rdearman wrote:Also you might want to consider some iTalki tutors. Otherwise looks very good to me, oh and you should join the study group (semi-TAC or whatever we're calling it).
The iTalki tutors are a good suggestion that I had forgotten about. Thanks!
As for the forum study group, I'm definitely joining that. I expect to get pointers to useful resources, as well as corrections and encouragement, from the group.
emk wrote:it might work well if your Spanish gives you enough of a "boost" to work with native materials very early on. But a lot will depend on whether your chosen materials provide you with enjoyable and more-or-less comprehensible input.
FWIW, I can understand much of the French written here on the forum, and I can muddle through the
Assimil FAQ to find the answers to my questions without resorting to google-translating the page.
Spoken French is, of course, another thing altogether. If I have subtitles (in any of French, Spanish, or English) I can hear the individual words and sometimes understand it (based on reading it). But without subtitles, I only catch words here and there and maybe the overall gist/topic.
emk wrote:Honestly, if you didn't already speak a Romance language, I'd be worried that you might need some kind of easy parallel texts such as those provided by Assimil.
My sister, who is going to be taking my lead in how to study French despite our different backgrounds, should probably add Assimil to the mix. (If she does take that advice, then I'll likely end up doing it too. Which is fine.)
emk wrote:If you like xkcd, you should also consider adding
CommitStrip, which is available in both French and English (but the French writing is better, with very idiomatic spoken French). This is one of my personal favorites.
And you may have heard me recommend this before, but you may want to check out
Izneo, which provides an enormous selection of French graphic novels online
Thank you! That comic looks awesome. In a few months, I'll probably be orderings some graphic novels, too.
emk wrote:rdearman wrote:I recommend you do some subs2srs anki cards with a French movie where you can get subtitles for English & French. EMK has a very good post on the old HTLAL with instructions for doing this, and recently posted a script for doing it in the resources are a here. Sorry, I'm just heading out, and don't have time to look up the links but I will try to remember to come back later and update this post with them.
Yeah, this was a little experiment I tried with learning Spanish using native materials from day 1, and I felt it was a huge success until I came down with influenza, a rotovirus and a new job in rapid succession. :-/
I'm hoping to have a new job in 2016, but I'll do my best to skip influenza and a rotoviris. (
Both?? Wow, that's really unlucky and sounds miserable.
)
Thank you for all the useful links. I suspect I will have a subs2srs'd
La Reine des neiges in my future. And perhaps the songs from
La légende du Roi Arthur too, which I just stumbled across and sounds
amazing. I suddenly feel a lot more motivated to understand French!
tomgosse wrote:Wow! That is one ambitious plan. I doubt that I could do in a week what you plan to do in a day.
Many of the bullet points won't actually take much time at all: flashcards, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Criminal Case, this forum...
And listening to music and self-talk are nearly background tasks, which I can do while shopping, doing chores, etc.
As far as my planned "daily" activities, I'm only expecting to have to "carve out time" for the actual workbooks & drills; I already "waste" time on social media, so I'm not anticipating that tweaking the percentage of English/Spanish to English/Spanish/French will be too difficult.
Finding time for the video content (and the prepping thereof!) will take more time. But hopefully it'll work out — I consider this fun, after all!
tomgosse wrote:I wish you all the best in your learning.
Merci!
