Lianne's 365 Days of French

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Lianne
Green Belt
Posts: 457
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 3:29 pm
Location: Canada
Languages: Speaks: English (N)
Actively studying: French (low int)
Dabbling in: Italian (beginner), ASL (beginner), Ojibwe (beginner), Swahili (beginner)
Wish list: Swedish, Esperanto, Klingon, Brazilian Portuguese
Has also dabbled in: German, Spanish, toki pona
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... hp?t=12275
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Re: Lianne's 365 Days of French

Postby Lianne » Sat Feb 23, 2019 9:42 pm

I wanted to do a separate post on some long-term plans I'm making.

I always struggle with getting distracted by other languages. Right now, I'm trying to avoid that by planning some future language learning (to take place perhaps in 2020 if this year goes as well as I hope!). The two main languages tempting me right now are Swedish and Italian.

Swedish
In Swedish, I would be a true beginner. My only exposure to it is the Millennium Trilogy movies, and I just know that I love it. I don't really know any words besides "absolut" meaning absolutely because Mikael Blomkvist says that word a lot. :lol: So far I don't really have a plan for this, but it's very much on my radar.

Italian
I haven't thought much about Italian for a long time, but it was actually one of my very first language loves. In grade 12, I went on the school Europe trip. We went to Italy, Vatican City, France, and Monaco. Before we left, I did the first few lessons of Pimsleur Italian, and my sister bought me a phrase book. When we went to Italy I was completely in love. I even went on to take Introduction to Italian when I started university later that year, but had to drop it because my course load was just too intense and I really knew nothing about language learning at the time. I haven't touched Italian since, but I still have my university textbook, my phrasebook, and an Italian novel I bought on that trip!

Anyway, my interest was recently reawakened when I was reading about mutual intelligibility and lexical similarity in languages and saw that French and Italian have an 89% lexical similarity. Wow! That got me reading about how similar the two languages are, in almost every area except pronunciation (and I think Italian pronunciation is easier, especially given that I already trill my Rs in French lol). So, I think this would be a perfect opportunity for language laddering. I could learn Italian through French, thus continuing to improve and practice my French while also learning Italian.

Resources:
Duolingo Italian from French
Assimil - Le nouvel italien sans peine - available at my local library! What luck!!
There are a couple French bookstores in my city that I could check for other French-language Italian resources, e.g. dictionaries and verb books
English base resources as a supplement, such as my university textbook
Italian content on Netflix
Italian books (in addition to the one I own, I think my local library may have an Italian section in its huge multilingual section!)

Hopefully making these plans will help me control my wanderlust for the duration of 2019! It's not that I don't like French. Au contraire ! I just also always want the languages I'm not allowed to study right now lol. Wish me strength.
1 x
: 3 / 100 French SC (Books)
: 7 / 100 French SC (Films)
: 0 / 50 Italian Half SC (Books)
: 0 / 50 Italian Half SC (Films)

Pronouns: they/them

DaveAgain
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Re: Lianne's 365 Days of French

Postby DaveAgain » Sun Feb 24, 2019 8:50 am

Lianne wrote:I wanted to do a separate post on some long-term plans I'm making.

I always struggle with getting distracted by other languages. Right now, I'm trying to avoid that by planning some future language learning (to take place perhaps in 2020 if this year goes as well as I hope!). The two main languages tempting me right now are Swedish and Italian.

Swedish
In Swedish, I would be a true beginner. My only exposure to it is the Millennium Trilogy movies, and I just know that I love it. I don't really know any words besides "absolut" meaning absolutely because Mikael Blomkvist says that word a lot. :lol: So far I don't really have a plan for this, but it's very much on my radar.
France Culture had a swedish themed evening of radio programmes recently, perhaps that could help you satisfy your curiosity in french :-)
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Lianne
Green Belt
Posts: 457
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 3:29 pm
Location: Canada
Languages: Speaks: English (N)
Actively studying: French (low int)
Dabbling in: Italian (beginner), ASL (beginner), Ojibwe (beginner), Swahili (beginner)
Wish list: Swedish, Esperanto, Klingon, Brazilian Portuguese
Has also dabbled in: German, Spanish, toki pona
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... hp?t=12275
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Re: Lianne's 365 Days of French

Postby Lianne » Sun Feb 24, 2019 5:19 pm

DaveAgain wrote:
Lianne wrote:I wanted to do a separate post on some long-term plans I'm making.

I always struggle with getting distracted by other languages. Right now, I'm trying to avoid that by planning some future language learning (to take place perhaps in 2020 if this year goes as well as I hope!). The two main languages tempting me right now are Swedish and Italian.

Swedish
In Swedish, I would be a true beginner. My only exposure to it is the Millennium Trilogy movies, and I just know that I love it. I don't really know any words besides "absolut" meaning absolutely because Mikael Blomkvist says that word a lot. :lol: So far I don't really have a plan for this, but it's very much on my radar.
France Culture had a swedish themed evening of radio programmes recently, perhaps that could help you satisfy your curiosity in french :-)


Thank you!! I will definitely check that out. That's exactly the kind of thing I need right now.
1 x
: 3 / 100 French SC (Books)
: 7 / 100 French SC (Films)
: 0 / 50 Italian Half SC (Books)
: 0 / 50 Italian Half SC (Films)

Pronouns: they/them

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javier_getafe
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Re: Lianne's 365 Days of French

Postby javier_getafe » Sun Feb 24, 2019 6:47 pm

Lianne wrote:
My insomnia really flaired up, so I haven't been getting enough sleep and have gotten more and more tired as the week progressed. Thankfully, it's now Saturday, and I slept for about 12 hours last night, so I'm feeling much better!

Weekend plans: Get some reading done! My reading was going really well but I just didn't have time this week. Also: L-R! I got the Fascination (Twilight) book and audiobook from the library, and as far as I can tell the audiobook is NOT abridged this time! So I want to get started on that this weekend.


Insomnia is something terrible, above all if it goes on in time. Long time ago, owing to medical problems that my daughter experimented I suffered from insomnia. It is simply that I became a night owl for weeks, the nights were just unbearable, and the days were not better than nights, it was impossible even focus properly at work. It was as a circle of behavior. At nine o'clock I got to sleep deeply, although at 2 o'clock my eyes were totally open. Fortunately, those times ended up.

I really hope your insomnia would only be temporary.
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Lianne
Green Belt
Posts: 457
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 3:29 pm
Location: Canada
Languages: Speaks: English (N)
Actively studying: French (low int)
Dabbling in: Italian (beginner), ASL (beginner), Ojibwe (beginner), Swahili (beginner)
Wish list: Swedish, Esperanto, Klingon, Brazilian Portuguese
Has also dabbled in: German, Spanish, toki pona
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... hp?t=12275
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Re: Lianne's 365 Days of French

Postby Lianne » Sun Feb 24, 2019 8:01 pm

javier_getafe wrote:
Lianne wrote:
My insomnia really flaired up, so I haven't been getting enough sleep and have gotten more and more tired as the week progressed. Thankfully, it's now Saturday, and I slept for about 12 hours last night, so I'm feeling much better!

Weekend plans: Get some reading done! My reading was going really well but I just didn't have time this week. Also: L-R! I got the Fascination (Twilight) book and audiobook from the library, and as far as I can tell the audiobook is NOT abridged this time! So I want to get started on that this weekend.


Insomnia is something terrible, above all if it goes on in time. Long time ago, owing to medical problems that my daughter experimented I suffered from insomnia. It is simply that I became a night owl for weeks, the nights were just unbearable, and the days were not better than nights, it was impossible even focus properly at work. It was as a circle of behavior. At nine o'clock I got to sleep deeply, although at 2 o'clock my eyes were totally open. Fortunately, those times ended up.

I really hope your insomnia would only be temporary.


I've had sleeping problems basically my whole life. As far as I can figure, it's because my natural circadian rhythm is just not lined up with what is socially expected. For me, falling asleep before midnight is very difficult, even when I'm very tired. And getting up in the morning is an absolute nightmare. A year ago I got a new job; I now have to get up at 6:30 am, while at my old job I had to get up at 5:00 am! The change felt really nice because it was such a big improvement, but it's still WAY too early for me to feel good. Basically on a weekday I never have enough sleep, and sometimes it's worse than other times, like this past week.
0 x
: 3 / 100 French SC (Books)
: 7 / 100 French SC (Films)
: 0 / 50 Italian Half SC (Books)
: 0 / 50 Italian Half SC (Films)

Pronouns: they/them

User avatar
Lianne
Green Belt
Posts: 457
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 3:29 pm
Location: Canada
Languages: Speaks: English (N)
Actively studying: French (low int)
Dabbling in: Italian (beginner), ASL (beginner), Ojibwe (beginner), Swahili (beginner)
Wish list: Swedish, Esperanto, Klingon, Brazilian Portuguese
Has also dabbled in: German, Spanish, toki pona
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... hp?t=12275
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Contact:

Re: Lianne's 365 Days of French

Postby Lianne » Mon Feb 25, 2019 3:19 am

Day 54:
2 hours, 44 minutes L-R, Fascination de Stephenie Meyer, French-French, 111 pages
30 minutes Memrise
45 minutes watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Day 55:
1 hour, 10 minutes Memrise
1 hour, 46 minutes L-R, Fascination de Stephenie Meyer, French-French, 71 pages

Good weekend! I've now done the first 500 of the most frequent nouns. Today I also got a start on the Compound Forms course. Some of those have weird translations that I don't really understand, e.g. "la suite" = "hangers-on". Huh? But most of them seem to make sense to me so far.

As for L-R, it's making me lose confidence in my reading skills! Twilight is supposed to be a pretty low reading level, so I didn't expect it to be so much harder than the books I've been reading. Maybe it's just the forced speed caused by the audiobook (which is definitely fast for me), but I feel like I'm understanding a lot less than when I just read. But, this stage is supposed to be about parsing the spoken language, and I do think it could be helping me with that.
1 x
: 3 / 100 French SC (Books)
: 7 / 100 French SC (Films)
: 0 / 50 Italian Half SC (Books)
: 0 / 50 Italian Half SC (Films)

Pronouns: they/them

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javier_getafe
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Location: Spain
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Re: Lianne's 365 Days of French

Postby javier_getafe » Mon Feb 25, 2019 2:40 pm

Lianne wrote:I've had sleeping problems basically my whole life. As far as I can figure, it's because my natural circadian rhythm is just not lined up with what is socially expected. For me, falling asleep before midnight is very difficult, even when I'm very tired. And getting up in the morning is an absolute nightmare. A year ago I got a new job; I now have to get up at 6:30 am, while at my old job I had to get up at 5:00 am! The change felt really nice because it was such a big improvement, but it's still WAY too early for me to feel good. Basically on a weekday I never have enough sleep, and sometimes it's worse than other times, like this past week.


I have also to wake up at 6:30 am everyday, but the good point to me on this case is I'm definitely a morning person and sleeping 6 or 6:30 hours in a weekday is enough to be on fire after my first coffee. In fact, I'm used to rise up never more late than 8 o'clock on weekends.

Lianne wrote:Good weekend! I've now done the first 500 of the most frequent nouns. Today I also got a start on the Compound Forms course. Some of those have weird translations that I don't really understand, e.g. "la suite" = "hangers-on". Huh? But most of them seem to make sense to me so far.


I've got a question. These kind of courses "compound-forms" and "french-nouns-1" are going to vanished, aren't they? (because of they are not original from memrise)
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Re: Lianne's 365 Days of French

Postby Cavesa » Mon Feb 25, 2019 6:02 pm

The Compound Foms courses were the only ones I was a bit unsure about. I supposed that my problem with them came from English not being my native language, and I put them aside for some other time (which may come or not).

I guess you are adapting to L-R now, I am curious to hear about your progress!

And whether Twilight is supposed to be easy doesn't matter that much. Your assessment of what is easier or harder than something else may differ from what others feel. So, if you're still enjoying it, I'd say it is ok. If it is harder, perhaps you'll learn even more :-)

You seem to be doing great in general, it is a pleasure to read your log! Thanks for writing it!
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Lianne
Green Belt
Posts: 457
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 3:29 pm
Location: Canada
Languages: Speaks: English (N)
Actively studying: French (low int)
Dabbling in: Italian (beginner), ASL (beginner), Ojibwe (beginner), Swahili (beginner)
Wish list: Swedish, Esperanto, Klingon, Brazilian Portuguese
Has also dabbled in: German, Spanish, toki pona
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... hp?t=12275
x 1298
Contact:

Re: Lianne's 365 Days of French

Postby Lianne » Mon Feb 25, 2019 8:20 pm

javier_getafe wrote:I've got a question. These kind of courses "compound-forms" and "french-nouns-1" are going to vanished, aren't they? (because of they are not original from memrise)


From what I've seen on this forum (because I haven't seen anything about this on Memrise!), the user-created content is being moved to a new site called Decks. So, as someone who just has a free membership, I shouldn't see much of a change. It looks like the change is most going to affect people with pro memberships, because not all of the pro features will be available on Decks.

Cavesa wrote:The Compound Foms courses were the only ones I was a bit unsure about. I supposed that my problem with them came from English not being my native language, and I put them aside for some other time (which may come or not).

I guess you are adapting to L-R now, I am curious to hear about your progress!

And whether Twilight is supposed to be easy doesn't matter that much. Your assessment of what is easier or harder than something else may differ from what others feel. So, if you're still enjoying it, I'd say it is ok. If it is harder, perhaps you'll learn even more :-)

You seem to be doing great in general, it is a pleasure to read your log! Thanks for writing it!


Looking through a sampling of the Compound Forms, most of them look pretty straightforward to me. It seems like right at the beginning there are more weird ones. But I wanted to do that course specifically because it seems better for fluency to do larger chunks rather than just single words.

Further reports on L-R to come! I'm also curious to see my progress!

I'm glad you like my log! :) I worry that my meticulous time tracking is boring to others lol.
2 x
: 3 / 100 French SC (Books)
: 7 / 100 French SC (Films)
: 0 / 50 Italian Half SC (Books)
: 0 / 50 Italian Half SC (Films)

Pronouns: they/them

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Cèid Donn
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Re: Lianne's 365 Days of French

Postby Cèid Donn » Mon Feb 25, 2019 8:32 pm

Lianne wrote:
javier_getafe wrote:I've got a question. These kind of courses "compound-forms" and "french-nouns-1" are going to vanished, aren't they? (because of they are not original from memrise)


From what I've seen on this forum (because I haven't seen anything about this on Memrise!), the user-created content is being moved to a new site called Decks. So, as someone who just has a free membership, I shouldn't see much of a change. It looks like the change is most going to affect people with pro memberships, because not all of the pro features will be available on Decks.


And there won't be an app for the Decks site. If you want to use Decks via a mobile device you will need be online and use a browser to access the site. That affects both Pro and non-Pro members, and it's one of the big issues people are having with this change. The app is far from perfect, but it's great for those of us who have needed a more convenient way to use the courses. I know a lot of people use the app on commutes. I've relied on it as a way to keep up with my daily studying even I have to stay in bed and rest due to my health issues--sitting at a PC isn't always very comfortable for me.

Memrise supposedly emailed users about Decks. I never got an email myself. There is a page on the website when you log-in announcing the Decks change, but if you stay logged in all the time, or just use the app, you probably would not have seen it. They're not really doing a great job with communicating this change to their users.
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