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Learning French continues well, I think. It’s pleasing, because at school languages were always one of my weak points, and it’s nice to know that I can do reasonably well if I apply myself. I’d be interested in how other people’s experience of learning languages compares, and especially in any resources you think I might find useful.
I’ve finished the Duolingo tree, although I did the last dozen or so badges fairly quickly, which means they haven’t fully sunk in yet, and I’m struggling to keep them all gold. I’ve now finished seasons 1-3 of the podcast Coffee Break French, and am just getting started on the fourth and final season. These podcasts take a variety of forms, some of which I find more useful than others.
The first season starts with introducing basic vocabulary and grammar, pretty much all of which I’d already covered. It was somewhat useful to revise in an audio form and get used to hearing spoken French, but I did skip a fair amount of it. The final ten lessons of the season are more interesting though, as they were presented as a series of conversations which occurred on holiday in France, so there was a short piece to listen to, followed by some discussion and analysis, and then the piece played again. This sort of practice was definitely useful, and I could see clear improvements in my ability to understand excerpts of spoken French longer than a sentence or two. The second season followed a similar pattern, although the earlier lessons, whilst still mostly revision, were challenging enough that I listened to them all.
Season three was much better, in that nearly all of it had the “listen to a piece”, “discuss some of the language used”, “listen again” structure, with only the odd lesson here or there to formally teach a couple of the trickier bits of grammar (ugh, conditional mood; even more ugh, subjunctive mood). Over the course of this I went from understanding maybe a third of what was going on in the first listen, to getting maybe 90% of the gist, which feels like real progress. Also, a lot more of it is going "hear French ---> understand concept", rather than "hear French ---> translate into English ---> understand concept".
So far I’ve only listened to half of the first lesson of season 4, which feels like quite a big step up. A lot more of it is in French and not translated for you afterwards, so you’re pretty much forced to figure it out for yourself, and it’s also quicker (although I suspect still a long way from being at normal conversational pace). I’m thinking about buying the premium version of this season, which gets you extra lessons and transcripts and learning notes, but is pretty pricey. I’ll see how I go with the free content and then decide.
I’m becoming aware of just how many different skills are involved in learning a language, and of what I find effective and ineffective for learning each one. Learning grammar through audio definitely isn’t something that works for me - going over the bits that I’d already learned, or having examples pointed out is fine to cement things, but I don’t feel as though I understand the conditional and subjunctive any better now than I did before I started those lessons (and I need to sit down with some written resources and practice them more). On the other hand, the podcasts are great forcing me to just keep going and move on to the next sentence, and then pull out the whole meaning from the bits that I managed to pick up. I’ve read a couple of YA novels on my kindle, which is great for vocab, both cementing and learning anew, and is much easier to do when the dictionary is a click away rather than in a separate book. I’m not sure how much it helps with grammar - at the time I was still in the fairly early stages of learning, so mostly just picking out the key words and guessing at the grammatical structure, but I suspect that now my understanding has grown a bit, it will help with that as well.
One area that I’m not doing very much of is constructing sentences, either written or spoken - you do some of that in duolingo, but a)more of it is going from French to English, b)it’s all written, and c)it’s only one sentence at a time. Once I’m managing to keep my tree golden I’m going to work through the tree for francophones learning English, which will help with a), but then I really need to branch out a bit more and find opportunities to write and speak in French.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
oedipamaas49 did recommend going to conversations meetups, but that is obviously utterly terrifying, so I’m probably going to put it off until I feel at least a little more fluent.
I’ve finished the Duolingo tree, although I did the last dozen or so badges fairly quickly, which means they haven’t fully sunk in yet, and I’m struggling to keep them all gold. I’ve now finished seasons 1-3 of the podcast Coffee Break French, and am just getting started on the fourth and final season. These podcasts take a variety of forms, some of which I find more useful than others.
The first season starts with introducing basic vocabulary and grammar, pretty much all of which I’d already covered. It was somewhat useful to revise in an audio form and get used to hearing spoken French, but I did skip a fair amount of it. The final ten lessons of the season are more interesting though, as they were presented as a series of conversations which occurred on holiday in France, so there was a short piece to listen to, followed by some discussion and analysis, and then the piece played again. This sort of practice was definitely useful, and I could see clear improvements in my ability to understand excerpts of spoken French longer than a sentence or two. The second season followed a similar pattern, although the earlier lessons, whilst still mostly revision, were challenging enough that I listened to them all.
Season three was much better, in that nearly all of it had the “listen to a piece”, “discuss some of the language used”, “listen again” structure, with only the odd lesson here or there to formally teach a couple of the trickier bits of grammar (ugh, conditional mood; even more ugh, subjunctive mood). Over the course of this I went from understanding maybe a third of what was going on in the first listen, to getting maybe 90% of the gist, which feels like real progress. Also, a lot more of it is going "hear French ---> understand concept", rather than "hear French ---> translate into English ---> understand concept".
So far I’ve only listened to half of the first lesson of season 4, which feels like quite a big step up. A lot more of it is in French and not translated for you afterwards, so you’re pretty much forced to figure it out for yourself, and it’s also quicker (although I suspect still a long way from being at normal conversational pace). I’m thinking about buying the premium version of this season, which gets you extra lessons and transcripts and learning notes, but is pretty pricey. I’ll see how I go with the free content and then decide.
I’m becoming aware of just how many different skills are involved in learning a language, and of what I find effective and ineffective for learning each one. Learning grammar through audio definitely isn’t something that works for me - going over the bits that I’d already learned, or having examples pointed out is fine to cement things, but I don’t feel as though I understand the conditional and subjunctive any better now than I did before I started those lessons (and I need to sit down with some written resources and practice them more). On the other hand, the podcasts are great forcing me to just keep going and move on to the next sentence, and then pull out the whole meaning from the bits that I managed to pick up. I’ve read a couple of YA novels on my kindle, which is great for vocab, both cementing and learning anew, and is much easier to do when the dictionary is a click away rather than in a separate book. I’m not sure how much it helps with grammar - at the time I was still in the fairly early stages of learning, so mostly just picking out the key words and guessing at the grammatical structure, but I suspect that now my understanding has grown a bit, it will help with that as well.
One area that I’m not doing very much of is constructing sentences, either written or spoken - you do some of that in duolingo, but a)more of it is going from French to English, b)it’s all written, and c)it’s only one sentence at a time. Once I’m managing to keep my tree golden I’m going to work through the tree for francophones learning English, which will help with a), but then I really need to branch out a bit more and find opportunities to write and speak in French.
oedipamaas49 did recommend going to conversations meetups, but that is obviously utterly terrifying, so I’m probably going to put it off until I feel at least a little more fluent.
no subject
Date: 2016-02-27 10:33 am (UTC)From:I think I'm the same way about learning grammar better in writing than by ear. (Though with any widely spoken language I assume/worry there are a lot of dialects with grammar that isn't written down where English people are likely to learn it, French at least has the Academy version so it feels a little 'safer' to be learning it in one written-down proper official way.)