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I Learned French in 12 Months

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Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#301

Post by j1elo »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #267
namelosw wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree on there is no shortcut for "hacking" languages. But at the same time "The quality and type of practice you do matters a lot" as you've said. And also, for learning languages, one way could be significantly less painful than others. I grew up in China, where almost every student struggles so much on English learning, every day. I found myself very easy to pass every exam and beating the average, without…

I grew up in Eastern Europe and had the same experience, ending up speaking English near natively as a kid thanks to watching undubbed cartoons on BBC, Cartoon Network and Fox Kids, Hollywood movies and playing video games. I thought this was the case across all of Europe but found out that in the rich part of Europe all entertainment is dubbed in the local language so youngsters there had worse English skills than I…

Most of that is due to the strong push for promoting the local language as a sign of national identity during dictatorship periods in some of those rich countries.

E.g. the italian "Language Defense Law" (not sure of how to translate it to English but that's basically the literal translation of this Law) was established by Mussolini and later used as inspiration for similar laws in Spain, Germany and France.

The spirit of such laws were basically propaganda. It dictated that dubbing of all foreign media was mandatory, so it had to be done for everything, regardless of it being a cheap animation show for kids, or a big Hollywood production. Also it introduced the opportunity to review the contents of the audio and apply censorship when deemed desirable by those in power.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#302

Post by narag »

bluGill wrote: post #277
narag wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube will give you as many videos in any language as you want.

IF you can find them. Also you have no idea about quality. I've watched several videos in my TL where the plot was 1 here is what I'm going to do, then 10 minutes silently doing it, then 1 minute of reflection. There are a lot of videos of one guy doing something without talking. Note that the above is probably a reflection on my tastes. I've also watched several videos and concluded after a while that it wasn't my T…

Heh, YouTube is such a big place!

Best way to start is watching tv news. Hosts have very clear pronuntiation, it's their job after all.

I first research what tv channels are more popular in the country, then search YouTube with that info. YouTube doesn't seem to offer a lot of search options, but it's possible to do the search from Google or DuckDuckGo and later select "videos" tab.

DuckDuckGo has a dropdown menu that allows search localization, so the first results are the most relevant to the selected country. Once you find a handful of interesting channels, you're set up.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#303

Post by inferiorhuman »

torben-friis wrote: post #131
inferiorhuman wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many of those were folks correcting you were Spanish? I wonder if the folks correcting you just learned a different dialect. For those not familiar, American Spanish diverged significantly from "mainland" Spanish. Even then Mexican Spanish is quite distinct in its own "charming" way from nearly every other Spanish speaking American country. It's not just the vocabulary, even the verb tenses are used differently i…

Nah, I am aware of how broad the Spanish language is, but these were basic mistakes that wouldn't be correct in any dialect. Kinda like how Americans might not know British English vocabulary, yet they know at a glance that "me will spoke English afternoon this" is not correct anywhere.

Yikes, that would be pretty grating. And, yeah, folks love to be pedantic on the intertubes.

To be properly obnoxious I'll wonder if that's how those folks were taught to speak/write. In my mind the analogous English situation is when British speakers use me in place of my.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#304

Post by abecedarius »

wes1350 wrote: post #172
abecedarius wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, as a user I'd use it more if it were more effective and less grind-grind-grind. But I suppose you're probably right. An efficient, effective learning process feels more challenging and frustrating, which must drive a lot of people away. It must be a solvable problem, though.

Author here. I agree that Duolingo is almost certainly not optimizing for language learning effectiveness, which ends up being somewhat of a side-effect of their business model. However, by using the desktop version and turning off the word bank, you can better optimize for effectiveness for yourself. Duolingo is certainly a grind, but I don't think that's 100% a bad thing. It's far from perfectly executed, but I thi…

Oh, I agree it's useful! I'm pretty sure it's a great improvement over my high-school Spanish classes or my rudiments of grade-school French in Canada.

It's just that I moved on nearly as soon as I could to learning by osmosis from reading real books; which, not being deliberate practice, is quite suboptimal in learning rate too, but is a much more tolerable use of time. If they were as effective as I think they could be, I wouldn't ditch them so soon.

I have the unusual issue of being severely hard of hearing and I'm not sure what'll be the effective way to learn spoken conversation if I do move to a French-speaking country. Even hearing English is, uh, problematic in most settings. So this is also an example of tailoring your own approach in view of goals and context. I like reading books, and this most directly got me the thing I like.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#305

Post by alberto_ol »

rimliu wrote: post #249
rajlego wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like this site [1] because it shows you just how big the gap between native and non-native speakers is. Non-native speakers generally know around 10,000 words while adult native speakers tend to know upwards of 20,000 words. I think the reason that getting to real native level fluency is extremely hard is that they have thousands more hours of input than you do and it's very hard to make up for that in real…

That page made me feel good about myself: English is my fourth language, and it estimates my vocabulary to be at 23200 words.

My spoken and written english is very bad, but my score has been 27400. So I think that the test is not that meaningful.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#306

Post by masayoshis_son »

karatestomp wrote: post #26
Brakenshire wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just watch French TV, films or podcasts, there's more access to that material now than there ever has been.

It’s still much tougher to come by that one might think. For one thing, European networks don’t care about distributing their content outside of Europe, even in exchange for actual money. For another, a huge proportion of the content is dubbed from English, which isn’t ideal. Even pirating the stuff’s pretty hard, since there’s (apparently) little interest in it. Japanese may be a pain in the ass to learn but it’s ha…

>> You could just watch French TV [...]

> It’s still much tougher to come by that one might think.

You could try Arte: https://www.arte.tv/

It's a joint French-German project based on public TV programming from both countries, approximately half of the content is in French.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#307

Post by bluGill »

narag wrote: post #302
bluGill wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IF you can find them. Also you have no idea about quality. I've watched several videos in my TL where the plot was 1 here is what I'm going to do, then 10 minutes silently doing it, then 1 minute of reflection. There are a lot of videos of one guy doing something without talking. Note that the above is probably a reflection on my tastes. I've also watched several videos and concluded after a while that it wasn't my T…

Heh, YouTube is such a big place! Best way to start is watching tv news. Hosts have very clear pronuntiation, it's their job after all. I first research what tv channels are more popular in the country, then search YouTube with that info. YouTube doesn't seem to offer a lot of search options, but it's possible to do the search from Google or DuckDuckGo and later select "videos" tab. DuckDuckGo has a dropdown menu tha…

The only thing I disagree with is best. Best is subjective, I find most news boring an irrelevant (a lot of gossip about people I don't care about) so while it is great if you can stand it, I tend to get mad about the subjects they consider worth covering and turn it off.

This is a reflection on me of course - you should have your own opinions.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#308

Post by ryanmercer »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #295
TeMPOraL wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having played some of the educational games as a kid, my Theory of Edutainment is: you have to make it a good game first, educational second. And then don't market the educational aspects at all . If the game is no fun, or playing it becomes a prescribed activity, it'll achieve no results.

I've always expected an Edu-Startup to crack this problem by pairing an existing hyper-addictive game to more traditional homework. My parents used to make me do quick one page math worksheets. Each sheet which took about 60 seconds earned me 5 minutes of time with "Command and Conquer", and to this day I'm able to quickly do Math in my head that most people would need to put on paper. My abilities drastically drop o…

That's actually pretty brilliant. It wouldn't be a language learning game but it would augment more formal instruction by assisting in building vocabulary. You could probably build in 5-7 new words a week and show 3-5 old words a week as well. Then of course you can put billboards and graffiti in a game where appropriate in the language using words the game has taught (or will teach).

In the load screens/waiting rooms it could be pretty simple too, the game could show and say the word then give you a grid of like 9, 16, 25 words to choose from and make you pick the correct one. The first few times you'd probably struggle but if you were playing for an extended period in a session, or over a week, you'd get that reinforcement every round/match/zone and be able to quickly select the correct words.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#309

Post by ahpearce »

bdg wrote: post #21
raphaelj wrote: post #9

As a French native speaker, I'm a little bit surprised by the corrected text OP posted in her/his article ( http://www.runwes.com/images/learningfrench/image1.png ). Most of the corrections she/he received are not justified at all. Like using the work "crédits" is totally fine in this context. I can't get why they corrected some connectors like "à" or "pour", as the usage of these in the text seem at least as correct…

It's a typical side-effect of writing anything online. I've had this experience with nearly everything I've ever posted (also: a lot of great comments too). Whenever you want to share knowledge about X: out of the woodwork crawl out the little pests who have nothing to do except hold you to the highest level of scrutiny they can imagine, and they'll word it like they want to crucify you for the slightest infraction.…

I think in this case, the point of the website the OP posted their passage to is to receive highly critical feedback to ensure 100% accuracy and learn from mistakes. I doubt the person correcting them was doing so with the spirit you describe here. Also, word choice is a bit subjective and perhaps the disagreement with the other poster you're replying to is regional or something else.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#310

Post by ahpearce »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #69
raphaelj wrote: post #9

As a French native speaker, I'm a little bit surprised by the corrected text OP posted in her/his article ( http://www.runwes.com/images/learningfrench/image1.png ). Most of the corrections she/he received are not justified at all. Like using the work "crédits" is totally fine in this context. I can't get why they corrected some connectors like "à" or "pour", as the usage of these in the text seem at least as correct…

I'm also a native speaker (France's French if that makes a difference). "Crédits" was replaced by "bons", which means vouchers. In the context that would indeed be the likely correct option (and I never heard "crédits" used that way...) It's grammatically incorrect to write "s'inscrire à une salle de sport" and should indeed be "dans une salle de sport" and so it was warranted to correct that. The other corrections a…

Also, many people here are kind of missing the point. The OP posted that for the express purpose of receiving corrections and feedback. People are criticizing the corrector for performing the task that was requested of them — likely on a website dedicated to this practice of written correction...
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