philomath wrote:Today I read Chapter 3 of Le Petit Prince, paying extra attention to the verb conjugations. Before, I was a little worried I would have trouble with the passé simple while reading, but it doesn't seem too complicated. I'm glad I don't have to worry about that tense while speaking though!
I also made a few more Anki flashcards. One thing I'm nervous about is that I don't too much of the vocabulary from Le Petit Prince to enter my active vocabulary, since some of the words might be too old-fashioned. Therefore I added a tag to my Anki flashcards so I know the words came from Le Petit Prince, and I started making basic front-->back flashcards instead of cloze deletion flashcards. So now the flashcards look like this:
Front
le chef-d’œuvre
Back
masterpiece
J’ai montré mon chef-d’œuvre aux grandes personnes.
Since these flashcards are testing my ability to recall the English translation rather than produce the French word, I don't think I'll have to worry about getting these words stuck in my active vocabulary. Of course, if I see the words elsewhere (in a more modern context), then I'll know I can start using them in my speech.
I'd say get more info in your cards, in this case the whole sentence is fine for the front, because it's all useful french and the sweet spot for humans is about 7 items at a time.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_nombre ... ite_note-1
What I do is underline the word i'm focussing on, but still fail the card if the sentence doesn't really come naturally when reviewing.
Q: "J’ai montré mon chef-d’œuvre aux grandes personnes."
A: remek-delo
Ah, also use wiktionary! get the IPA for the words you learn and put it on the front, or back, as you want.
if i were learning "anticonstitutionnellement", id go and get
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anticons ... nnellement
then put on my card "/ɑ̃.ti.kɔ̃s.ti.ty.sjɔ.nɛl.mɑ̃/".
etc. etc.
french has a many to one writing system, so after a while you'll read with pretty good accuracy. writing is where the confusion sets in. our language is a bit like chinese with its one million homonyms and constant rythm