Lianne's 365 Days of French

[Lianne]

Day 33:
1 hour, 30 minutes reading La lune des coyotes
1 hour, 54 minutes watching Twilight: Fascination
26 minutes Pimsleur French 1 (lesson 25)

Day 34:
53 minutes Pimsleur French 1 (lessons 26 and 27)
30 minutes reading La lune des coyotes

Day 35:
60 minutes reading La lune des coyotes

OMG. So, I switched from intensive reading to extensive reading. The reason for this is that intensive reading is agony and the result is that I was never doing it. So a couple of days ago I sat down and started intensive reading, and then just switched to extensive reading. I am able to read this Buffy the Vampire Slayer novel!! I don't know every word or entirely understand every bit of grammar, but I can read it and know what's going on and it isn't torture! I am so happy. Even though I started the current Super Challenge 8 months late, I might actually do better in it than I ever have before.

In other news, the first four Twilight movies on Netflix have both French audio and French closed captioning that matches the audio!! (Sadly the last movie, Breaking Dawn part 2, doesn't even have French audio.)

[Cavesa]

OMG. So, I switched from intensive reading to extensive reading. The reason for this is that intensive reading is agony and the result is that I was never doing it. So a couple of days ago I sat down and started intensive reading, and then just switched to extensive reading. I am able to read this Buffy the Vampire Slayer novel!! I don't know every word or entirely understand every bit of grammar, but I can read it and know what's going on and it isn't torture! I am so happy. Even though I started the current Super Challenge 8 months late, I might actually do better in it than I ever have before.

Welcome among the extensive reading and listening lovers!
Now just have fun for dozens and hundreds for hours, observe your awesome progress, and prepare to face all those learners telling you that you're doing it wrong and your progress doesn't exist

[Lianne]

OMG. So, I switched from intensive reading to extensive reading. The reason for this is that intensive reading is agony and the result is that I was never doing it. So a couple of days ago I sat down and started intensive reading, and then just switched to extensive reading. I am able to read this Buffy the Vampire Slayer novel!! I don't know every word or entirely understand every bit of grammar, but I can read it and know what's going on and it isn't torture! I am so happy. Even though I started the current Super Challenge 8 months late, I might actually do better in it than I ever have before.

Welcome among the extensive reading and listening lovers!
Now just have fun for dozens and hundreds for hours, observe your awesome progress, and prepare to face all those learners telling you that you're doing it wrong and your progress doesn't exist

Thank you! I'm excited to finally make some progress on my pile of French novels. And I'm really hopeful that this will help me make some noticeable progress on my French.

Are there really people who say extensive reading is doing it wrong?? What I see in this forum is usually lots of people stressing the importance of massive exposure to the language, which is definitely what you get from extensive reading/listening!

[Cavesa]

OMG. So, I switched from intensive reading to extensive reading. The reason for this is that intensive reading is agony and the result is that I was never doing it. So a couple of days ago I sat down and started intensive reading, and then just switched to extensive reading. I am able to read this Buffy the Vampire Slayer novel!! I don't know every word or entirely understand every bit of grammar, but I can read it and know what's going on and it isn't torture! I am so happy. Even though I started the current Super Challenge 8 months late, I might actually do better in it than I ever have before.

Welcome among the extensive reading and listening lovers!
Now just have fun for dozens and hundreds for hours, observe your awesome progress, and prepare to face all those learners telling you that you're doing it wrong and your progress doesn't exist

Thank you! I'm excited to finally make some progress on my pile of French novels. And I'm really hopeful that this will help me make some noticeable progress on my French.

Are there really people who say extensive reading is doing it wrong?? What I see in this forum is usually lots of people stressing the importance of massive exposure to the language, which is definitely what you get from extensive reading/listening!

You'll see a few such voices here (but usually polite and with arguments worth reading and thinking about), but many more, if you venture outside this forum to communities like reddit or much worse.

I am all for plurality of opinions and options. But there is a difference between someone pointing out the benefits of the intensive reading and listening and shortcomings of extensive (as every method has some pros and cons) and someone implying (or sometimes even openly saying) that the extensive reading/listening is nonsense and everyone saying otherwise is mistaken and lying about their language skills.

I am all for comparing the process of the people waiting for the 95% comprehension (I am not a fan of that) and those starting earlier like you and me. But I don't take it well, when someone starts patronising me like "but you would learn much better and would enjoy it more, if you did it the right way and wasn't lazy" despite having clearly less experience and lower levels in their languages. They also assume I just haven't tried. Well, I have got experience with intensive reading. And very negative.

Internet is a scary place All the value we get from it gets balanced by the amout of moronic stuff we encounter too.The form of this stuff is unpleasant, and the content is repetitive.

And people wonder why I sometimes prefer books to real people

[Lianne]

Day 36:
24 minutes Pimsleur French 1 (lesson 28)
40 minutes reading La lune des coyotes

Day 37:
50 minutes Pimsleur French 1 (lessons 29 and 30 - woohoo!)
60 minutes reading La lune des coyotes

Day 38:
56 minutes Pimsleur French 2 (lessons 1 and 2)
18 minutes watching Peppa Pig

Things are going well. Finished Pimsleur French 1 and moved on to French 2 (yay!). I thought there would be a bigger jump in difficulty, but it actually transitioned quite smoothly. Though I'm definitely aware of the fact that my prior knowledge is making me not drown in this program! While I still know most of the grammar and vocab introduced in the lessons, it's still definitely challenging me to conjugate on the fly (not as on the fly as in conversation, but more so than on Duolingo for example) and just generally be quicker thinking.

Reading is also going well, and I'm not far from finishing my first French book (without parallel text)! I've got another Buffy novel lined up, which I hope will be similar enough that I'll be able to start reading it without too much difficulty.

I also picked up some French audiobooks at the library today. Stay tuned! One of them is Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, which is a whopping 17 hours of audiobook. And I'm hoping it'll be easy enough for me to stand a chance of following along (without the video cues you get in a movie!). In English, its lexile level is 850L, which corresponds with grades 4-5, and is just a bit lower than Harry Potter (but higher than Twilight!).

[Lianne]

Day 39:
28 minutes Pimsleur French 2 (lesson 3)
30 minutes reading La lune des coyotes
40 minutes Duolingo

I spent so long on Duolingo because I went back to the early skills and started reading all the grammar notes and then doing some reviews on each skill. As I go I'm making notes of any grammar points I think I need to spend some time reviewing. I want to identify the holes in my knowledge.

Day 40:
1 hour reading La lunes des coyotes

Day 41:
27 minutes Pimsleur French 2 (lesson 4)
45 minutes reading La lune des coyotes

Day 42:
56 minutes Pimsleur French 2 (lessons 5 and 6)

I finished my book!! So pumped. I had planned to go straight into another Buffy novel, but then I browsed the French YA section at the library and took out a novel that's entirely in the form of blog posts and comments, and is the first in a long series. So I might just go with that next. I read the first page no problem so I think it's a good level.

(Side note: I'm a school library technician, and I'm sounding more librarian-ish talking about my own French reading than I do with my students. With them I'm always like "whatever makes you happy!" and with myself I'm like "I need to pick a good fit book!")

[Lianne]

Day 43:
54 minutes Pimsleur French 2 (lessons 7 and 8)
30 minutes reading La vie compliquée de Léa Olivier: Perdue (started a new book!)

Day 44:
28 minutes Pimsleur French 2 (lesson 9)
30 minutes reading La vie compliquée de Léa Olivier: Perdue
30 minutes Duolingo

Day 45:
27 minutes Pimsleur French 2 (lesson 10)
5 minutes Duolingo

Day 46:
27 minutes Pimsleur French 2 (lesson 11)
45 minutes reading La vie compliquée de Léa Olivier: Perdue
22 minutes watching Au service de la France

Oh man, I just had a scare! I was looking at my 6WC tweets to see what I did each day and copy it here, and the only thing tweeted on Tuesday was 27 minutes of Pimsleur. I thought I was gonna break my perfect streak by 3 minutes. I was racking my brain for anything French I might've done for 3 minutes that I wouldn't normally count. Then I realised that I just didn't tweet my second Pimsleur lesson and my reading until Wednesday. Phew!

[Lianne]

Day 47:
45 minutes reading La vie compliquée de Léa Olivier: Perdue
50 minutes Memrise

I started a new Memrise course and I am SO EXCITED. OK, so, I've been feeling like my vocabulary is a bit lacking, and my attempts at vocabulary study have not historically gone well. My attempts using Anki, word lists, Goldlist method, etc., always end up falling apart, largely (I think) due to my choices of words. Specifically, I have trouble picking words! Also, I struggle with the fact that words don't directly translate between French and English and so the English side ends up being a big awkward list of words. But recently I had the idea that if I focused on a specific part of speech, like learning common verbs, it would go better.

To that end, I did some searching on Memrise (because I also hate the work that goes into making flashcards). And I found this user's courses! The courses are split up by part of speech, and are ordered by frequency based on the Lexique database. In total, you can use these courses to learn the most common 9545 adjectives, 1482 adverbs, 20477 nouns (!!!), 55 prepositions, 107 pronouns, 4453 verbs, 20000 compound forms (i.e. common phrases), as well as 346 colours (what?!), 2149 food and nutrition words, and 240 countries (don't ask me how when there are only 197 countries plus a handful of partially recognised ones).

This might not seem to all of you like an interesting way to learn, but let me tell you, I LOVE LISTS. I love memorising lists. I can name every country and its capital city (thanks to Memrise and frequent testing on Sporcle). I love data. I love having a clear plan to follow. The idea of someone telling me exactly which words I should learn is thrilling to me.

So, I started with the first nouns course, which covers the most frequent 4099 nouns. Last night I did the first 100, which was pretty easy. Today I did a speed review of those and then did the second 100, of which there were a few that weren't super familiar to me but overall still pretty easy. We'll see how this goes! I'm pumped! I think after doing the first nouns course (which I hope to finish by the end of March, though we'll see how that goes as the reviews pile up!), I'll switch to a different part of speech. Maybe a quick one like pronouns and then jump into adjectives? I'll see how I feel!

[Lianne]

Day 48:
1 hour Memrise
40 minutes reading La vie compliquée de Léa Olivier: Perdue
about 1 hour listening to an audiobook (Quatre filles et un jean (abridged))

Day 49:
50 minutes Memrise

I've been doing that Memrise course with the most common nouns for 3 days now, and have managed to keep up with learning 100 words per day, plus doing all reviews that are due. So far it's been easy because most of the words have been ones I already knew.

Reading continues to go really well. Reading this YA novel has actually become kind of relaxing! And I can keep it up for about as long as I would normally read in English (except for when I sometimes read for 24 hours at a time...). I might start throwing in the odd page or two of intensive reading, just to help me really learn the stuff I might be kind of breezing over when reading extensively. Really, I understand (or can gather from context) quite a lot, but there are sometimes tricky grammatical structures and mysterious words that could use some study.

This weekend, I tried listening to an audiobook in French for the first time! I had taken the first two Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants audiobooks in French out from the library, with plans of doing L-R with them, but unfortunately they both turned out to be abridged. So I decided to just give it a shot, and listened to the first disc of the first book. At first, I had my usual response to spoken French, i.e. "Is this human language?!" However, with time, I found that I was able to understand at least enough to know what part of the story I was at. On the one hand, audiobooks lack the visual clues of TV, but on the other hand, audiobook narrators speak clearly and consistently, not mumbling or whispering or anything like that. So I think this is a worthwhile avenue to explore.

In unrelated news, I've started rewatching the Millennium trilogy movies (the Swedish ones), and it has reinvigorated my desire to learn Swedish. But I will resist!! It's just soooo pretty.

[Lianne]

Day 50:
30 minutes Memrise
54 minutes Pimsleur French 2 (lessons 12 and 13)

Day 51:
24 minutes Pimsleur French 2 (lesson 14)
30 minutes Memrise

Day 52:
29 minutes Pimsleur French 2 (lesson 15)
30 minutes Memrise

Day 53:
55 minutes Pimsleur French 2 (lessons 16 and 17)
19 minutes watching Au service de la France

Everything is going along quite well. My pace on the Memrise course did slow a bit, simply due to lack of time, but I'm still making good progress on it. I had a really exhausting week. 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.