach vulgar French. This contained a sampling of French vulgarity, but I read and watch plenty of trashy French media, and a lot of the choices seemed older, or slightly "off" (certainly if used by a foreign speaker).

Now, I really do think that intermediate students should learn common profanity. If nothing else, it helps you understand why you must be very careful about the pronunciation of cou /ku/ versus cul /ky/, and it helps you to avoid falling for juvenile jokes like T'habites à combien de kilomètres de Tours ? But I think the best way to learn profanity is from native media (or from casual conversation, if you hang out with native speakers who swear a lot).

It totally says "Heiroglyph edition" on the spine. Good catch. Now I want it

Yes, yes you do. It's only 7€ plus shipping, and it's the perfect gift for any language lover.

I've been meaning to read those Bernard werber books for a while now. Did you like them? I asked my Belgian friend for French authors similar to Stephen king and she recommended me Bernard werber.

Werber writes science fiction, and he's fairly popular in France. Personally, I think he's more likely to appeal to people haven't read much science fiction. If you're a fan of SF, then you'll probably guess most of his plot twists by page 2. Personally, reading a Werber book feels sort of like reading a locked room mystery where the butler did it. The writing is fine, but there's no surprise. This is less of a problem for people who don't read a lot of SF, obviously.

One exception to this is Les Fourmis, which is one of his most famous books. I've read about half of it, and it was more surprising and original. Also, it's fairly creepy, so if you're a Stephen King fan, it might be a good place to start?

Also, your shelf gave me some BD recommendations. Thanks

For BD recommendatioins, you might also enjoy my pages on SensCritique.

[emk]

Over 9 years ago, I tried an experiment where I started studying Spanish with nothing more than a Subs2SRS-like tool and a laminated two-page grammar reference for Spanish. You can find my progress notes here, and some sample SRS cards and advice here.

In total, I spent about 20-30 hours doing Anki reviews over 60 days. And then I started watching Avatar extensively, eventually watching the entire series, before switching to Korra. I ultimately was less successful than Sprachprofi's similar experiment with Japanese. But I did actually manage to follow quite a lot:

Episodes 7 & 8: Less than 50% comprehension, but I could follow the plot pretty well! Definitely fun.

Episodes 9 & 10: Definitely harder than 7 and 8. Rough going overall.

Episode 11: Not as good as 7&8, but definitely better than 9 and 10.

Episode 12: Wow, this was great! I followed almost all the story, and I understood some sections solidly.

I never did push forward to a well-rounded A2, because I didn't have much practical use for Spanish. And in fact my Spanish skills were bizarrely unbalanced. My vocabulary was awful (except for travel, making friends, and attacking people with elemental magic). I had no output skills besides repeating earworms. And my reading was, bizarrely, weaker than my listening, to the point that I often understood written Spanish better if I read it out loud.

But here's where it gets weird. I finished this experiment over 9 years ago, and haven't really touched Spanish since. I dropped that Anki deck after less than a year. According to the usual forgetting curves and SRS theory, I should have lost everything.

And yet, those Spanish earworms still come rushing back to me. When I see hear some Spanish with any kind of subtitles or context, I can often parse the sounds and sometimes even recognize the grammar. My vocabulary has gone from "awful" to "practically non-existent". But there's still some kind of Spanish listening structure burned into my brain after almost a decade of neglect. And some grammar and idioms, though those take several seconds to click again.

And it always was weird to have listening as my strongest skill, instead of my weakest.

And of course, subs2srs is much less convenient at the intermediate level, because you get a much smaller number of useful cards for the same effort. I've tried to build tools to fix this, but never really got any into usable shape.

But there's something about the way that audio-based SRS creates earworms that still surprises me. And earworms, are, I suspect, extremely useful for listening skills. I suspect that about 60% of normal "SRS theory" can be ignored with this approach. And in fact, most first time users would understand the process more quickly if the SRS software was redesigned for huge numbers of cheap, easily-discarded cards.

I'm not quite sure how to adapt this approach to active skills, how to best help with vocabulary, or how to scale it to the intermediate levels. But even after all these years, I'm convinced that there really is something here. I suspect that we could do much better with listening skills during A1 and A2.

[sfuqua]

I just went back to the old site to get a link to the old thread,vso i could bring this up in my log.
Right now. This moment.
Great minds think alike.


Im going to be trying something similar with Japanese this year

[emk]

Oh, I also have a fun recommendation for intermediate French students who enjoy the occasional video game! A while back, I picked up Horizon Zero Dawn for $10 during a Steam sale. It runs quite well on the Steam Deck, usually around 40 fps with some dips.

The sales pitch for this game would be "You get to hunt robotic megafauna with spears and arrows." It's worth minimizing spoilers, because half the fun is discovering why you hunt robotic megafauna. There's a whole science fiction backstory, and plenty of solid writing.

From a language learning perspective, the best part is that the game contains a couple dozen hours of clearly enunciated French dialog, with 99% accurate subtitles. And the big lore dumps all come with replayable audio and transcripts, all available from a single screen. And even though you get a lot of dialog choices, none of them actually affect the plot much. So if you make a mistake, you can't lock yourself out of major plot lines.

Linguistically, this would be a great choice for a B1+ student who has already watched one or two TV series. Just getting that many hours of accurate subtitles and clear dialog is easily worth $10 on sale, at least compared to most French TV or movies.

From a gameplay perspective, the combat is fun. It favors stealth, preparation, strategy and movement. And each type of robot requires different tactics. A typical strategy might be "drop it with an electric trip wire, stake it down with a harpoon, then back up and pick off key weapon systems." Or if you're just in it for the story, there's also a "story mode" difficulty that presumably makes everything very easy.

So this is a nice accidental discovery that I wish I had available when I was slogging through B1/B2, desperately digging through native media trying to find something with good enunciation and accurate subs. It's equivalent to a couple of seasons of TV, and better written than average. And it's not region-locked to France.

[emk]

Ooh, fun! For fans of French science fiction, the finalists for the Bob Morane prize have been published.

French science fiction at the book length is a bit of a mixed bag for heavy readers of science fiction. I have a few favorites—Le Déchronologue is not an easy read, thanks to the heavy nautical vocabulary and the fact that chapters are out of order, but it's my all-time favorite "alternative history" book by a very wide margin. On the other hand, a lot of Bernard Werber's popular books basically recycle plots that had been done to death by the 1920s in English. French SF actually seems to be stronger in the BD format.

But I need to look through the Bob Morane prize finalists in more detail, and see if anything catches my eye.

[jeffers]

Oh, I also have a fun recommendation for intermediate French students who enjoy the occasional video game! A while back, I picked up Horizon Zero Dawn for $10 during a Steam sale. It runs quite well on the Steam Deck, usually around 40 fps with some dips.

The sales pitch for this game would be "You get to hunt robotic megafauna with spears and arrows." It's worth minimizing spoilers, because half the fun is discovering why you hunt robotic megafauna. There's a whole science fiction backstory, and plenty of solid writing.

From a language learning perspective, the best part is that the game contains a couple dozen hours of clearly enunciated French dialog, with 99% accurate subtitles. And the big lore dumps all come with replayable audio and transcripts, all available from a single screen. And even though you get a lot of dialog choices, none of them actually affect the plot much. So if you make a mistake, you can't lock yourself out of major plot lines.

Linguistically, this would be a great choice for a B1+ student who has already watched one or two TV series. Just getting that many hours of accurate subtitles and clear dialog is easily worth $10 on sale, at least compared to most French TV or movies.

From a gameplay perspective, the combat is fun. It favors stealth, preparation, strategy and movement. And each type of robot requires different tactics. A typical strategy might be "drop it with an electric trip wire, stake it down with a harpoon, then back up and pick off key weapon systems." Or if you're just in it for the story, there's also a "story mode" difficulty that presumably makes everything very easy.

So this is a nice accidental discovery that I wish I had available when I was slogging through B1/B2, desperately digging through native media trying to find something with good enunciation and accurate subs. It's equivalent to a couple of seasons of TV, and better written than average. And it's not region-locked to France.

The idea of playing video games in foreign languages is a great one, especially where the game has accurate subtitles in the TL, and even more so if the language is necessary for making progress. One such game that I really enjoyed was Lego City, because there is a large amount of language, all with very accurate subtitles, and the game involves a lot of puzzle solving, most of which needs you listening getting at least some help from NPC dialogue.

[emk]

Games: Detroit: Become Human. (French trailer.) This won a bunch of awards about 6 years ago. It's essentially an elaborate "choose your own adventure" movie. It's extremely dialog and text heavy, with accurate subs. But unlike Horizon: Zero Dawn, you can't replay key exposition, and you often need to make important choices on a timer. But the reflexes here seem to be almost entirely linguistic so far, not "combat" stuff.

I got this dirt cheap during a Steam sale, like $13. It's a good value for a B2ish student. B1ish students might find it a bit stressful keeping up, but some people like a challenge. Anyway, it has tons of dialog, accurate subs, and some rapid decision making.

Dusting off substudy and checking out modern tools. Substudy was my personal clone of Subs2SRS. I've been dusting off the source code and getting things to compile again. I've also been looking closely at modern tools in this niche. I'm impressed overall. But I do have opinions!

One of my favorite pet theories as a language learner is that there's untapped potential here. The mix of full-speed native audio, bilingual text, and spaced repetition allows creating an "Asssimil-like course" out of almost anything. And the remarkable memory persistence of those Subs2SRS cards is a part of it, I think. Earworms are powerful. So figuring out how to extend this from A1 to C1 and how to fully integrate with extensive watching might have real payoff.

Migaku is very close to getting it all right. Except they struggle with a bunch of subtle "polish" issues, IMO. And I'd love to figure out how to add more of active wave to this. But if you can get into the rhythm with Migaku, everything I know says it should be a far better use of your time than Duolingo.

I am sorely tempted to build one of these apps, with a fully integrated SRS tool that guides users down the right path. But I'm middle aged, I have a family and a real job, and ars longa, vita brevis. So realistically, I will instead focus my time on other cool programming projects that pay well. But the temptation is real!

[jeffers]

Migaku is very close to getting it all right. Except they struggle with a bunch of subtle "polish" issues, IMO. And I'd love to figure out how to add more of active wave to this. But if you can get into the rhythm with Migaku, everything I know says it should be a far better use of your time than Duolingo.

I'd never heard of Migaku before today, and it really does look great! Unfortunately for me, it is designed to work with a limited set of languages which does not include my current main target language: Hindi.

So I am left with Language Reactor. I've only just discovered the "Phrase Pump" feature, which I guess is their equivalent of an SRS, but based on a series of sentences using the target word.

Screenshot 2024-03-04 152612.png

What's nice is that in the "learn" section, it gives me several different sentences using the target word. Presumably at some point the word gets marked as "known", and can show up in other sentences where appropriate. This also works in the free version, so that's a serious plus.

Another feature Language Reactor has is the ability to take an article online and choose "Read in Language Reactor", so it combines features from things like LWT, flashcards, and of course the cool stuff it does with subtitles while watching Netflix and YouTube.