Postby PeterMollenburg » Sat Dec 22, 2018 8:46 am
2018-
A year of loads more French, but certainly not as much as I had hoped. A mixture of resources utilised, French becoming more natural and automatic (ingrained), a ditched C1 attempt, reintroducing Spanish and Dutch, starting Norwegian, readying myself for Arabic, dropping Norwegian and Spanish and continuing with French and Dutch here at the end of the year.
I am still amazed with how many gaps there are in my French, but at the same time I have this internal excitement on how ingrained/fluid/natural my everyday French has become, and I think speaking with my children exclusively in French and reading them stories has helped a lot. My listening still has some pretty decent holes in all honesty, and in reading I’m not exactly reading Tolkien, but hey it’s still improving, and that’s certainly the main aim.
Currently I have been working on Fluenz French 5, which is helping me re-tweak my pronunciation. I’d mentioned recently that my French ‘r’ was too strong and I believe I’m already successfully watering it down. What’s helping a lot is the audio of Fluenz French 5, that is all the sentences I am shadowing, attempting to mimmick as closely as possible, pronunciation, tone etc, albeit I have had to listen particularly hard.
Around a week ago, while using some noisy power tools, I used some earplugs. After I took them out, it still felt like my left ear was significanty blocked (with wax). Finally I went to the doc yesterday and the result was that I could hear so much better out of my left ear, that I had to readjust to hearing details that had progressively disappeared over a previous extended period of time (possibly years). The power tools was the final straw. Now when I hear myself speak I can more clearly hear the differences between the nasal vowels in ‘un’ and ‘hein’, and produce them with more confidence. So I ought to when you consider that after returning home from the doc, the rustle of a plastic bag sounded too loud!
I’ve also been very slowly working through Practis Makes Perfect: The French Subjunctive. A good balance with the Fluenz, as here I’m looking at more advanced grammar as opposed to a lot of shadowing of sentences that don’t stretch my brain’s capacity, but train my brain/phoneme production coordination.
In Dutch, a rather recent language to get into the serious nature of my routine, I’ve been using some courses I’ve previously completed but quite a number of years ago now-
Collins Gem Dutch Phrasebook
Very very easy stuff and took very little effort to go through. This isn’t really a course as such, more of phrasebook audio essential phrases. There were perhaps a couple/few words I couldn’t recall and I didn’t really care. Why do it? To repave those nueral pathways, and why not since I have it on hand.
Teach Yourself Dutch Conversation
Kinda similar to above but a little longer, also completed very quickly.
Michel Thomas
I’ve completed the beginner’s level of 8 CDs. I’m onto the Advanced level now of 4 CDs. I don’t do any of these audio programs at home. If I’m driving, my time is shared between French and Dutch, so that’s when these courses feature.
Pimsleur
Started it, but pretty quickly opted for MT instead. I’m likely to do a quick run through of just the conversations to see if any one lesson warrants further attention, otherwise it’s a big waste of time, because it’s just far too easy. Well, at least that’s impression I’ve had from the first lesson. Perhaps by lesson whatever I may feel like I can stomach going through the whole lesson as will be useful.
One thing Dutch has over my study of French, is that time on accent/pronunciation is FAR less with Dutch. This is because I’ve gone beyond B1 before in Dutch and because I find the pronunciation requires less focus.
VocabuLearn
A good deal of the way through level one.
Hugo Dutch in 3 Months
Another course again I’ve completed before. I’m up to week 10 out of 12, so great progress. A few grammatical rules i’ve had to re-embed on my memory, but it’s not as if I’m learning it from scratch.
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