rpg learns Spanish, French, German

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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Mon Jun 07, 2021 2:47 am

rpg wrote:
In French I watched three episodes of Le Bazar de la Charité (somewhat boring period drama miniseries) . . .

It's good to see your opinion. As a caution to me that others may legitimately have opinions about shows that differ very much from my own. Though I too stopped watching--after the first 3 episodes--because it was too traumatic. But maybe you watched more than three episodes before getting bored?
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rpg
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby rpg » Mon Jun 07, 2021 6:18 am

MorkTheFiddle wrote:
rpg wrote:
In French I watched three episodes of Le Bazar de la Charité (somewhat boring period drama miniseries) . . .

It's good to see your opinion. As a caution to me that others may legitimately have opinions about shows that differ very much from my own. Though I too stopped watching--after the first 3 episodes--because it was too traumatic. But maybe you watched more than three episodes before getting bored?


Hah! No, I've only seen three episodes as well. I think the plot threads just feel a bit uninteresting and clichéd to me right now--certainly the main love story does. Then we have Audrey Fleurot's character who keeps making bad decisions and is thus not a very sympathetic protagonist, and then the Rose plotline which really defies all belief (you're telling me nobody recognizes your voice / that it's changed? c'mon...). And the pacing also feels pretty slow to me. With that said, I normally don't watch this kind of show anyway, I just wasn't in the mood for another serious horror/crime type thing and this was what was left. I'll probably watch the whole thing as it's only 8 episodes in total.
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby rpg » Mon Jun 14, 2021 1:58 am

An update from my phone. I've been very busy with work this week, but I have found some time this weekend for languages.

In German I took another... 4 Lingoda classes (only), with one more tonight. I downgraded my plan to the lightest one possible (4 classes/month) now in preparation for using my remaining class credits and cancelling my plan while I take this Spanish class. I'm getting plenty frustrated with Lingoda anyway and could use a break from it. I need to regroup and figure out the best way to continue with German. These classes are too focused on oral production and I feel like I'm not getting a balanced language learning diet.

In French I watched the other five episodes of Le Bazar de la Charité. My opinion only marginally improved as it went on; the pacing was still very slow and the plot a bit too ridiculous for me. Oh well. Vocabulary-wise I think this was the easiest French show I've seen, though--because it's a period drama set among the aristocracy, the language was overall a lot more formal / classroom-like, with fairly minimal argot. I only found myself looking up words occasionally and usually they were things like "carriage" and whatnot. So I'd recommend it from a language learning perspective.

I've done a fair amount of reading as well. I finished Le Petit Nicolas et les copains, and read another 100-ish pages in HP2, which I might finish as early as next weekend. I've only got one more of the original Petit Nicolas books left, though it seems there are also quite a number of other books available collecting stories that were published in magazines and so on.

My French reading process has been different from my Spanish one: I've been reading on the Kindle app on my phone with a dictionary in another app, and switching between the two wherever I need to look up a word. I haven't been making too much effort to reinforce vocabulary besides the word lookups, but I'm definitely learning a bunch of words anyway.

In Spanish I've done absolutely nothing. Next week I'll try to find the time to watch some more TV so I don't fall further behind.
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby rpg » Mon Jun 21, 2021 9:05 am

This week:

In German I took 5 Lingoda classes. Sometimes these go great and I'm very happy, sometimes they go badly and I get really frustrated. Nothing new there. Looking forward to using up my 17-class balance and then taking a break from Lingoda...

In French I finished reading HP2 way ahead of my expectations--I ended up finishing it on Monday. Once I get close enough to the end I can't really put a book down. I started HP3 and am already 100 pages into it, so that's good. As for the film portion, I watched Le feu follet, a good (if rather depressing) film by Louis Malle. Oh yeah, and I just watched two episodes of the new series of Lupin... not really sure where they're going with this but it's entertaining enough. And oh--this week I'm actually going to Paris for the next few weeks, now that they're reopening, so I'm hoping that'll be good.

In Spanish I never got around to watching more Vis a vis, but this week Netflix released four "short stories" from Élite, each around the length of a normal TV episode and exploring a different relationship from amongst the original characters, and I did watch all four of them.

It's funny, I felt like I wasn't really doing much language stuff this past week, but adding all this up I probably spent 15h or so, maybe slightly more (not sure how long I spent reading). So all things considered I should probably consider it a success!
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Mon Jun 21, 2021 5:03 pm

Paris! Wow, have a good trip!
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby rpg » Sun Jun 27, 2021 10:21 am

Nothing to update beyond French this week: no Spanish and no German classes, between the travel and being busy with work (it's the end of the quarter, so I had a project launch I was busy with). I paused my Lingoda subscription for three weeks until I get back from France.

In French, I actually finished reading HP3 last night, already, mostly thanks to the flying + hanging around jetlagged. I haven't started the fourth one yet but as it's a similar length to the previous two put together I expect it'll take a bit longer. I also finished the second part of Lupin on Netflix, which was... kind of ridiculous, but still entertaining.

I'm also, well, in France! It's been around a year since I've actually spoken any French with anybody, so that brings its own challenges. I've reverted back to being stressed out by conversation and am currently still calming down after making a reservation on the phone during which I didn't understand a question they asked me near the end (or rather, I understood the gist but couldn't make out all the words in one of the two options they presented, so I struggled responding). And this morning at a boulangerie I said "un part de..." instead of "une part de..." and was super embarrassed when they repeated back the feminine form. I've always been jealous of people who don't have that much fear of making mistakes, or who can get over their fear easily. For me every time I mess up speaking it haunts me for hours or days on end! I think this is part of why I overly bias towards taking classes, as they provide a comfortable environment for speaking practice.

Oh well. Onwards and upwards...
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby rdearman » Sun Jun 27, 2021 10:28 am

One of my conversation partners is a speech therapist. She tells me that French speakers, even ones with speech problems, invariably get the gender of words correct. But second language speakers of French almost always struggle. It seems native speakers have some kind of innate understanding of gender in French. Anyway, my point is that you're not French, you're not going to have an unconscious ability to automatically come up with the right words. Don't beat yourself up about it. Actually, you should be proud of yourself. They only corrected you, rather than just switch to speaking English, so it couldn't have been that bad, and they were trying to help. :D
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby rpg » Sun Jun 27, 2021 4:17 pm

rdearman wrote:One of my conversation partners is a speech therapist. She tells me that French speakers, even ones with speech problems, invariably get the gender of words correct. But second language speakers of French almost always struggle. It seems native speakers have some kind of innate understanding of gender in French. Anyway, my point is that you're not French, you're not going to have an unconscious ability to automatically come up with the right words. Don't beat yourself up about it. Actually, you should be proud of yourself. They only corrected you, rather than just switch to speaking English, so it couldn't have been that bad, and they were trying to help. :D


Oh, believe me, this isn't the first time I've made a gender mistake in a Romance language :D It's funny, I think if it were Spanish I'd have gotten it right-- la parte does look more correct to me than el parte. Also I think I would have known to say "ma part" and not "mon part", funnily enough. For whatever reason I didn't get it right this time, though.

Despite the stereotype I don't experience people switching to English with me very often these days in Paris, actually--sometimes to the chagrin of my SO who doesn't speak any French.
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby jmar257 » Sun Jun 27, 2021 4:48 pm

rpg wrote:Oh, believe me, this isn't the first time I've made a gender mistake in a Romance language :D It's funny, I think if it were Spanish I'd have gotten it right-- la parte does look more correct to me than el parte. Also I think I would have known to say "ma part" and not "mon part", funnily enough. For whatever reason I didn't get it right this time, though.

Ha, el parte actually is correct as well but means "the report" (vs. la parte, which means part/portion in the way you're referring to). I have an Anki card differentiating the two and I figured that knowledge would never be useful but...I guess it sort of is here, as a fun fact. I definitely use Spanish to recall French genders as well (which isn't always perfect, but generally works) or sometimes, like you mention, trying to see if another word in front of it sounds right (like mon/ma instead of le/la).

I'm insanely jealous of you being in France, hope it's a good time.
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby rpg » Sun Jul 04, 2021 9:24 pm

Not too much to log this week. Nothing in Spanish or German, as planned, though my college Spanish course is beginning this week. As a reminder, this is like an "intro to literary analysis" type course that's a prerequisite at my local state university for all of their upper division Spanish literature courses. To be honest it doesn't actually look very hard to me right now--the amount of reading seems relatively minimal to me as far as I can tell, maybe only a couple short stories' worth per week. I suppose that's probably a good thing because the Mandarin summer courses I took two years ago were so intense (when combined with my full-time job) that I barely made it through.

In French, well, I'm in France :D It's good to be back; I still love Paris. I've had plenty of interaction in French but nothing very substantial, to be honest. My SO does not speak French and that prevents me from seeking out monolingual French experiences. That's too bad, because I think the surface level tourist interactions that remain (the same 20 sentences ordering food, making reservations, asking where the bathrooms are, whatever) are not worth the price I have paid in language learning. It's all well and good that I can use the subjunctive or make conditional sentences with si or whatever but in practice the language I'm actually using is super simple. My French does still need work & I think that's the only comforting thought. My listening comprehension is still not good enough to consistently support a normal full-speed conversation especially with background noise or masks or whatnot. I can still say to myself that it would be different if my French were better.

Anyway, as for logging, I've read around 150 pages of HP4 this week and rewatched the first episode of Dix pour cent with my SO. I also bought Le petit prince in a bookstore a few days ago and will probably finish reading that tonight before going to sleep. Not sure how I'm going to log that for the SC because even though my copy is some 110-odd pages they're pretty small pages and many pages are partly or entirely pictures. I might log it at a 50% discount or something, not sure.
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Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150


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