Isa's French Log + a bit of occasional ES, IT, JP or ZH

[eido]

I see your Monty Python and raise you Laugh-In...


(Good luck with your Japanese and Italian! I don't mean what's said in the video, haha. Also, sorry for the poor video quality. It's the only one I could find on YouTube.)

[I_likes_languages]

@Eido: Thanks for the encouragement. I'm still trying to recover from their accents though. I will never be able to shake the fear of sounding like them

French
Listening: My current routine is to listen to at least one longer podcast every day, so every evening, I pick one (or two) podcast episodes to listen to the next day and download them onto my phone. Then I listen to them whenever I find the time during the day, so for example 10 minutes while preparing in the morning, 15 minutes during lunch break, 15 minutes during grocery shopping etc..., so on most days I don't need to use any "study time" for listening and this also reduces the time I spend in front of screens.
This week, I've tried a couple of new podcasts:
- Sur les épaules de Darwin: Seems to be a mix of science, history, literature and culture; pretty diverse topics and an interesting approach. Not my cup of tea though.
- Varennes (La fuite): Retells the failed attempt of Louis XVI and his family to flee from the French Revolution and the aftermath. It's by the same presenter as Au coeur de l'histoire. I only listened to the first episode so far, but I liked the way it was presented. The French revolution is not a topic that has me screaming for more, since we studied and compared different revolutions for about two years back in high school. In every episode, the podcast's narrator takes the perspective of different characters (the king, the queen, a moderate revolutionary, a more radical one...), which sounds interesting. I think I'll listen to all of them.
- À la Hussarde: Recent changes in the political landscape of France, by Thomas Legrand (also presents L'édito politique). The podcasts mixes interviews, comments and editorial notes.
- Les braqueurs: Different robbers tell their story in long monologues. It took some getting used to, but now I like it.

Reading: I finished le Roi de fer last week. I'm still fighting through Germinal, I find it hard to read but still rewarding enough to stick to it. I'm somewhere in the middle of the story and therefore the miners' strike now, and all the bleakness, hunger and destitution are helping me to appreciate the easy comfortable life I live. Which definitely also applies to Petit Pays, a short book by Ga:el Faye which I picked up at the library. I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone. The main character is a 12-year-old half-french-half-rwandan kid who lives in a privileged area of Bujumbara (Burundi) with his family. The story is set during the early 90s, so you can kind of guess where it's going. Since it's all in the words of a 12-year-old, the language is not too hard. I'm also reading Le soleil sous la soie, a historical fiction about a surgeon at the end of the 17th century. This book doesn't live up to the marketing ("Le meilleur roman historique depuis Les Piliers de la Terre"), but the language is mostly simple and after each chapter of Germinal reading this book feels almost relaxing. With 180 pages of Germinal and 600 pages of this one to go, I will probably finish them at the same time.

Actual studying: Much less of course. Shadowing some Assimil lessons to work on my pronunciation; more vocabulary in Anki; two grammar points in my Grammaire progressive; one italki lesson; and I write 5 sentences of incoherent French everyday in my notebook.

Italian
Listening: I listened to all the episodes of Veleno, and half of Risciò (350min). Risciò is good, but Veleno is in a league of its own. It may be the best podcast series I've listened to so far, including Serial and Death in Ice Valley. I have four more episodes of Risciò to go, then I'll move on to Lo stato dell'unione after which Da costa a costa seems like the logical next step. I remember looking for good italian podcasts in 2014 or 15 and not finding any that interested me, but that has definitely changed.
Reading: None yet, but I have Cheryl Strayed's Wild on my nightstand. I picked it up on a trip to Italy some time ago, but abandonned it because the first chapter hit a little too close to home. My plan is to finish this book before the end of the year.

Japanese
Listening: Only one episode of Midnight Diner so far. I had thought that there were a couple of good shows on Netflix, but other than The Many Faces of Ito and Midnight Diner nothing looks interesting yet. I discovered a Ronja Röversdottar/Räubertochter anime that the kid in me really wants to watch (first hero of just about every German girl maybe? Her or the Red Zora). I haven't looked at podcasts yet, but hopefully I'll find something interesting there.
Reading: Keeping it boring: I'm going to read Harry Potter first. I only own 3 Japanese books, so I'll stick with them for now.

I'm trying to adhere to strict rules regarding time allocation to different languages, but with Veleno I've broken them several times becasue I got so addicted. I've set myself some intermediary goals for the Super Challenge, and I've calculated the amount of minutes and pages per day I need to reach these goals. I've also decided on a clear hierarchy among languages, which will change quaterly. For now until the end of 2018 (or the DALF exam at least) French always comes first. I won't listen to Italian before finishing my French minutes for the day, and I won't listen to Japanese before finishing Italian. For reading, the hierarchy is French - Japanese - Italian, because if I don't put Japanese before Italian, I'm worried that I might never read any Japanese, because it's much harder for me than reading Italian. But my Japanese goals are much lower than my goals for Italian to compensate for this. I want to finish Harry Potter in Japanese within the next 6 months, but Wild within the next 3 months (all the while reading about 30 pages of French each day).

[I_likes_languages]

I finished Germinal! I’m pretty proud of myself right now , one week ago I was still in doubt whether I could make it or not. In the end then the plot just kept me going (+ someone preordered the book from the library, so I’ll have to bring it back sooner than I thought and work has been slow this week).

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the book yet. The plot is definitely not a joyride, just when you think it can’t possibly get worse for the Maheus, there is yet another level of misery that follows. The characters are extremely well written, and Zola describes everything in the environment very precisely, that really helped me imagine the surroundings and the mine (I’ve never been in a mine) and brought everything alive. The verbose style can get annoying sometimes but I wonder whether it may be good for acquiring specific batches of vocabulary by reading. He always uses a large amount of words to describe everything and the vocabulary is often very specific to the context. There were many words that I didn’t know and didn’t look up, but I still managed to enjoy the book, although I probably missed a lot.

I spent an hour last night researching all the books of the Rougon-Macquart cycle and the family tree, to see what their specific topics are.
Basically Zola had two things in mind when writing the cycle: an outdated theory of heredity, where everyone is highly influenced by their environment and inherited traits; and giving a full picture of the Second Empire (1852-1870). So the books are set in different milieus and have different foci: politics/power, the church/catholicism, workers/misery, the bourgeousie, financial speculation, the railway, department stores vs small traders, war, arts, science, farmers, everyone gets a book.

All in the cycle are descendants of Adelaide Fouque’s three children: Pierre Rougon, Antoine Macquart and Ursule Macquart.
The Rougon-line is the “legitimate” line, most members belong to the upper class and are more successful than members of the other lines (money, power, education).

The Mouret-line, descendants of Ursule Macquart are somewhat in the middle, that part of the family is apparently the one with the most fragile mental state, but they are mostly middle class people.

The Macquart-line gets the worst of it (Alcoholism, prostitution and homicidal tendencies), but they also get more books, 9 of the 20 I think. Workers, soldiers, farmers, lots of illegitimate children (last names change a lot too) etc. Although many of Zola’s characters seem to die or fail in some way (financial ruin, jail…), the books whose main characters are descendants of Antoine Macquart seem to have the most misery, alcoholism and violence in them.

I’ll continue with Au Bonheur des Dames once it arrives. Octave Mouret is both a grandson of Ursule Macquart and Pierre Rougon.

-----
This is the current list of all the books I’ve read since June 2018. I marked the ones I liked best with a star.

• Ahmed Kalouaz - La première fois, on pardonne - 90 pages
• José Frèches - L'imperatrice de la soie - 1. le Toit du monde - 550 pages
• José Frèches - L'imperatrice de la soie - 2. les yeux de Buddha – 160 pages (abandonned)
• Georges Simenon - La première enquête de maigret – 180 pages
• Georges Simenon – Maigret Voyage – 180 pages
• *Véronique Bizot - Un avenir – 90 pages
• Isabel Allende - La Cité des dieux sauvages – 330 pages
• Jeanne-Marie Sauvage-Avit - Perline, Clémence, Lucille et les autres...- 820 pages
• Georges Simenon - Maigret: Le Pendu de Saint-Pholien – 180 pages (not kidding, they’re all the exact same length)
• Agatha Christie - Miss Marple au club du mardi – 175 pages
• Maurice Druon - Le Roi de fer – 292 pages
• *Gae:l Faye - Petit Pays – 206 pages
• Émile Zola - Germinal – 387 pages (this book has about 450 words/page, other editions have more than 500 pages.)
• Éric Marchal - Le soleil sous la soie – 296 pages (of about 900)

Sum :3944 pages/50 = 78,88 Super Challenge books

[I_likes_languages]

Life got in the way. I won't be taking the DALF this year. My mother has been sick for a while, but her condition has deteriorated significantly since mid-September. As we all deal with this situation, I've suspended most of my short-term projects for the time being. Consuming large amounts of French literature and podcasts has been great to distract me and keep my brain occupied though, and I finished the first half of the double SC for French about a week ago. I've found two new podcasts that I would recommend: Superhéros (everyday heros, trigger warning for some episodes) and Chasseurs de nazis.
---
This is a list of all the books I've read since last month. I spend a lot more time on trains now and go out a lot less, otherwise I'd never have managed the insane amount of pages. My reading speed has improved to about 1 p/min though. The books I liked best/would recommend are marked with a star. There are a lot of them

Philippe Claudel - La petite fille de Monsieur Linh - 115p
Louis Malle - Au revoir, les enfants (Scénario) - 60p
*Christelle Dabos - Les fiancés de l'hiver (la passe-miroir 1) - 553p
*Patrick Modiano - Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue - 151p
Aimé Césaire - Un saison au Congo (théâtre) - 80p
**Nathacha Appanah - Tropique de la violence - 173p (really really good book, but prepare for violence. It says so in the title, but I was definitely not prepared)
*Sarah Barukh - Elle voulait juste marcher tout droite - 390p
*Christelle Dabos - Les disparus du clairdelune (la passe-miroir 2) - 653p

[MamaPata]

Really sorry I hear about your mother. Look after yourself!

[I_likes_languages]

Hi everyone
I hope everyone has had a good start into 2019! I still like languages, but the longer I went without posting the more pressure I felt to post a looong update, so that never happened.

French:
Anyway, I'm still working on my French daily. I couldn't take the DALF C1 in 2018, so I'm eyeing the test date in May 2019 atm. I'm about 80% done with the double Super Challenge in French (84%/169 books, 74%/148 movies) and I hope to finish by the end of April. I mostly watch arte or France 2 documentaries on Youtube right now, and france culture has recently adapted and published several Tintin comics as radio plays. I didn't read as much as I'd have liked the last three months. I read Emile Zola's Au bonheur des Dames in October, and I loved it. But then I got firmly stuck in "Le ventre de Paris" which I kind of enjoyed too, but eventually I got overwhelmed by all the descriptions of food (ever wonder how they made sausages back in 19th century Paris? Zola has a step by step description you can follow...). The next book I tried was Romain Gary's La promesse de l'aube - this book is hands down one of the best books I've ever read, in any language. But I felt it was also quite dense and it left me a little burned out. After I finished it I tried to read Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes, also kind of a classic I guess, but I really don't understand what that was about. I abandonned it after the first part ended - should I continue? Is there a lot of good stuff still to come? After fighting a little more with the Zola (chapter 3 features an eloquent enumeration of just about every fish you could imagine, nicely sorted by salt water and fresh water ) I finally gave up two weeks ago. I decided to pick up Patrick Pécherot's La saga des brouillards (Les brouillards de la Butte, Belleville-Barcelone et Boulevard des Branques) again. I had tried to read one of the books last April, and it seemed much to difficult, but I think I improved enough to understand them now. Just like the Zolas, they are a treasure trove of new obscure vocabulary. Pécherot uses a lot of argot or words that were maybe popular back in the 1930s (so like macchabée instead of cadavre, bigopohone instead of téléphone or poulardin instead of police) as well as colorful and ironic descriptions (such as "caresses viriles" instead of coups, or "Yvette entamait un nouveau mouvement de sa sonate pour Remington." instead of just saying "Yvette started to type again") and nice new expressions (avaler son bulletin de naissance, phosphorer) for me. You can probably tell that I'm a bit in love with the authors style. I still have the last book in the series left to read this week:) I also signed up for the Output Challenge in French, but I haven't started yet.

Japanese:
I have withdrawn from the half SC for Japanese. I've decided to put Japanese in maintenance mode for the time being. I bought a tear-off calender with small daily Japanese lessons for 2019, and that is all I'll be doing.

Italian:
I still have to do my half SC in Italian, but I want to get French out of the way first. So the current plan is to start this in May. But we'll see.

Spanish:
My big goal for 2018 was to not add another language. Two weeks ago I was told that I could go to Spain on a work trip in the second half of February. So here I am, scrambling to get the basics into my head before the 13th. I've picked Assimil, Language Transfer and a premade anki deck for now, put I'd love to get more suggestions?!

Edits: Typos.

[I_likes_languages]

French:
It's been a while. I'm done with the listening part of my French Super Challenge, I finished yesterday. I still have 600 pages to read, but I'll have a 4-day weekend next week (Easter) so I might make it before the end of the month. I'm glad that I'm almost done, because doing a double SC at this pace was, to me at least, more stressful than motivating. I have benefitted a lot from listening so much, and harder material that was not accessible to me before now seems almost easy. Listening to podcasts has changed from being work to being entertainment. I'll revise everything I listened to and read and try to post my favorites later this month.

I found a new tutor on italki some weeks ago. I occasionally book lessons with different people just for the variety so I've talked to about 15 different tutors so far, but I'm still figuring out what makes a good or a great tutor. I’ve found a couple of good ones, but she might be a great one.
I’ll just describe the experience a little, because I really liked her style: I had booked a one-hour conversation lesson with her, but she interrupted let me talk for only 15 minutes to go over mistakes I had made. She was very thorough and had even caught a lot of smaller mistakes that other tutors don't seem to take the trouble to point out (le/la; lots of phonetics like liaisons, pays/paie, correct pronunciation of the female ending in adjectives). She noted every mistake (grammar, vocab, phonetics) in a table in a google doc and had me write/pronounce the correct version besides it. She made me figure out everything by myself, only using questions to direct me to the correct grammar rules or vocabulary. I had told her that I'd probably heard every grammar rule at least once in my life but sometimes tutors will just repeat the rules anyway, wasting our time, because for them, making a mistake seems to equal not knowing the rule. Her timing turned out to be quite good, with all the corrections and some chatting it took us almost 45 minutes to get through the list.
I should also mention that my focus during italki lessons has also shifted during the last year. In the beginning, it was more on speaking confidently and without to many interruptions, so I was looking for encouraging, easy to talk to people. Now I have improved enough to get out of many corners that I've talked myself into, but there is still so much room for improvement (especially with regards to vocabulary).

I will also start a C1/C2 conversation class at our local institute franc,ais later this month. I’ve been working in home office a lot lately and it has been a little lonely, so I’m trying to push myself to make my hobbies more social to balance this a little. I don't really like group lessons, but I'm looking forward to meeting new people with a love for languages.

[I_likes_languages]

I did myself a huge favor last week – I put a pretty profile picture on italki. I didn't have a profile picture before and I'd never gotten any messages - now I get several a day and one of them has already turned into a language exchange, and I have 2 more coming up this week.

French:
Apart from the language exchange and all the messaging involved in setting it up I didn't do much, but being so close to the end of the SC has given me extra motivation for my reading. Since the beginning of April, I've read/finished the following books:

Romain Gary (Émile Ajar) - La vie devant soi - Told from the perspective of Momo, who lives with the old Madame Rosa, an aging former prostitute and holocaust survivor. Told in a kind of breathless manner through the eyes of a kid that never had any formal education. The language is not too hard, but Momo sometimes misuses words or spells them incorrectly. I loved this book just like I loved the last book I read by Romain Gary.

Madame de La Fayette - La Princesse de Clèves - A love story written in 1678 and set in 1558/59. The author really had a gift for observation and observing psychology. I had heard this was a must read for French students, so I decided to try it. The way the story is told differs a lot from modern novels, but it was surprisingly readable. The vocabulary is not too hard and definitely easier than anything from Zola. The many characters can get confusing, everybody seems to be a prince or princess of something and have at least two different names/titles which are used interchangeably. I l also read the shorter La Princesse de Montpensier (50 pages) by the same author.

I had been stuck in these two books since February so I’m really happy I could finally finish them!

Gilles Leroy - Alabama Song – also a Goncourt winner, it retells the biography of Zelda Fitzgerald starting from her first encounter with Scott Fitzgerald until her death. I liked the book, the vocabulary was a littles harder and the story often jumps between different periods in the past.

Tahar Ben Jelloun - Le dernier ami - Tells the story of two friends from Tanger, Morocco. The book is split into two halves, one written from Ali’s perspective, the other one through Mamed’s eyes. It’s a short book and I enjoyed it. I’ve been wanting to branch out a little and read more books from authors with a more diverse heritage I guess, so this was a good start.

Kéthévane Davrichewy - La mer Noire – Tells the story of a Georgian emigrant, now an old lady, who fled Georgia in 1918 as a 15-year-old. A good read and hard to put down. I picked this up because Nino Haratischwili got me interested in Georgia.

Italian:
I got some listening done. I’d almost forgotten how much work it was to find good podcasts for the SC in French, I’m still sifting through my podcast player’s library. I have a language exchange scheduled for Thursday.

Spanish or juggling 3 languages:
I finished lesson 49 of Assimil in March, and I’ve been taking a break ever since. I’m not sure whether I want to continue with Spanish this year. On the one hand I liked it a lot, and there ae soooo many authors that I’d love to read, plus speaking Spanish was a lot of fun. But on the other hand… time. I don’t seem to be one of the language teachers who can stick to a plan which allocates so-and-so-many minutes per day to each language or 25% to one, 25% to the next and so on. My language learning has always been a little chaotic and unbalanced. I was balancing French and Spanish well enough, but now I feel that I should give priority to Italian, and I haven’t figured out how to systematically make progress in 3 languages at the same time. I’m planning to experiment a little during the next week with: setting hard to fail, small goals for each day or week; and setting a main language for each day/time of day.

[DaveAgain]

I did myself a huge favor last week – I put a pretty profile picture on italki. I didn't have a profile picture before and I'd never gotten any messages - now I get several a day and one of them has already turned into a language exchange, and I have 2 more coming up this week.

Ani wrote a few posts about getting language exchange partners that you might like to read:

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 81#p117481

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 73#p131273

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 28#p119828

[I_likes_languages]

Super Challenge
I’m done with the Double Super Challenge in French.
I would have liked to put these letters into a glittery font just to express how happy I am that I made it!
-> view spreadsheet here
Listening:
Finding new material was always a challenge, and I hardly watched any movies. France culture has been my favorite source of high quality content. These were some of the things that stood out (list of 7, because it was to painful to eliminate 2 more..):

rfi grand reportage – Short documentaries, 19min 30s each, Mo-Fr. There was usually at least one per week that caught my interest and I would listen to them if I couldn’t find anything else.

France culture – Les chasseurs de Nazis – 8 weeks of 5 episodes à 10 minutes each. Thoroughly examines the reality and myths surrounding Nazi hunters and the legal and political treatment of Nazi criminals in post-war France, Germany, Israel and the USA. Many different viewpoints and areas are touched upon. Highly recommended.

Youtube – Histony – La Révolution française – I never thought that I would put 7 hours of this one guy talking about the French revolution on my best of list, but this was really worth it. Histony dispenses with some myths and legends, very well researched, and most importantly he never oversimplifies.
If the French revolution does not sound super interesting to you, I also recommend the podcast series Varennes by Europe 1. It’s a dramatized recount of the events during the early revolutionary years and was my gateway drug into the topic.

Spla$h – by Nouvelles Écoutes – two professors of economics discuss everything from highway tolls, rich and the poor to the (questionable?) benefits of video surveillance, always from an economic view point. I binge-listened to this when I first found it, but then I’m an economist by training so I’m definitely biased. Some episodes are extremely well-researched, others more superficial, but the general standard is high and the topics always interesting. The most recent one is « Faut-il construire des prisons ? »

Le dessous des cartes – Arte – I almost forgot to put this one the list, even though it’s an all-time favorite of mine. International politics/Geopolitics explained with maps. I had stopped watching for a while since Jean-Christophe Victor passed away, but the new presenter does a really good job as well. Sometimes things a presented as facts that might be debatable, but there is always a lot of info in only about 12 minutes per episode and further reading suggestions.

And last but not least…
Kaamelott. Towards the end of the SC I realized that I can finally understand what goes on in these episodes – for that alone the SC was worth it. Everyday life at King Arthurs’s court. Awesome and often awkward.

I’m happy with my progress, and I can understand most spoken French now, even in discussions. I planning to focus more on different accents from now on. I will listen to the regional France Bleu stations a bit every day, even though the presenters have a standard accent the people who call in often don’t. Due to the restrictions of the SC (only >10min count) I hadn’t listened to my normal staples in a while – Géopolitique and La revue de presse (france inter) and la revue de presse internationale (france culture) – but it only took me a couple of days to revert to my old ways. The amount of information that I’ve absorbed via podcasts this year was insanely high and I wouldn’t have wanted to sustain the same pace. I have 4 more seasons of Kaamelott to watch, so I won’t have time for anything new for a while.

Reading
I read or started many books during the last 12 months, but these are the books I really liked, even after some months, and would recommend:

- Romain Gary (Émile Ajar) - La vie devant soi ;
- Romain Gary - La promesse de l'aube
- Emile Zola - Au Bonheur des Dames
- Christelle Dabos - Les fiancés de l'hiver (la passe-miroir 1)
- Kéthévane Davrichewy - La mer Noire
- Nathacha Appanah - Tropique de la violence
- Gae:l Faye - Petit Pays

I’m really happy with my progress in reading. I never would have thought that I could read and enjoy classics in French when I signed up for the challenge, I thought I would have to stick to crime novels, YA fiction or adventure books etc. Instead I fought my way through 2 ½ books by Zola and a couple of other classics and enjoyed them a lot, and I generally found fiction books much more accessible than I thought. The downside of this was that there were sometimes too many unknown words per page to note them all, and I didn’t work on vocabulary quite as much as might have been necessary to retain those new words.


For the last 11 months or so, the super challenge was almost on my mind because I stupidly decided to do more of it than planned in the original challenge in less time. In hindsight, 100 books and movies in a foreign language in 20 months is a pretty good choice. Doing 200 in 11/12 months was stressful. I wanted to finish early so I could focus on Italian/Japanese, but now that I’m done I think there is so much room still for improving my French that I might stick to French instead.