To be an outstanding tourist.

[sfuqua]

Happy New Year!

I've decided to start to work on the long haul. My journey through Assimil seems to be getting very slow, so I've decided to shift how I think about things

Learning French and Spanish to a C level is going to be very, very hard for someone like me, with a tiring job, a family, and grey hair.

It will take years, if I live long enough, so I'd better get started. Remember, not everyone who wanders is lost.

I've decided to think through what I'm doing a little differently.

With the recent completion of a Superchallenge, the board is full of success stories. I did my own little superchallenge with Spanish a couple of years ago, 9000 minutes watching and 5000 pages reading. This had a profound effect on my comprehension. I can make my way through almost any Spanish book now easily. My listening comprehension is less good, but it is much improved. As various people have suggested, I don't really think I reached the level that many people have where Spanish is as easy to read as English. I think I probably just need more minutes and more pages. I haven't really seen much if any transfer from my increased comprehension to my speech. Once again I may need more minutes and pages.

And I need to talk regularly.

In the old days, on the old forum, there were a lot of posts about people who went through the FSI materials we have available and were able to arrive in country speaking their language. I suspect most of them were about a B1 level. I went through the first three fourths of FSI Spanish and it had a radical effect on my spoken Spanish. I never finished the last, perhaps most important part of the course. I spent about 300 hours on FSI Spanish; FSI suggests that 600 hours are needed to get one of their diplomats up to an FSI 3 (C1). Of course all we have available of their instructional materials are the recordings and books they used for homework, but the material is excellent, old fashioned audiolingual instruction. I certainly needed more hours of FSI.

Many of us in this community have found it relatively straightforward to develop high level passive skills, but are still challenged by developing equal skills in production. The three languages I speak well were learned in country, where opportunities to practice were easy to find (just go outside...).

I don't think I can count on developing speaking skills to a high level just by doing extensive listening and reading, although I think this should be the main focus, once I get to a high enough level to do it.

Right now I'm trying to level up my French and Spanish at the same time; this will slow everything down.

My point is that I have a multiyear project on my hands and that I need to think about doing 600 hours of courses (some of this could be extensive reading). I need to read and listen to at least 10000 pages of reading and 10000 minutes of movies for each language. This is going to take time, but keeping these numbers in mind should remind me that it is going to take time.

[sfuqua]

As far as the title of this log, I think I'm pretty close to there already. The Assimil, Michel Thomas, and Pimsleur lessons I've been doing have led to a sudden burst in my French. I think the GSR files I was working on had a good effect also. I seem to be pretty automatic about the order of particles and pronouns around French verbs, and I can't figure where else I would have learned it except for glossika.

I think that with a review with a phrasebook, I could take off and get around in French at at least the survival level. My comprehension is way up also recently. i don't want to overstate the improvement, but I've just noticed a big change. When you finally start to move it feels very good.

I've been doing a bunch of reading in French without really recording it or thinking of it as studying, but I bet this is having an effect also. Krashen is very easy to criticize, but his insights seem amazingly accurate, at least for receptive skills.

Anyway, from here on out, I'm going to try to learn French (and improve Spanish) as fast as I can and read the daylights out of my phrasebook just before I leave for Europe.

I'm really tempted right now to stop courses for a while and see how much I can learn listening and reading. Maybe a couple of weeks of Michel Thomas would give me the skeleton of French grammar that I could fill in with reading and listening.

I still remember those exciting days when I left the courses behind and took off in native materials in Spanish. The explosive growth I experienced then was one of the most exciting experiences in learning that I've ever had.

[sfuqua]

Before anybody comes along and reminds me, I'm pretty sure that I won't really need to speak any French to travel around there. Knowing language can make the whole visit to a place nice, even if you never speak it. I hope to someday roam freely through French media and I plan to roam France in the summer.
Knowing a language can help in emergencies also. I had some very bad moments a few years ago in Thailand because I didn't know a certain word. I will never, ever forget the Thai word for "hospital..." (Don't worry, my friend's wife lived).
It's a vocabulary learning technique I don't recommend.

While I've been fooling around with Michel Thomas, the main thing that I've been using is Assimil. I've been shadowing and building up a set of lessons that I can recite more or less from memory.
Shadowing too much makes it easy to turn the whole process into "Singing Along," which means that you stop paying attention to meaning. I've been trying to use the book to with my shadowing and reading along with the English at the same time. We'll see if it works. Anyway, being able to reproduce Assimil lessons at Assimil speed and understand what it means is probably more useful than Pimsleur...
500 words vs 2000-4000
grammatically limited messages vs complex sentences.
extremely boring vs. "Dad jokes".
I'm not sure if I'll do the second level of Assimil, but so far; so good.
Assimil: 18 / 100 French and Spanish

[Adrianslont]

Before anybody comes along and reminds me, I'm pretty sure that I won't really need to speak any French to travel around there.

Quite the contrary - I’m going to jump in and say that I think you will find your french study useful and that it will make your experience easier as well as more enjoyable.

I spent three weeks in France in 2017 and found my ugly A2 level French very useful. A minority of people switched on me, some looked bemused yet continued in French (I’m guessing their English was better than my french - or perhaps not always), some just carried out transactions in a normal fashion and some looked frankly relieved that I spoke some french. No one rolled their eyes at me when I started in french.

I started in English only twice in three weeks and got one eye roll - 50% hit rate. My wife started a transaction in English in a bakery in a small wealthy town near Nice (unusual as she otherwise left everything to me) and the assistant looked quite panicked and said in french that she couldn’t speak English - I took over, mangling her language but successfully negotiating the lunch deals her shop offered. She was clearly relieved and inquired about how our holiday was going and wanting to chat.

If I can make a generalisation, people over 40 in jobs that don’t require a post-secondary education will usually have less English than you have french - with the exception of people in shops and restaurants dealing with tourists on a daily basis.

Considering factors such as gender, age, language background, apparent ethnic background (as per a current thread) you and I are a match.

I’m guessing your French will be better than mine and that you are going to have great fun with it.

Oh, I also saw several Spanish speakers conducting transactions in Spanish with french customer service people at highly-touristed places in Paris. And recorded announcements and signage in Spanish.

[sfuqua]

My son speaks about 4 words of French, and he spent some time in France last year. He used his four words every chance he got, and he thought he got some extra smiles.

[sfuqua]

Maybe I've found a better way of shadowing, at least for me.
I've done this before, but maybe it suits me better at this point.

Shadowing exercises many of the skills needed for conversation, but it can take a lot of repetitions to get to the point where one can shadow along, in time with a native speaker. It is pretty easy for one to get to the point where it is just a pronunciation exercise. In one of my earlier phases I can remember shadowing Assimil while surfing the Internet. Clearly this had nothing to do with meaning. I've always liked L-R also, it seems like a sort of magic way to rapidly build listening comprehension...
I recently did 20000 reps each of Spanish and French GSR. Each rep consists of and English sentence, a brief pause, and the L2 equivalent. The idea of having an English sentence in the mix worried me at first, but I found that it actually helped my concentration.

What I've been doing lately is reading along on the English side of Assimil while shadowing the L2. It is impossible to do this without paying attention to the meaning. Today was the first time that I shadowed in this way for a long period of time, 90 minutes today. It feels good. There is no question that it (at least temporarily) improved my fluency. French and Spanish are just rolling off my tongue right now.

I've always thought that Alexander Arguelles's approach to shadowing was very weird. He starts off blind shadowing for several days (I guess for pronunciation) and then shadows with the book to learn the meaning and does other things. I grew up as a graduate student in the age of Krashen, so meaning seems primary to me.

For me, I think I'm going to try shadowing each new lesson first looking at the L2 until I can get all the words in and then shadow all of the old lessons I have time for, while looking at the L1. I think this may be a good way to practice in order to drive skills from A1/A2 to B1 at least for fluency. I may look at this approach again whenever I shadow a novel.

I'm psyched tonight, I have a bit more confidence that my spoken French won't be total rubbish 7 months from now in Europe.

Edited to add a connected thought.

[jeff_lindqvist]

I've always thought that Alexander Arguelles's approach to shadowing was very weird. He starts off blind shadowing for several days (I guess for pronunciation) and then shadows with the book to learn the meaning and does other things. I grew up as a graduate student in the age of Krashen, so meaning seems primary to me.

Here's what he wrote nearly ten years ago (Message 20 of 39):

Blind shadowing first and foremost when learning the phonetics of a language like Korean forces you listen more carefully and to reproduce the sounds you actually hear rather than attempting the approximate associations you will be given in any description of the sounds of the language.

When working through an Assimil or Linguaphone type method by shadowing, blind shadowing each lesson initially before listening to the text forces your mind to understand as much as it can on its own. You only need do this once or twice before looking at the text for clarification, but if you look at the text first and foremost, you will understand more when you listen/shadow, but you will not know how much you would have understood without doing this.

[sfuqua]

I guess I never found that message of his. It seems very reasonable.
I've just seen that schedule for shadowing that appears in different places, and which includes several days of shadowing before looking up the meaning. http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Shadowing
I'm looking forward to my shadowing today. Just as extensive reading that is a little over my head does, it gives me the feeling that I am sort of half learning a huge number of things at the same time... It is exciting.

[sfuqua]

This log is going to be repetitive..For the next few months my main activity is going to be to charge through Assimil.
The past few days I fell into the same traps that I fell into years ago, when I first tried to learn a language from Assimil.
I spent a couple too many days reviewing and repeating lessons aiming for perfection. Waste of time; I'm a beginner, and I sound like a beginner. I need to keep moving forward instead of aiming for some sort of perfection.
I got bored shadowing, so I've been doing something different the past few days. I found it boring to just listen to old lessons, so I tried pushing the speed up to 2X and the lessons got fast enough to be interesting. I've been interested in how blind people often listen to speeded up audio to get through more content in a short time, and I know some people swear by it for listening to native language media. I've wondered if this wouldn't be a good thing to do once one gets up to an advanced level in an L2. It's not quite like someone screaming in a movie, but it is challenging. I'm not sure how fast Assimil at double speed is, but it isn't slow the way that Assimil is at full speed.
I've also tried reading aloud the lessons that I'm reviewing. This is a little different that shadowing; there is no time pressure. It's a little more relaxed. It also made me recognize some of the pronunciation problems that I have ignored (apparently) while shadowing. I think I am going to get a tutor to work on my pronunciation.

My French "R" is annoying me. I can hear that I hit it just right sometimes. Other times it seems to sink down my throat and mess up the surrounding vowels. Understand, I can hit it right (or what sounds right to me) 50 times in a row, and maybe I just need to practice more, but I'd like to see if I have a systematic problem.

Other times I remember that Jean Seberg's French accent was considered cute.
I think it probably helps to look like a movie star for your accent to sound cute, but who knows?
I can hear it now...

"Listen to that Outstanding Tourist. I can't understand what he is trying to say, but he has such a cute accent."

[smallwhite]

I can hit it right (or what sounds right to me) 50 times in a row

That's very good already. I can make 50 different sounds around the uvular, but I don't know which one is the right one

I can hear it now...
"Listen to that Outstanding Tourist. I can't understand what he is trying to say, but he has such a cute accent."

I like how you always keep your goal in mind