Isa's French Log + a bit of occasional ES, IT, JP or ZH

[I_likes_languages]

Ani wrote a few posts about getting language exchange partners that you might like to read:

Thank you DaveAgain, that was good advice! My experiences were quite good so far, but online language exchanges are definitely new to me. I've done a lot of offline tandems locally, and in my college town French was always the hardest languages to find a partner for because demand (everyone who did French within their degree and some independent learners like me = 100-200) always exceeded supply (about 10-20 Erasmus students per semester). I suppose I have to reappraise the whole "market" - always though it would be much harder to find a language partner, but over the last 2 weeks I have received many serious messages on italki, almost too many to answer and certainly too many to actually skype with. Keeping online dating in mind has definitely helped to sort through all the messages and I have chosen to ignore anyone who sends me a one liner or who doesn't even study German.

I've done 7 exchanges with 5 different people in the last 10 days and fixed new dates with 4 of them (some were only30 min), I think it is probably good to talk to many in the beginning and then wait and see how everything develops. The conversations in French went quite well. Lack of appropriate vocabulary was the most limiting factor at the moment, while grammar and phonetics did not generally impede the flow the conversation. Which brings me to my next point…

Because I was spending so much time on reading and listening, other skills were neglected. I watched Lýdia Machová's videos from the polyglott gathering some time ago, and thought that her approach makes a lot of sense. She proposes to focus on about 2-3 skills out of the full set of reading, writing, listening, speaking, vocabulary, phonetics and grammar for 3 months at a time, and then move on to other skills. I will focus on speaking and vocabulary from now on, and maybe add writing once I've established a routine

[I_likes_languages]

French
Speaking
Today was the second class of my conversation course at the Institute Franc,ais. I was pretty apprehensive before signing up, because I’ve had to sit through many bad and mediocre language classes in the past. This course is labeled C1/C2 Actualités, there is no program at all, everyone just sits there and talks about current topics from the news. The other participants have all been taking this course for years it seems, some have a high C2 level (one even works as a translator), others are C1ish. I don’t really know what I expected, but I don’t think I will learn much in terms of vocabulary, grammar or expressions there. What is totally new to me, is that it is a group discussion where many participants have reached a high level in their studies and many are just doing this course as maintenance. I think the course will help me a lot with both confidence and comprehension, since it is so different from a one-on-one language exchange. I have to speak French in front of quasi-strangers – my stress level is definitely much higher than when I talk to either my computer (self-talk) or a language partner online. But I noticed that I was already a little calmer during the second class. I also have to listen to many different people speaking. Most have a good or very good accents, and I’m not worried that I will pick up any bad habits – thanks to the SC I’m confident that I can distinguish what sounds correct from incorrect or overly inelegant phrasing.

Well, I’ll see how it goes. I’m glad that I’m meeting new people, and the library there is also pretty awesome. The teacher is very attentive and moderates the discussion well, making sure that everyone who has something to say gets to speak. Nevertheless, I probably spoke for less than 5 minutes out of the 90 minutes lesson time. I also had one italki lesson and 2 more languages exchanges during the last 6 days, so that makes at least 90min of spoken French this week.

Vocabulary
As for vocabulary, I realized that I don’t really lack vocabulary, but rather active vocabulary. It doesn’t make much sense to input ever more words into anki if I can’t access them during a conversation, so I’m considering my options. I’ve played around with the text input questions on clozemaster a bit, and I think writing might do the trick. My searches on the forum have not yielded a clear strategy yet, but I will dig deeper if I have some free time.

Writing
I finally started to do some writing. Lots of nonsensical stuff, but I want to see how it can help me activate vocabulary. I've written about 700 words so far That's only 98,6% or so of the Output Challenge to go.

[Cavesa]

Super Challenge
I’m done with the Double Super Challenge in French.

YOU ARE AWESOME! Congratulations!

Spla$h – by Nouvelles Écoutes

Le dessous des cartes – Arte

These two go on my list, thanks!

And last but not least…
Kaamelott. Towards the end of the SC I realized that I can finally understand what goes on in these episodes – for that alone the SC was worth it. Everyday life at King Arthurs’s court. Awesome and often awkward.

Yes, you've passed the final listening exam! Rise, knight Isa.
This is exactly what Kaamelott is for. You'll find not many more challenging things from now on. Or funnier.

Today was the second class of my conversation course at the Institute Franc,ais. I was pretty apprehensive before signing up, because I’ve had to sit through many bad and mediocre language classes in the past. This course is labeled C1/C2 Actualités, there is no program at all, everyone just sits there and talks about current topics from the news. The other participants have all been taking this course for years it seems, some have a high C2 level (one even works as a translator), others are C1ish. I don’t really know what I expected, but I don’t think I will learn much in terms of vocabulary, grammar or expressions there. What is totally new to me, is that it is a group discussion where many participants have reached a high level in their studies and many are just doing this course as maintenance. I think the course will help me a lot with both confidence and comprehension, since it is so different from a one-on-one language exchange. I have to speak French in front of quasi-strangers – my stress level is definitely much higher than when I talk to either my computer (self-talk) or a language partner online. But I noticed that I was already a little calmer during the second class. I also have to listen to many different people speaking. Most have a good or very good accents, and I’m not worried that I will pick up any bad habits – thanks to the SC I’m confident that I can distinguish what sounds correct from incorrect or overly inelegant phrasing.

You've just made me check my local Institut... aaaaaand nothing for this level, as usual. I hope you'll enjoy the classes, it looks like one of the rare very good settings to improve with non natives. Given your listening practice, I don't think you'll struggle with anything or catch mistakes. And perhaps you'll be surprised how much has the seemingly passive super challenge improved your active skills. I'm looking forward to the future posts about this. How many people are there?

[I_likes_languages]

Thank you Cavesa!

French

Speaking
Regarding the course at the IF, I think there may be 12 students in total, but there have never been more than 10 to one class. The numbers are always changing, last time I saw two new faces (new for me, not anyone else apparently). I think 10 is already a large group for a language class/discussion, I'd prefer something closer to 6 because I think there is a limit of how many people you can sensibly include in a group discussion. More people, and it is harder to contribute something new to the discussion and not just repeat/agree with what others have said. But some people don't participate as much as others no matter what topic we discuss unless the teacher expressly includes them, as if they are waiting to be included. It's not even that hard to join into the discussion and make yourself heard, it's all rather civilized and people leave opportunities for others to join in. Or maybe I'm just used to much more lively discussions where making yourself heard can be a struggle (I have older siblings and a bunch of noisy cousins). I'm pretty convinced that the single most important thing in language learning is taking responsibility for your own progress and not waiting around for some teacher or miraculous method, so the 3-4 silent participants are really weird for me (even if that results in the occasional weird experiment or abandoned project).
The inevitable has happened and the awesome, underpriced italki tutor I found last month has decided to increase her rates (she totally deserves it). I’ve been taking one lesson with her every week and I’m pretty happy with her corrections, so I’ll continue for a while longer. I also had two more language exchanges with the same people, one French guy and a girl from Switzerland. I might have another one with a new person tomorrow. And I have recorded myself speaking French and reading some articles out aloud. I’m a little uncomfortable with how I sound, though I’m not sure I sound like that in normal conversation. It was really weird listening to myself reading French, it sounded very snotty and not at all the way I sound in other languages (at least I hope that, and I checked and recorded myself in German and English because it was so weird.). So yeah, not quite sure what to do about that or whether it matters at all.

Writing
I managed to hit my goal of 250 words/day on most days this week, and today I even wrote about something more relevant than what I ate or how I slept. Another week or so and I might feel ready to share. My orthography is really bad, but clozemaster has been a great help in training the placement of accents and all random e’s in the middle/at the end of words which are not pronounced.

Vocabulary
The leaderboards on clozemaster are weirdly motivating. I think clozemaster is helping me a lot with synonyms and orthography and also, as intentioned, with activating my dormant vocabulary. I’ve also started working with a book called vocabulaire 450 nouveaux exercises by cle. I found the book at the Institut Franc,ais and it’s a good source to mine sentences/words for anki (but I wouldn't have paid for it).

Reading & Listening
I’m currently reading Pierre Lemaitre – Au revoir là-haut. I’m about 50 pages into the story and I think it will be awesome. The narrator is very opinionated and I like the sometimes ironic or almost flippant and provocative style.

[I_likes_languages]

French

Writing
I spent a lot of time on writing this week, writing between 300-400 words each day. I’ve now established a routine:
- open the courrier international website and choose whichever headline interests me
- read the article and look for related Wikipedia pages in French
- try to write something about the topic, like a small summary of the main topic using the article and related Wikipedia articles
- note all the words I had to look up (using leo.org's search history)
- Reread and check for errors
- switch on word’s spellchecker to identify more errors (it must be switched of before, or it will correct stuff without me noticing)
- note and correct errors
- use https://bonpatron.com/ to find more errors
- note and correct errors
- post the result on italki and wait for corrections
- note and correct errors
- google all the corrections I don’t understand/where I make persistent mistakes or look them up in a book.

The whole process takes me at least 1 hour.

Using an article as a base is much easier than coming up with something to write on my own though. I can recycle some of the vocabulary and the structure of the original articles. From what I understand, that is similar to what is expected in the synthèse type questions of the DALF.

I’m amazed by how many mistakes I can identify and filter out just by using word and bonpatron. Turns out I’m not only bad with the accents, I also suck at French noun genders and thus with word endings. I think that using spell checkers makes it so much more likely that I will get a fast and detailed correction by a native. Whenever I myself look for texts to correct, I ignore those that obviously haven’t been spellchecked, because I don’t want to waste my time on what a simple browser extension could do. Anyone who can should use these tools! That way, whoever is correcting your texts will have more energy and time left to help with rephrasing and subtleties. But I also think it's important to carefully check each sentence for errors before using the spellchecker, otherwise I'll just get lazy and never learn. So far, I’ve found 2 free tools, but I’ve only used bonpatron because it works by simply copy-pasting the text into the browser. There is also https://grammalecte.net/ , which seems to be a free spell checking tool which works with Libre Office, Open Office, Thunderbird and Firefox. I’ll try to compare their accuracy next week.

Speaking
I overslept and missed one language exchange on Saturday. Fortunately, I'd already had a couple of exchanges with this person, so she has forgiven me and we set a new date. I spent some time today setting up more exchanges for next week since my tutor won’t be available. Next week will also be the last time my first language partner and me (and I? I will never remember that) can use our language exchange to bitch about how bad we think season 8 of GoT is, so we will actually have to find something new to talk about.

Vocabulary
The clozemaster website is nice, I’m trying to do most of my reviews there and not on the app. It’s much faster that way and comes with audio. The audio is quite good, even if it doesn’t do the liaisons. I'm not 100% about the efficiency of using clozemaster, since I'm using it to review vocabulary that I already know. Sometimes when I'm speaking or writing I will use a word and remember that I just reviewed it with clozemaster, so its probably effective. I just wonder whether it's the fastest method? There is an "ignore word in all sentences with same missing word" option, maybe I should use that more often.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Super Challenge
I’m done with the Double Super Challenge in French.
I would have liked to put these letters into a glittery font just to express how happy I am that I made it!

Congratulations on finishing the Challenge!
And thanks for listing the resources you used. For me, it is just what the doctor ordered.

[I_likes_languages]

French
DALF
I passed the DALF C1 last Saturday, they sent me the results yesterday, much much faster than I would’ve thought (they also told me that the certificate would take 6 months or so.). My French course at the Institut Français also ended on Monday. After spending the last the last 2 months very focused on test preparation, it’s finally time to celebrate, relax, reflect and plan.

Initially I thought that registering for an official test would motivate me to focus on gaps in my skills. But I’m not entirely sure now. I put in a lot of hours during the last two months, but a lot of that was focused on how to take the test. It certainly pushed me to improve my writing skills, but not as much as I would have liked. What I really learned during the test preparation was to take two articles of about 1000 words, read them quickly and then write a little summary + article or prepare and deliver a structured talk on the topic. That is not a bad skill to have, but it’s not a language skill that I will need in real life. The 250 words limit is annoying thought.

As a preparation, I used the abc DALF C1/C2 book and just did as many of the practice exercises as possible. I was most scared of the oral production, so I did almost all the available exercises, either recording myself or talking to a language partner/tutor. I passed the test, so my preparation was ok, but it could have been better. I’m essentially a lazy person who wants to have fun with languages. I think I only enjoy active studying if it’s a choice and registering for the test took some of my freedom away, so I started to procrastinate a lot instead of focusing on what’s important. When I told my tutor that I was going to take the test, she answered that she was on board, but that it would take all the fun out of it (or to cite her directly: […] la préparation DALF est un travail assez rébarbatif, voire barbant […]). She was right. Still, it can’t always be fun to study a language. I might have improved my overall language skills more with another route of study, or I might have just lost my motivation altogether, it’s summer after all and there are many other things to do.

Of course, I also wanted to take the test to prove to myself and others that I’m C1 in French, because I was never sure of my self-assessment. It’s always one thing to claim that you have a certain level, and another thing to back that claim up with a certificate. The certificate might come in handy in the future. Nevertheless, I’m very happy to return to normal mode.

Plans
I haven’t set myself any new French study goals for July and August. I have a couple of books that I want to read, and I will keep doing language exchanges, but I will take a break from tutoring and just focus on what’s fun for now. My goal for 2019 is still to finish the Output Challenge for French, or at least the writing part - I’m only at 7500/50000 words. Overall, I want to continue studying French for at least another year. Looking at the progress I’ve made during the last 12-15 months, I would say that that might take me to a point that I’m comfortable at.

Other plans and ramblings
I’m still debating whether I want to study/reactivate a second language at the moment, and if so which. I’ve focused on French for about 15 months now, which is really a long time. I wasn’t always actively studying during this period, but I rarely had a day without some activity in French. What has helped me enormously during this time was that I allowed myself to only study French and let go of all the other languages. The more languages I studied in the past, the more obligated I felt to continue studying these languages actively, even though I wasn’t necessarily enjoying it or doing much, I was just putting pressure on myself. I no longer feel that it is もったいない to let go of my Japanese, even though people tell me that a lot. I passed the JLPT2 (old one) at 18, but that doesn’t mean that I have to keep Japanese in my life forever.

So for my current plans: I want to maintain Italian at its current level, but I feel that my Italian may be to close to my French, and so attempting to study them both simultaneously is a bad idea, since I would likely end up directly replacing some activities (like listening to Italian radio/podcasts and reading “Internazionale” instead of “Courrier International”, reading Italian books instead of French books), which I’m not comfortable with yet. I signed up for a half super challenge, but it is getting more and more unlikely that I will finish it, because I’m unwilling to give up my French reading time for Italian.

The most likely candidates are Chinese and Spanish. My ultimate goal would be to reach at least B2/conversational fluency in both languages, and this is more a question of “when”, not “if”. The idea has been in the back of my head for a while now, and as the DALF test date approached, my brain got more and more obsessed with this question - so much so that I took all the Chinese and Spanish learning material and put it out of sight. Now that the test is over, Chinese is a little less attractive, and Spanish seems more attractive again.

Realistically, I could free 30min of active study time in the morning and 45min in the evening/afternoon, while reducing my active study time in French and shifting activities further towards using French for entertainment and my social life. Maybe a bit more on the weekend and some additional time for low intensity activities. That would give me only 10 hours per week, 500 hours a year.

I’m confident that I could reach B2 in Spanish after about two years, while still working, doing sports, maintaining an active social life and having life happen. Thanks to knowing some French, Italian and Latin already and the wide availability of learning and native material, I might even get there a bit faster. Fast progress would of course be a huge motivation in itself.

For Chinese, I’m a lot less optimistic. I have a long-standing love-hate relationship with the language that started over 10 years ago. I would really like to take up Chinese again, but I’m hesitating because I’m aware that that would constitute a huge commitment and might take me a couple of years in which I can’t study other languages as intensively. Half-assing Mandarin and still making progress is impossible for me, I know this because I’ve tried a couple of times. I know in my heart that I want to someday speak the language fluently, I’ve always wanted to. Always postponing and giving up will not help. Although I’m not starting from scratch, 2 years to reach B2 on my current time budget seems unlikely. Maintaining my motivation for 3 years or longer will be the main factor.

Then again, no plan is set in stone. I might just play around with Chinese or Spanish for the summer, watch some Peppa Pig and then reassess the situation. Language learning is my hobby after all, I just tend to attach too much importance to the results. That is something I really need to fix in the long term.

[MamaPata]

Congratulations! It’s a great achievement!

[Lawyer&Mom]

Le dessous des cartes is brilliant! Thanks for the recommendation!

[I_likes_languages]

French
I spent a long weekend in Strasbourg last week. Strasbourg is one of my favorite cities, with all my favorite bookstores. It's also less than 2h from where my dad lives, so after convincing my boss to let me work from home and convincing my dad that a trip to France was just what he needed, we went there for 4 days (of which I had to work two, but I still had the evenings). There is a foreign language bookstore on Place Kleber, the "Librairie Gallimard du Monde Entier" that is just about the dream of anyone here on this forum. It carries resources in so many languages! I think they had about 3 full shelves of Assimil courses
(somewhere between 24-30 meters, but apparently the word "Regalmeter"/meters of shelf space does not exist in English ), but also resources in many other languages. Just opposite, there is the Librairie Internationale Kléber, also one of the best bookstores I know. I also visited a couple of used bookstores both in Krutenau and the centre (there seems to be a bookstore every 50 meters or so) and bought 15 books in total.

Waiting for la rentrée.../ Listening : Most of the podcasts I usually listen to are on summer break. My italki tutor recently introduced me to several chroniqueurs on France Inter that I'd really like to work on, their pacing but also their way of connecting ideas is a lot more difficult to follow than what I've been working on in the past. But everyone is on summer break... for now, only géopolitique and la revue de presse are still on, so I listen to about 10min/day of French each day.
Reading: Read: Zola Jackson by Gilles Leroy; La femme au carnet rouge by Antoine Laurain. Currently reading: L'art de perdre by Alice Zeniter - I think I forgot to mention that I read Nos richesses by Kaouther Adimi. The book was ok (4/5) imo, but it really got me interested in Algeria, and several people from my French book club recommended L'art de perdre.
Speaking: I had a couple of occasions to speak French in Strasbourg, also a couple of language exchanges. I have 3 regular LE partners now, so I mostly do 2-3 LE per week. I'm taking a break from tutoring.
Writing: Some personal messages and emails. I'm too lazy. I need to work on this.

Mandarin Chinese
I decided to go for it and study some Mandarin this summer. My French routine is pretty entrenched by now, so I'm not too worried, but I'm definitely diverting a lot of time. I have to revise my initial estimates downwards though - I can only manage about 45min of Mandarin study per day on weekdays and a little more on the weekend. This is the first time that I'm really tracking how much time I spend studying a language - I'm at about 900min (15h) since July 10th.

Recovery: My first focus is on recovering my previous skills. I'm currently working with anki a lot - 5 different decks, about 350 cards/30min per day, most of this is still recovery. I also use the textbook "Chinesisch für Deutsche" as a grammar reference. Since I know that my pronounciation was always problematic, I'm trying to get a lot of listening input (most of my anki decks have audio, which I repeat out aloud) and I'm working with Speechling and the Glossika Tone Training files for about 10-15min each day. I think I will get a pro account on speechling in August, since I really like them but I'm still debating whether I want to spend any money on my "summer project" (though I could use speechling for French too, so I could justify it ). I've also started to reread my Chinese Breeze Graded Reader collection (also with audio) and I'm trying to watch at least 5min of Peppa Pig each day. So far, I'm still motivated because the recovery is going well. My goal for this summer is to reach HSK level 3 by August 31st (I will test myself then).