Re: PM’s French Re-entry into the Matrix - Phase 1: 500 Hours Extensive Reading

[PeterMollenburg]

*Assimil Using French (currently up to lesson 44 on second wave).

I've been thinking of buying this, and then following Small White/Ari's chinesepod method.

Is Using French the same format as French with Ease, or is there more to it?

(Cheapest buy new option for Using French seems to be fnac.com at the moment)

Hi DaveBee,

It’s the same approach as NFWE just a tad older. I totally recommend it!

Hey I will miss you! Who else has the consistency to keep studying French like this?

I wanted to post the other day but got busy, It is funny you are back to the big five because I just picked back up Assimil which is the only of that set I actually swore off.

Did you ever end up finding the later Mauger books btw?

Hey Ani,

I can’t resist this website it seems. I got tired of my dribble and frustrated with what seems to be lack of sufficient progress as well as wasting time here and elsewhere.

The Big 5 didn’t last, yet again, as wisdom prevailed - at this point in my studies too heavy a focus on courses is ludicrous I concluded yet again. I move too slow through courses to allow for sufficient extensive language exposure. Also, focused vocab learning is useful to balance out extensive reading, so yet again I opted for 1)one course (=grammar and pronunciation focus), 2)extensive reading (=extensive language exposure) and 3)intensive reading (=focused vocabularly building) as my main activities.

I’m only using Assimil Using French currently in terms of courses. I hope you’re enjoying Assimil Ani! I have all the Mauger books now, the later ones second hand.

Actually the routine above is true for the most part, but in the lead up to a 13 day trip to New Caledonia (early November) I’ve also been digging into Assimil’s pocket guide Le calédonien as well as reading bits of Petit Futé Nouvelle Calédonie Vanuatu 2018 which are nice (French) distractions. Soooo looking forward to the trip!

[PeterMollenburg]

Just a little comment or two born out of frustration perhaps or disbelief, or maybe it stems from an underlying fear of my inability to learn as fast as I shoud/could (compared to others).

So from time to time, like many of us, I search the web reading/listening to opinions and articles on what it takes to reach different levels of the CEFR (Common European Reference Framework for languages or whatever it's called) scale (eg C1/C2). I struggle at times with what I come across. I read numerous remarks stating that from 'random person's' experience in learning languages the CEFR timescales produced by the FSI are pretty much spot on. Spot on? Wtf! I don't get it. Then I read some random language school allotting 60 hours of study between each level of the CEFR. That seems utterly absurd. Okay, so let's say it takes 600 hours to reach French C2. Now let's say that's class time and you can double that = 1200 with 'home study' included. Okay, for many of us that's going to be 1200hrs of home study (no class study in there). So I read another post recently stating C1 is 8000 words vocabulary in size or thereabouts, while C2 is 16000 words. So 1200 hours of study to get to C2 divided by 16000 words equates to 13.3 new words per hour of study.

Initially that may seem like a feasible number, or it may not. It's not. For me, it's just not. Some days, even studying for hours, i'm lucky if I learn 10 new words (I don't just learn new vocab). The next day I'll probably forget them, then next week I'll go over them after doing several other activities and relearn them. How the hell is one supposed to reach C2 in these ridiculous time frames? Flashcards? Okay fine- get all your vocab down pat, learn 40 words a day studying 3 hours/day. Doable. Oh, but what about also having all your skills (listening, speaking, writing, reading) at C2 in that time frame? What about idioms, what about tone, grammar, pronunciation (even if it's not perfect). What about being a human being and not a robot? What if I didn't do all the courses I have and made myself an incredibly steep learning curve from day one and pushed myself to the limit. I still have my doubts that I could learn French to C2 level as my first foreign language in under 2000 hours. I think it's unrealistic. Either that or I am actually way beyond C2 already, but as per the definition, I'm not.

This therefore makes my few somewhere between 3 and 4 thousand hours of French seem reasonable. I don't hammer my brain with new words day in day out (and let's not forget learning one word in isolation - or not - won't allow for the 67 hundred -exaggeration there-
other meanings of the same word when considering many verbs for example). I think i'm discovering that I'm human. Yes I have really worked some areas of my French to death and neglected others, but I'm human, and I think for most humans of average intelligence (me), reaching C2 in your first foreign language is a long road, and such articles seem utterly full of shit at times. I have read/listened to some sane opinions out there though. Luca Lampariello comes to mind. His articles seem to be realistic.
--------------------------------------------

I considered looking for nursing work while in New Caledonia. My wife was supportive of the idea. I wrote to the appropriate authority. The response was clear. Go back to learn nursing in France or New Caledonia is option one. Option two, get my degree recognised in France, then I'm able to work there. Square one. France does not recognise Australian nursing qualifications. Back to the Belgium/maybe Switzerland plan. I'm going to stop writing about the whole nursing thing, it's either going to happen or it's not, and right now I feel like it just might, but I need to do less talking and more doing. I could be too old by the time this stuff happens to be employable. Might not be, doesn't matter, whatever. I'll keep moving forward, slowly, as per usual. Signing off past my bed time (as usual) PM, the whiney one

[rdearman]

Just a little comment or two born out of frustration perhaps or disbelief, or maybe it stems from an underlying fear of my inability to learn as fast as I shoud/could (compared to others).

Brother I feel your pain. But seriously, lots of people on the Internet lie! No, really, they do. Some people really say things like; "Yeah I'm fluent in French, I learnt it in three month, doing 15 minutes a day". What utter bollocks! Seriously, don't worry about that. It has taken me a long time to get over my inferiority complex (which this place exacerbates).

Regarding your C2=16,000 word vocabulary. If you check out this page: http://www.mine-control.com/zack/guttenberg/ The author did some serious statistical analysis of various English books from Project Gutenberg to try and work out the number of unique words in a book. Even something as huge as the 6 volume set of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol 1-6 only has 43113 unique words. The total word count is 1543676 (over 1.5 million!). My point is that to get to 16k words vocabulary reading is a very good way, because even a rough and dirty calculation shows you'll see a word on average 35.8 times in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol 1-6. Tons of repetition without the flashcards.

The Count of Monte Cristo has 1312 Pages in the amazon print version, so with unique words at; 16110 and total words of 464256 you'd be looking at 354 words per page, with average repeat of 29 words you'd have 12 words repeated per page. I know this isn't accurate because some words repeat more often than others, but you see my point. Lots of words, repeated again and again. So if you read this book you're going to encounter your 16,110 words if you LWT this book and learned every word, then bang you've hit your target.

Personally, I'd rather read 4 hours a day than do flashcards, but that is just me. If I do a bit more "back of the fag packet" calculations; average readers are the majority and only reach around 200 wpm reading speed. So if we half this to 100 wpm, then it would take 4642.56 minutes to read The Count of Monte Cristo, or 77 hours. Doing 3 hours per day you'll have seen almost half a million words, a lot of them repeated, in 25 days. Less than a month. You'd also encounter a lot of the different meanings for the words.

So if you can read the entirety of The Count of Monte Cristo without looking up more than 110 words, then you're C2 level. 16k words. If you read Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (all 6 volumes) not only would your reading speed increase dramatically, but even at the snails pace of 100wpm you'd finish the book in 90 days. Actually less than 3 months to read all 6 volumes at a snails pace. This would net you 43,113 unique words, 2.6 times more than you need to hit this magic 16k words for C1 (BTW where did you get that number from?)

So reading both these books would cost you less than 500 hours of your time, but net you just under 60,000 unique words.

Luca Lampariello comes to mind. His articles seem to be realistic.

Link?

Anyway, don't get discouraged. The road is long with many a winding turn...

[reineke]

Just a little comment or two born out of frustration perhaps or disbelief, or maybe it stems from an underlying fear of my inability to learn as fast as I shoud/could (compared to others).

Brother I feel your pain. But seriously, lots of people on the Internet lie! No, really, they do. Some people really say things like; "Yeah I'm fluent in French, I learnt it in three month, doing 15 minutes a day". What utter bollocks! Seriously, don't worry about that. It has taken me a long time to get over my inferiority complex (which this place exacerbates).

Regarding your C2=16,000 word vocabulary. If you check out this page: http://www.mine-control.com/zack/guttenberg/ The author did some serious statistical analysis of various English books from Project Gutenberg to try and work out the number of unique words in a book. Even something as huge as the 6 volume set of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol 1-6 only has 43113 unique words. The total word count is 1543676 (over 1.5 million!). My point is that to get to 16k words vocabulary reading is a very good way, because even a rough and dirty calculation shows you'll see a word on average 35.8 times in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol 1-6. Tons of repetition without the flashcards.

The Count of Monte Cristo has 1312 Pages in the amazon print version, so with unique words at; 16110 and total words of 464256 you'd be looking at 354 words per page, with average repeat of 29 words you'd have 12 words repeated per page. I know this isn't accurate because some words repeat more often than others, but you see my point. Lots of words, repeated again and again. So if you read this book you're going to encounter your 16,110 words if you LWT this book and learned every word, then bang you've hit your target.

Personally, I'd rather read 4 hours a day than do flashcards, but that is just me. If I do a bit more "back of the fag packet" calculations; average readers are the majority and only reach around 200 wpm reading speed. So if we half this to 100 wpm, then it would take 4642.56 minutes to read The Count of Monte Cristo, or 77 hours. Doing 3 hours per day you'll have seen almost half a million words, a lot of them repeated, in 25 days. Less than a month. You'd also encounter a lot of the different meanings for the words.

So if you can read the entirety of The Count of Monte Cristo without looking up more than 110 words, then you're C2 level. 16k words. If you read Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (all 6 volumes) not only would your reading speed increase dramatically, but even at the snails pace of 100wpm you'd finish the book in 90 days. Actually less than 3 months to read all 6 volumes at a snails pace. This would net you 43,113 unique words, 2.6 times more than you need to hit this magic 16k words for C1 (BTW where did you get that number from?)

So reading both these books would cost you less than 500 hours of your time, but net you just under 60,000 unique words.

You've missed the point about vocabulary density. Gibbon may have a large number of unique words due to the large number of footnotes and/or Latin words but in any case in a text that includes more unique words than a thesaurus (45000) some 18000 words may occur once, another 5000 words may occur twice etc. The reader will also run into multitudes of multiword units. Gibbon is supposedly more dense than Rabelais and Melville. King's Dark Tower series that you are currently reading (1.3 million words) should have fewer unique words, simpler sentence structure, different collocations etc.

[Jar-Ptitsa]

Your French is really good!!! What language test is the nurses' test in Belgium or Switzerland? Have you seen the test, or maybe you don't have to do that.

Anyway, you're a nurse, so you must know the advice that they (nurses and their friends) say a billion times every day that what the others learn / do is completely not relevant, it's only relevant how much more you know now that you yourself did know before, like 6 months ago etc I think that it's good advice, although I don't know if it's possible to truly follow and not feel fear, frustration, etc because all the wordl compare himself, herself, with the others or with your own ambition. But your French is very good in my opinion.

[PeterMollenburg]

Just a little comment or two born out of frustration perhaps or disbelief, or maybe it stems from an underlying fear of my inability to learn as fast as I shoud/could (compared to others).

Brother I feel your pain. But seriously, lots of people on the Internet lie! No, really, they do. Some people really say things like; "Yeah I'm fluent in French, I learnt it in three month, doing 15 minutes a day". What utter bollocks! Seriously, don't worry about that. It has taken me a long time to get over my inferiority complex (which this place exacerbates).

Thank you for reaching out rdearman, it's nice (not nice as in 'oh, ok, that's nice... let's move on...' but nice as in actually nice) to receive some kind support from you.

Regarding your C2=16,000 word vocabulary. If you check out this page: http://www.mine-control.com/zack/guttenberg/ The author did some serious statistical analysis of various English books from Project Gutenberg to try and work out the number of unique words in a book. Even something as huge as the 6 volume set of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol 1-6 only has 43113 unique words. The total word count is 1543676 (over 1.5 million!). My point is that to get to 16k words vocabulary reading is a very good way, because even a rough and dirty calculation shows you'll see a word on average 35.8 times in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol 1-6. Tons of repetition without the flashcards.

Thanks for sharing that, there are some interesting numbers there. I agree, reading is very useful, which is why it's a part of my routine in the form of both extensive and intensive reading. I have provided this link before, but for anyone wondering just how valuable extensive reading (and listening) are in learning a language, take a look http://www.robwaring.org/er/what_and_why/er_is_vital.htm

The Count of Monte Cristo has 1312 Pages in the amazon print version, so with unique words at; 16110 and total words of 464256 you'd be looking at 354 words per page, with average repeat of 29 words you'd have 12 words repeated per page. I know this isn't accurate because some words repeat more often than others, but you see my point. Lots of words, repeated again and again. So if you read this book you're going to encounter your 16,110 words if you LWT this book and learned every word, then bang you've hit your target.

You make it sound simple I do appreciate the analysis, mind you.

Personally, I'd rather read 4 hours a day than do flashcards, but that is just me. If I do a bit more "back of the fag packet" calculations; average readers are the majority and only reach around 200 wpm reading speed. So if we half this to 100 wpm, then it would take 4642.56 minutes to read The Count of Monte Cristo, or 77 hours. Doing 3 hours per day you'll have seen almost half a million words, a lot of them repeated, in 25 days. Less than a month. You'd also encounter a lot of the different meanings for the words.

Okay, you've made it sound too simple. I'm not sure why though. Do you think it is this simple? I don't know about you but I just cannot pick up words that easily from extensive reading. It takes several, and I mean several exposures. I still go back to books i've already read a couple of times and struggle with many of the same words I did first time round. I can't pick up a new word from a few instances alone in one book.

So if you can read the entirety of The Count of Monte Cristo without looking up more than 110 words, then you're C2 level. 16k words. If you read Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (all 6 volumes) not only would your reading speed increase dramatically, but even at the snails pace of 100wpm you'd finish the book in 90 days. Actually less than 3 months to read all 6 volumes at a snails pace. This would net you 43,113 unique words, 2.6 times more than you need to hit this magic 16k words for C1 (BTW where did you get that number from?)

I can't see this working. I can see it helping, but not being the only thing. I need a LOT more exposure I believe than what you suggest to pick up the so called 16k words (which btw is only looking at vocab and nothing else). I found the 16k thingy, here: http://www.universeofmemory.com/how-many-words-you-should-know/
and in the process I found these as well: https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?t=3424 and https://languagelearning.stackexchange.com/questions/3061/what-are-estimates-of-vocabulary-size-for-each-cefr-level

So reading both these books would cost you less than 500 hours of your time, but net you just under 60,000 unique words.

Luca Lampariello comes to mind. His articles seem to be realistic.

Link?

I don't have a photographic memory Here's some links re Luca that come to mind:



http://www.thepolyglotdream.com/why-youre-still-an-intermediate-language-learner/

Anyway, don't get discouraged. The road is long with many a winding turn...

[/quote]

Thanks rdearman

[PeterMollenburg]

Your French is really good!!! What language test is the nurses' test in Belgium or Switzerland? Have you seen the test, or maybe you don't have to do that.

Anyway, you're a nurse, so you must know the advice that they (nurses and their friends) say a billion times every day that what the others learn / do is completely not relevant, it's only relevant how much more you know now that you yourself did know before, like 6 months ago etc I think that it's good advice, although I don't know if it's possible to truly follow and not feel fear, frustration, etc because all the wordl compare himself, herself, with the others or with your own ambition. But your French is very good in my opinion.

Thanks vogeltje. Yes my French is good, as good as B2, the exam I passed back in May. It should be good considering the amount of time I've put in, but it's not yet advanced/excellent. It's not yet C1 nor C2. That's my aim, for a couple of reasons.

First I don't want to start learning/return to learning another foreign language before taking French to C1 or C2. The experience from taking my first foreign language to a high/advanced level will aid me immensely, from what I have come to understand, with subsequent foreign languages and my approach to learning them. Secondly, it will make me potentially more employable with better language skills. The better my French, the better my chances, the easier to navigate a foreign system, the more likely I'll be looked upon positively with employers, and most importantly my goal will have been reached. I need at least a B2 level to nurse in a francophone region. I already have official evidence of this. C1 would be even better, as mentioned. Yes I have to have that level of French (B2), and I do already, but since I'm not moving to France/Belgium/Switzerland right now, I may as well keep learning more French and aiming higher, while hopefully benefiting future foreign languages with skills learned along the way (i.e. learning how to learn, what works and what doesn't, how long it takes, where I wasted time etc).

So, that's the language level. But there's more to it. Recognition of qualifications and coupled with that, assessment of my nursing experience and skills, which may or may not require passing a nursing exam. If this is the case, then a better command of French will only help.

[rdearman]

Okay, you've made it sound too simple. I'm not sure why though. Do you think it is this simple? I don't know about you but I just cannot pick up words that easily from extensive reading. It takes several, and I mean several exposures. I still go back to books i've already read a couple of times and struggle with many of the same words I did first time round. I can't pick up a new word from a few instances alone in one book.

Lord no I don't think it is simple! I have the same problem, some words seem to just stick straightaway in my head, but others seem to be slippery as teflon. For example: "presque", I almost remember it, but I don't... (see what I did there? )

Seemingly regardless of how many times I look up "presque", no matter how many dozens of times it appears in a book the slippery little devil always seems to allude me. But I figure one of these days I'm going to nail the slippery little git and "presque" will remain in my head and in my active vocabulary. This is one of the words I've put in my Anki deck to drill because I keep looking it up, and it keeps wandering off. While some words just stick with no hassle after 3-4 times looking them up, the slippery ones you might need to SRS or otherwise force yourself to memorise it in some way.

So reading isn't the be all and end all of vocabulary, and even if I passively learn "presque" and know it when I see it in a sentence, will I know it when someone says it to me? Will I be able to get the slippery little devil to come out my mouth at the right time? Probably not.

So my calculations are only demonstrating exposure, not internalisation of the words, that is a whole other story. It might be you'd have to read The Count of Monte Cristo 30 or 40 times before you internalise the words. Anyway, I wouldn't worry about having to keep looking up words.

One strange thing I have noticed in my own program of learning, is that I seem to internalise words better if I look them up in a paper dictionary after reading a paper book. Perhaps these pop-up dictionaries are a little too easy? Not sure.

[DaveBee]

One strange thing I have noticed in my own program of learning, is that I seem to internalise words better if I look them up in a paper dictionary after reading a paper book. Perhaps these pop-up dictionaries are a little too easy? Not sure.

You sometimes hear that writing things down is better for memory/learning than typing them. Could that be a factor here? Do you write these words down, and then look them up later?

[PeterMollenburg]

Okay, you've made it sound too simple. I'm not sure why though. Do you think it is this simple? I don't know about you but I just cannot pick up words that easily from extensive reading. It takes several, and I mean several exposures. I still go back to books i've already read a couple of times and struggle with many of the same words I did first time round. I can't pick up a new word from a few instances alone in one book.

Lord no I don't think it is simple! I have the same problem, some words seem to just stick straightaway in my head, but others seem to be slippery as teflon. For example: "presque", I almost remember it, but I don't... (see what I did there? )

Seemingly regardless of how many times I look up "presque", no matter how many dozens of times it appears in a book the slippery little devil always seems to allude me. But I figure one of these days I'm going to nail the slippery little git and "presque" will remain in my head and in my active vocabulary. This is one of the words I've put in my Anki deck to drill because I keep looking it up, and it keeps wandering off. While some words just stick with no hassle after 3-4 times looking them up, the slippery ones you might need to SRS or otherwise force yourself to memorise it in some way.

So reading isn't the be all and end all of vocabulary, and even if I passively learn "presque" and know it when I see it in a sentence, will I know it when someone says it to me? Will I be able to get the slippery little devil to come out my mouth at the right time? Probably not.

So my calculations are only demonstrating exposure, not internalisation of the words, that is a whole other story. It might be you'd have to read The Count of Monte Cristo 30 or 40 times before you internalise the words. Anyway, I wouldn't worry about having to keep looking up words.

One strange thing I have noticed in my own program of learning, is that I seem to internalise words better if I look them up in a paper dictionary after reading a paper book. Perhaps these pop-up dictionaries are a little too easy? Not sure.

Okidoki, I hear you now.... presque En parlant de ‘presque’, est-ce que tu connais le mot presqu’île ? As-tu mal à la tête maintenant ? Moi aussi. Il me semble que je dois tout simplement travailler plus dur et étudier plus régulièrement, plus systématiquement quoi. Facile

One strange thing I have noticed in my own program of learning, is that I seem to internalise words better if I look them up in a paper dictionary after reading a paper book. Perhaps these pop-up dictionaries are a little too easy? Not sure.

You sometimes hear that writing things down is better for memory/learning than typing them. Could that be a factor here? Do you write these words down, and then look them up later?

I am using paper dictionaries and writing words down. It’s ‘different’. Not sure if it’s better for retention than flashcards (I got sick of flashcards nonetheless). It may just be a different process for memorising, possibly a better one, more natural at least.