The Happy Mental Tourist enjoys French and Spanish

[sfuqua]

Here we go.
I'm going to do the super challenge for French and Spanish.
This means I'm going to try to read 5000 pages and watch 9000 minutes of Spanish and French.

The Spanish should be straightforward. I'm a little afraid of my French. I think I might do better with a few more months of "courses."
I'm going to try to give it a try. While I have a lot of French vocabulary from cognates with Spanish and English, I have huge holes in my vocabulary.
Onward!!! (after midnight my time)

[Lawyer&Mom]

Dive into the French! You can do it! I started reading in French after finishing Assimil. It was rough sledding at first, but it got much better very quickly. Clozemaster helped fill gaps in vocabulary. But between Spanish and English you (unwittingly) already know a ton of French vocabulary. Courses and courses are so not necessary for (receptive) French.

[sfuqua]

French 20 pages, 0 minutes.
Spanish 20 pages, 0 minutes.
The goal is 5000 pages and 9000 minutes for both.

OK, first day...

After some floundering trying to make myself read Harry Potter, I found that Harlequin romance novels are available in French and Spanish. They are easy in Spanish, of course, but they are very hard in French. This is not surprising, but I swear that after only 20 pages of French reading, my reading is getting better.

For today my technique is one that I used a lot when I was going through my own personal super challenge in Spanish.

Read 10 pages using the popup dictionary and then listen to the tts voice while rereading the same 10 pages.

Results for today:

Spanish reading was very easy, however I did see a few new words.
Spanish listening was very easy. It was a little hard to make my eyes follow along with the print, since I could understand the voice by itself.

French reading was hard, but I think that I know what was going on. I used the dictionary a lot. It seemed to be getting easier by the end of the 10 pages.
French listening comprehension was terrible without the book, but when I was reading along, I was surprised that I could understand anything.

For right now, I am going to emphasize reading and try to increase my French vocabulary before I begin to hit TV and movies very much.
I know that I can count listening to a book while simultaneously reading it as either listening or reading. I'm going to think of it as reading for now.

I eventually plan to do reading aloud and shadowing, but that is a ways off for French

[sfuqua]

Day 2
10 pages each of Spanish and French. No listening.
I wanted to read something more challenging, so I made parallel texts out of Jean S. by Alain Absire and Diana o la cazadora Solitaria Carlos Fuentes. I read the English side whenever I missed some vocabulary. It was slow, but easy.

[zjones]

I'm a little afraid of my French. I think I might do better with a few more months of "courses."
I'm going to try to give it a try. While I have a lot of French vocabulary from cognates with Spanish and English, I have huge holes in my vocabulary.
Onward!!! (after midnight my time)

Just wanted to say good luck! I am still in the study phase of French and I'm doing the Super Challenge too. It's a little scary, but we can do it!

[BOLIO]

Oh I will be watching your log like so many other of your posts. I think the SC will be beneficial for both languages. How could that much input not be helpful but I think the language you seem to be a little apprehensive about, French, will give you a huge amount of growth. I’m with LawyerMom on this one. Dive in. Your advance Spanish will help you relate to the French and your Tagalog will be helpful too.

All the best and I’ll be watching.

BOLIO

[sfuqua]

Day 5

I've had quite a few developments, both personal and language wise since my last post.

First, the personal developments, which may have an impact on my performance in the challenge...
After a couple of months of nausea and dizziness, and a thousand negative tests, my wife seemed to be getting better.
Then she suddenly got much sicker, and they did more tests, and then we got a very frightening biopsy report. It looks like we have a war on our hands. We have important tests and important meetings with doctors next week, where the shape of the campaign will become more clear. I really admire anybody with the courage to become an oncologist.
My first instinct was to quit all of my fooling around with languages. My second instinct was to drop the super challenge and just go to doing some course or another, or a big anki deck. I decided to keep up the super challenge for now. My experience has been that having somebody in the family serioiusly ill means that there is a lot of waiting and worrying. Studying a language can be a nice distraction, as long as you can keep your concentration up. If my language study interferes with my duties as husband and father, I will suddenly disappear, and reappear on the other side of the battle...

So far my totals are:

78 pages Spanish
and
78 pages French.

No movies or TV yet. I have done some reading while being dragged along at 150wpm my the tts voices.

I read French and Spanish translations of _The Children of Hurin_.

So far my reading comprehension is very shaky in French, one page I'll be patting myself on the back that I finally am starting to be able to read French normally, then I'll turn the page and realize that I don't know a single word on the page, at least at first glance. I may make parallel texts out of the two translations I have of _Hurin_ just to make it easier to look up unknown vocabulary.

My Spanish reading is more variable than I remembered it. I've read a little over 5000 pages of Spanish at this point, and I can cruise pretty well through the genres and authors that I like to read. I'm pretty thrilled by how well I can read. I am, however, very vulnerable to genre and author. I can read García-Márquez pretty well as long as I can hit the dictionary every page or so, but when I started on Carlos Fuentes's _Diana o la cazadora Solitaria_ and ran into a chapter on God, sex, donjuanism, and Jean Seberg's amazing skin, I got a bit lost, even though, word for word, and sentence for sentence, Fuentes is simpler that García-Marquez. I took a glance at the English translation, and found the chapter pretty heavy going in English also.

One of my weaknesses as a language learner is that I keep trying to read things that are too hard for me. A super challenge is a marathon, and I've got to find a pace that will get me through.

[Ani]

So sorry to hear about your wife's health. I'll keep you both in my prayers if that is alright.

I agree that language learning can be a great distraction when dealing with a health crisis. There is always a lot more waiting than actually doing, even though we usually wish it were the other way around.

[iguanamon]

Steve, my thoughts are with you and your wife and family. I wish for you all courage and strength.

[sfuqua]

Thanks for the kind words. We don't really know everything yet about my wife's condition. It's just sort of like a nightmare we can't wake up from. More tests and more tests for a couple of more days, and then the big meeting with the oncologist...

To get a baseline of where I am, I did a silly little recpetive vocabulary test in both Spanish and French. I basically ran a couple of lemma based frequency lists into anki (using the ""ignore lines that match an existing note") setting, scrambled the lists and then checked to see how many of a 50 word list I knew, at least receptively.

My results are
9600 lemmas for Spanish (a little lower than right after I did my personal super challenge)
4100 lemmas for French (there are a lot of cognates in French).

I wouldn't claim that there is anything exact about these numbers, but if they change very much during the superchallenge, it should reflect real learning.

I may do some shadowing tonight; I'm sort of bummed about how badly I can mess up the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word I run across in French reading.