sctroyenne: French, Irish, Spanish (new beginnings?)

[sctroyenne]

So my theatre class is still going well though the teacher has assigned us a very ambitious amount of material that we will be performing in a very short amount of time (no idea who and how many will bother to come out). I'm kind of dreading having to put work into it. I'm working on this sketch by Florence Foresti:


There have been a couple improv exercises that work well for FLE students, I think, and which could work over Skype. One is where the group tells a story but 2-3 words at a time (passing the relais to the next person to complete the sentence or start a new one). A bit like "Three-headed Broadway Star" from Whose Line is it Anyway but no singing. Another is one where we were timed for about a minute and had to say as much as we could about a topic/theme (given just before the timer starts). This one is a great exercise because you just have to keep the words flowing no matter what's coming out. These exercises and the creative writing exercises in the writing atelier are great for developing spontaneous expression skills.

[sctroyenne]

So I just discovered HelloTalk and after reading quite a bit about it I took the plunge and started chatting. Such a great tool! In addition to building some great in-chat tools (text/speech, in-chat corrections, translations, etc) they seem to have done a great job recruiting users. I'm having no trouble finding active French speakers (I've done a quick search for Irish but haven't tried it out yet). It can be really addicting - I could spend all day chatting away in French if I wanted to and it will be fun to share cultural things. I already surprised one guy who mentioned that he worked for Peugeot Citroen by saying "Oh, you must be from Poissy" (I would see the Peugeot Citroen building by the Poissy RER station when commuting to my teaching job). And I surprised another who plays in a metal band by sharing a blog article the French Embassy's cultural section featuring French metal music - he said he never would have thought that the French Embassy would be promoting metal music. This comes at a great time when I feel like I'm getting into a bit of a rut - it will be fun making a lot more connections with people abroad!

[garyb]

I enjoyed the metal band list, I hadn't heard of a few of them! I love Amesoeurs, Alcest and everything else Neige has been involved with. There's been a lot of good black metal coming out of France and Quebec.

I keep hearing good things about HelloTalk, I've seen a few people say they've had good experiences with it. I need to give it a try when I have a bit more time on my hands. It's especially exciting for if I ever decide to take up French again, since the difficulty for that was always connecting with native speakers.

[galaxyrocker]

(I've done a quick search for Irish but haven't tried it out yet)

So there's users for Irish on it? I generally stay away from these types of apps because there's hardly any Irish language users, and all seem to be learners as well, with most being beginners. But if there's some, I really might check it out and see what it's like, since I've heard nothing but great things about it.

[sctroyenne]

(I've done a quick search for Irish but haven't tried it out yet)

So there's users for Irish on it? I generally stay away from these types of apps because there's hardly any Irish language users, and all seem to be learners as well, with most being beginners. But if there's some, I really might check it out and see what it's like, since I've heard nothing but great things about it.

I did a search and I did find some. I haven't tried talking to any of them yet. You have to play with the search a bit since by default it will look for someone with your exact language combination (since my native/teaching language is English there aren't many of those).

[galaxyrocker]

Thanks! I'm downloading it right now. I'll probably update my log after I check it out and hear back from a few people.

[sctroyenne]

Thanks! I'm downloading it right now. I'll probably update my log after I check it out and hear back from a few people.

I'll be anxious to hear how you find the Irish community to be on the app. Right now I'm pretty overwhelmed by all the simultaneous French conversations. And a lot of them have been exclusively in French, which I feel kind of bad about, so I try to steer it to English a bit so my conversation partners don't get frustrated but we end up back in French.

[galaxyrocker]

Well, I've messaged a few people and so far have heard nothing. I'm going to attribute that to the 6/7 hour time zone difference. I messaged the two people who had Irish as a 'native' (I'm sadly always doubtful of this claim) language that actually lived in Ireland, as well as a French person who was learning Irish, since I'm currently working on French as well. I don't really want to message many learners, since they're all at a lower level than myself however. So, sadly, it seems like it's not going to be super useful for Irish.

[sctroyenne]

Too bad about Irish. I think I saw the app mentioned on one of the Facebook groups so maybe they'll start to flock over. It could help if people started promoting it through the Skype group. I wouldn't say it replaces the Skype group, rather it makes casual conversation throughout the day much more convenient so it can exist alongside Skype.

As for French, it's almost too good. I'm getting so overwhelmed with conversations. And there are a couple that work nights who don't have much to do so they're up chatting all during my day and at night everyone else is waking up so there's a constant stream (which I need to learn to control otherwise I'm going to go crazy).

And with all this multitasking between multiple conversations in addition to real life tasks I've discovered one of the "final frontiers" to conquer with French. Before it was conversations in a social setting (such as bars, parties, between coworkers) between multiple speakers. I got a lot of practice doing that thanks to On Va Sortir events. Now it's speaking French rapidly while multitasking. I started off with great French, pulling in all kinds of expressions that were dazzling my conversation partners but now I'm making some really basic mistakes (I wrote "et tu" for example). I get a little embarrassed when I get corrected for that kind of stuff, especially very basic gender errors (speaking of, I wish autocorrect/predictive text would integrate gender and conjugation - some of my "mistakes" come from relying on predictive text to not to have to type so much but it frequently pulls in the "tu" conjugation when I'm using "je"). So this is what I'll be working on getting better at I guess

[sctroyenne]

Some articulation workouts from theatre class (a few get repeated): Phrases à articuler.