rpg learns Spanish, French, German

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rpg
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby rpg » Sat May 15, 2021 10:30 pm

As mentioned in my last post two weeks ago I was expecting to be busy the past two weeks--I'm busy with work and we also went on some type of vacation.

However I ended up watching a bunch in French the past couple days as I was recovering from my second covid vaccine (the side effects hit me pretty hard). I watched season 1 of Plan cœur (The Hook-up Plan) and also got around to watching Lupin. Both were okay, but I think Lupin had been over-hyped for me so it was a bit of a disappointment (fun, but a lot of the plot points defy all logic). As for Plan cœur, my expectations there were pretty low so I ended up being pleasantly surprised; it ended up being fairly charming. This is a great alternative to Emily in Paris: still a rom-com among young people set in Paris, but instead of a long list of dumb clichés & weird American stereotypes about Paris and France, you get a more realistic, ie normal, portrayal. Well, okay, the plot is kinda crazy so "realistic" might not be the right word, but you get the point.

I'm glad that I'm finally spending some more serious time on French after a lot of anemic updates. I think I need to do more reading (the neglected half of my SC...) and possibly a little flashcarding for my vocab. But the TV watching is very good too. Compared to Spanish, imo French has a far bigger gap between the written and spoken language, and I still need a lot of work with the spoken language (both with the mountains of oral-specific vocabulary and with general listening comprehension).

I watched two more episodes of Aqui no hay quien viva on a plane. Otherwise not too much going on in Spanish. My Anki deck is in a bad state and we'll see how long it takes me to get it back under control. I've stopped adding new words and am just trying to get the volume of reviews down. It's been a few weeks since I've watched any Vis a vis so I'll try to watch at least one episode of that this weekend.

In German I had just one or two classes during this period; I took a pause due to the trip. I've booked a whole bunch for the upcoming week, though. I hope to get maybe 2/3 or so of the way through Lingoda's A2 curriculum by the time that Spanish course starts in July, when I'll put German on pause & resume it again after. I don't think I'll have any problem reaching A2 in German this year but I don't think I'll make it to B1.

My goals for 2021 remain:

  • Spanish: C1 DELE (will start more actively preparing for this in the fall, I imagine)
  • French: B2 on TCF (picking TCF because I don't want to prepare for both the DELF and the DELE at the same time; TCF looks more low-key).
  • German: A2 (unofficially ;) )
7 x
Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

rpg
Orange Belt
Posts: 153
Joined: Fri Jul 21, 2017 2:21 pm
Languages: English (N), Spanish (B2), French (B2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=8368
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby rpg » Sun May 23, 2021 9:20 pm

Ok, a quick update.

In German I did 7 (I believe) Lingoda classes this week. I'm getting a little frustrated with them and a little tired of it though. I'm thinking about winding these down, but I still have another 35 credits worth of classes to get through first. Ultimately I think these classes are right now a little too performance-heavy for me. The curriculum spends too much time asking me to say things and not enough time teaching me things I can say. My vocabulary simply isn't large enough to say what I want to, even by circumlocution. And I shouldn't be made to feel bad about that! I'm only in an early A2 class, after all. The range of what is expected from someone with an A1 level should be very small.

Too many language learning classes place too much emphasis on speaking in these early levels. Yes, it should be one component, but imo at early levels the bulk of the effort should go into giving a lot of input to students so that they can build up their vocabulary and acquire some basic word order type things.

Spanish has been getting the short end of the stick recently. I watched one Vis a vis episode last weekend and that's about it. No reading, no Anki.

That's because I've spent a lot of time on French instead. I watched the first couple episodes of season 2 of Plan cœur (even though I read it wasn't that good, I figured I might as well watch it anyway) as well as three episodes (which is half the show) of Le châlet. The latter is pretty confusing because there are an absolute ton of characters and they were all introduced so quickly that I'm spending half the scenes trying to decipher who all these people are and what their relationships are. I'm not sure if it's just because I'm watching it in a foreign language, but I suspect that a lot of the blame belongs to the show creators here, tbh. Once I finish it I'll have to see if other people online had similar problems or if it's just me.

I also got around to finishing Les vacances du Petit Nicolas. I bought the next one (Le Petit Nicolas et les copains) but haven't started it yet. I did start reading the first Harry Potter book on a whim. I had been kind of resisting reading HP in my TLs because I feel like it's much more fun to read something new & something originally written in the TL. At the end of the day, however, I think it's pretty good for language learning, so I'm doing it anyway. I've already made some good progress (bit over 100 pages) in less than a week and I think my vocab is growing a nice amount; there's a lot of words that are very high frequency in this book that I didn't really know, probably because I haven't done all that much reading in French to date.
5 x
Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

DaveAgain
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby DaveAgain » Mon May 24, 2021 7:13 am

rpg wrote:
I did start reading the first Harry Potter book on a whim. I had been kind of resisting reading HP in my TLs because I feel like it's much more fun to read something new & something originally written in the TL. At the end of the day, however, I think it's pretty good for language learning, so I'm doing it anyway.
I think Pierre Bottero's 'La quête d'Ewilan' is a French equivalent to the Harry Potter series, but I've not read it myself.

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 20#p177109

https://www.babelio.com/auteur/Pierre-Bottero/14681
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rpg
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby rpg » Tue May 25, 2021 12:19 am

DaveAgain wrote:
rpg wrote:
I did start reading the first Harry Potter book on a whim. I had been kind of resisting reading HP in my TLs because I feel like it's much more fun to read something new & something originally written in the TL. At the end of the day, however, I think it's pretty good for language learning, so I'm doing it anyway.
I think Pierre Bottero's 'La quête d'Ewilan' is a French equivalent to the Harry Potter series, but I've not read it myself.

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 20#p177109

https://www.babelio.com/auteur/Pierre-Bottero/14681


Thanks, I'll take a look at it.

I think HP has a couple of advantages that make it good extensive reading material: there's a lot of it (something like 3-4k, depending on the editions), the language is relatively simple, and I know the story so well (especially the first book) that it's easier for me to fill in the blanks in passages with unknown words (sometimes by even remembering the particular word or phrase from the English version directly).

I may also take a look at the Arsène Lupin stories/books or the Maigret books. I wish there was an easy way to evaluate how difficult a book's vocabulary is, so I could better assess what would be the best candidate to sink my teeth into. I have some ideas for some language learning tools to solve these kinds of problems but I can't work on them right now without my employer owning the copyright.
2 x
Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

DaveAgain
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1961
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby DaveAgain » Tue May 25, 2021 8:47 am

rpg wrote:I may also take a look at the Arsène Lupin stories/books or the Maigret books. I wish there was an easy way to evaluate how difficult a book's vocabulary is, so I could better assess what would be the best candidate to sink my teeth into. I have some ideas for some language learning tools to solve these kinds of problems but I can't work on them right now without my employer owning the copyright.
There is a thread where some books are suggested in different difficulty brackets, French and Spanish Book Recommendations thread
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rpg
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby rpg » Tue May 25, 2021 11:23 pm

DaveAgain wrote:
rpg wrote:I may also take a look at the Arsène Lupin stories/books or the Maigret books. I wish there was an easy way to evaluate how difficult a book's vocabulary is, so I could better assess what would be the best candidate to sink my teeth into. I have some ideas for some language learning tools to solve these kinds of problems but I can't work on them right now without my employer owning the copyright.
There is a thread where some books are suggested in different difficulty brackets, French and Spanish Book Recommendations thread


Yes, but (with due respect to the contributors) that's pretty subjective and unscientific. Personally I don't take opinions like that very seriously because I think learners have wildly differing outlooks on how much unknown vocabulary they read with. I'm thinking more along the lines of running the book through a frequency list and saying "if you know the X most frequent words in the language you will understand Y% of the words in this book".
0 x
Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

DaveAgain
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby DaveAgain » Wed May 26, 2021 7:06 am

rpg wrote:Yes, but (with due respect to the contributors) that's pretty subjective and unscientific. Personally I don't take opinions like that very seriously because I think learners have wildly differing outlooks on how much unknown vocabulary they read with. I'm thinking more along the lines of running the book through a frequency list and saying "if you know the X most frequent words in the language you will understand Y% of the words in this book".
I think Readlang.com uses an automated system like that to classify uploaded texts on A1>C2 lines.

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 75&p=67271

Linq.com also classifies texts, but I'm not sure if that's user suggested or automated.
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rpg
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby rpg » Mon May 31, 2021 2:42 am

Even though I really should have been catching up on some work this weekend, I've been procrastinating by watching a lot of French tv. I watched the back half of Le chalet (a word which I only now realize I've been misspelling with an â for some reason), the rest of season 2 of Plan cœur, and all of La mante. None of them were particularly good, to be honest. Perhaps the best was Le chalet. I did read online that a lot of other people had trouble keeping track of who everybody was in the first few episodes, so I felt better about that. I think the show's cast was just a bit too big and they didn't spend enough time establishing all the relationships, but besides that I think it's overall fairly entertaining. As for Plan cœur, the second season felt extraneous and directionless and I'm not sure there was any point to it. They also made a confinement episode last summer which has already aged poorly (imo) and didn't really resonate with my experiences of the confinement in Paris. I'll still watch the third and final season when it comes out, since it's a good source of slang and is a relatively easy (upbeat) watch, but I'm not expecting much. Finally, I thought La mante was okay for what it was, if a little clichéd, but not particularly revelatory, and some of the choices the writers made were...questionable.

I've also continued reading HP1 in French. I'm about 70% of the way through and at this rate will finish it next weekend, probably.

In German I've continued Lingoda classes. I've done six in the last week and have another scheduled tonight and two tomorrow. My opinion on these varies drastically; sometimes they're fun and I feel good about my progress, other times they're extremely frustrating and unenjoyable and make me question the point of language learning altogether. Anyway, I'm trucking on and making slow but steady progress.

Oh, I don't think I mentioned this earlier, but I was successful with my Super Sprint! So I get the full refund. That was nice when I found out.

In Spanish I've been doing very little, but I watched another episode of Vis a vis to not fall too far behind. Spanish got a lot of attention during the winter & spring so I'm perfectly fine with French getting the spotlight now instead.
5 x
Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

rpg
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Posts: 153
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, Mandarin

Postby rpg » Tue Jun 01, 2021 10:52 am

I'm continuing to procrastinate on work, so some more scattered reflections that I didn't include yesterday.

First on my French level. I've been thinking about this a bit today--somehow it feels like my French has improved respectably over the last year even though I'm not fully sure how. Once we got back from Paris in July I mostly dropped French for quite a while and only in the last couple months have I picked it up again--and hardly intensively at that, as you can see from my anemic SC stats. Yet somehow I feel like my listening comprehension has improved a fair amount and that my vocabulary has been growing as well. I went back and looked at recordings of my last Chatterbug lessons (last May) and they were super painful to watch, so I have to imagine that my speaking is better now too (just based on when I talk to myself), even though I haven't really put it to the test recently.

As one data point for my improved listening comprehension, I rewatched a whole bunch of Bref episodes this weekend (probably 30+). There are still some pieces that I miss here and there but my overall comprehension is solid and I'm not struggling nearly as much as I was when I watched these last year. It helps a lot having learned a lot more common argot (kiffer, pécho, taf, etc) lately too.

When looking back to my log last year for my last updates on French, I came across last year's TV5Monde simulated TCF results, from April 30, 2020:

rpg wrote:An abbreviated pre-Super Challenge update:

First, inspired by a post from dicentra8 in the 6WC thread, I took the TV5Monde simulated online TCF. My results: 7 incorrect responses (77% correct) for compréhension orale, 3 incorrect responses (85% correct) for structure de la langue, and 4 incorrect responses (87% correct) for compréhension écrite. Altogether this is 66/80 and they tell me:

Votre score pour l'ensemble du test est égal à 83 % de bonnes réponses. Vous êtes du niveau d'un utilisateur indépendant (niveau B défini par le Cadre européen commun de référence) pour la compréhension orale, la compréhension écrite et la maîtrise des structures de la langue.


For oral and written comprehension, they further say "Votre niveau de compréhension écrite (orale) en français est celui d'un utilisateur indépendant (niveau B défini par le Cadre européen commun de référence)." but for the structure de la langue part they say "Votre maîtrise des structures de la langue en français est d'un niveau fin de B2 (utilisateur indépendant), début de C1 (utilisateur expérimenté)." so that's nice at least.

With that said I'm still a little annoyed at the results because I already knew I was in the doldrums of the B levels (I'm certainly better than A2 and certainly worse than C1!), so I wish they had given me something more conclusive after I spent all that time doing the test. I'm not really sure how far along I am on the B1/B2 spectrum any more. And I already knew that I was decent at grammar and reading comprehension and that my listening comprehension was weaker.


I went back and re-did the test now and happily my score has improved. This time around I missed 3 on compréhension orale (90% correct), 3 on structures de la langue (85%), and 2 on compréhension écrite (93%), for a total of 72/80 correct. Progress! Most of the improvement is in the listening comprehension, which aligns with my own impressions, but I improved reading comprehension as well. This time the overall result, as well as each of the three sections, is "fin de B2, début de C1". So that's nice. Still eager to take this exam for real this year and see how I measure up!

I'm also gratified when I think about how I've only actually been learning French seriously for around a year and a half of calendar time (besides maybe a half-dozen or so French in Action lessons I did before that point). Of course that includes several months of full-time French study and a period of being in France (albeit mostly interacting with my English-speaking girlfriend thanks to covid). In terms of # of hours I don't think it's anything impressive. But I think it's great in terms of calendar time because it lets me dream big for, say, 5 or 10 years down the line. But that's easy to do when you're young...

On the German side I ping-pong between really great lessons and not-so-great ones. Just about every tutor I have on Lingoda (a lot--they don't repeat very often) has complimented me on my pronunciation, so that's nice. The only sound I'm uneasy on is the ich-laut (/ç/) which I don't feel like I nail consistently in speech (one tutor remarked on this a few weeks ago as well). I had a tutor a couple days ago who went so far as to say that if I were talking on the phone the other person would think I was German. I never really take compliments like that too seriously (especially since I'm still a beginner...) but it's still nice to hear. I've also had a number of teachers suggest I move up to a higher level (and got another memorable compliment, that the teacher wished that her A2 students in her language school spoke so well!), but meanwhile some of my other classes are real struggles where I flounder around unimpressively, sitting in silence for 20+ seconds trying to think up a sentence that I actually knew how to say that contains a particular word (this is always the least enjoyable thing in language classes for me, when my vocabulary isn't very good and I can't come up with anything that I actually know how to say).

I also have a lot of still-basic grammar and vocabulary to learn, so I'm in no rush to move up a level. But it's nice to feel like I'm on track and making appropriate progress and that if I trust the process I'll get the results I want, and to try to keep this in mind the next time I'm floundering in a lesson (so, tomorrow, probably :roll: )
4 x
Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150

rpg
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Re: rpg learns Spanish, French, German

Postby rpg » Mon Jun 07, 2021 1:12 am

This past week in German I've taken another...8? Lingoda classes since my last post, with one more scheduled for tonight. They're coming along... I'm starting to get preoccupied with whether or not I'm learning enough vocabulary quickly enough but I guess I should be patient. It doesn't feel to me like these classes are very good at teaching a lot of the small function/glue words of the language (the stuff that's not nouns/adjectives/verbs essentially) but whatever.

In French I watched three episodes of Le Bazar de la Charité (somewhat boring period drama miniseries) and two of Family Business (it's just ok). I did finish reading the first Harry Potter book, though, and I'm already around 100 pages into the next one. I think I'm picking up a nice amount of vocabulary from this reading and I hope it continues.

Spanish has gotten very little attention; I actually don't think I've done anything at all minus maybe a couple youtube videos (I remember watching a couple from BBC News Mundo for example). My spreadsheet says I'm now four hours behind on the film part of my Spanish SC, though as I'm still 44 hours behind on French I don't think that's my biggest worry. At least I've been slowly closing the gap with French. At this point I'm feeling good about finishing the film portion of both SCs and the only question is how close I'll be able to get on French reading (Spanish reading is probably a lost cause). I think I need to read somewhere around 125 pages a week which isn't out of the question; I read that much in French this week, I think.
3 x
Super challenge 2020/21
French reading: 4534 / 5000      Spanish reading: 81 / 5000
French movies: 115 / 150       Spanish movies: 98 / 150


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