Today is the one-third mark of the French Revolution, my quest to teach myself as much French as I can in several hours a day for 30 days.
Lately I've been wondering whether I should really go the whole 30 days. I've learned tons about language and language acquisition in general through this experiment, but I feel like that type of benefit is starting to peter out. Of course, I'm still learning French steadily, but the point of the experiment is more to learn about language in general than about French in particular.
If I push through with the whole 30 days, it'll be a great way to train self-discipline. On the other hand, there are other projects I could do which would have just as much of a benefit on self-discipline. If self-discipline training was my sole objective, I could go dig ditches for 30 days. Heck, that would probably be a good workout.
For now, I'll take it one day at a time, and go on until I really feel like I don't wanna do it anymore or that I'm not gaining anything any more. And who knows, maybe I'll wake up, say "well, time to do one more day", then suddenly realize it's day 30.
UNDERSTANDING ROMANIAN THROUGH FRENCH?
Earlier, a very interesting phenomenon occurred. I was lying down, very relaxed and feeling pretty good, soon to take a nap, and I was listening to this DJ Project megamix, which is in Romanian. Suddenly, I realized that I was understanding bits and pieces of the songs! I was clearly, unambiguously recognizing words based on Latin roots, and all without really "trying". If I were consciously straining to hear the Latin roots, it would be quite impossible because the words are sung way too fast.
I'm not sure how similar Romanian and French are, nor how much of the phenomenon was simply my mind making shit up because I was extremely drowsy. Right now, I can still make out words here and there, but nowhere near as strong as earlier today.
It's not the first time I've noticed how the brain's language parsing changes when it's sleep deprived. I've even written here, in my article The Sound Of Your Native Tongue, about an experience where I was listening to a book-on-tape while very drowsy and started hearing the English without parsing it, allowing me to hear what English "sounds like". Today the phenomenon was kind of the opposite, like my brain temporarily gained new language-parsing powers. I wonder if that's somehow related to how my Japanese seems to improve when I'm drunk?
REVIEWING SCHEDULED CARDS
I started out with the audio pronunciation deck, where there were 21 scheduled cards. It took about 15 minutes to go through them. Compare these 21 cards with the 6 cards scheduled yesterday. This illustrates a general phenomenon with spaced repetition systems: if you add cards in big irregular clumps, they'll come up for review in big irregular clumps, at least initially. Of course, over a longer period of time, they'd gradually even out if I were never adding new cards.
Next came pronunciation rule cards. There were 24 scheduled and it took 3 minutes to review them. I noticed that for one of the cards I used my knowledge from the audio pronunciation deck to figure out the rule. That's good, that's how a real French person would do it: rather than have pronunciation rules memorized, they'd quickly think of some example words which they know how to pronounce.
Finally, the biggy, the sentence deck. 304 cards were scheduled. This took 56 minutes.
I'm finding for some of the sentences, I'm (unconsciously) relying on my knowledge of the characters from the storyline at Tex's French Grammar, to deduce the correct answer. For example, I'm often mixing up "meilleur" (best) and "mauvaise" (worst), so when I see a sentence like "Tammy: Texas A&M est la plus mauvaise université du monde.", I unconsciously use my knowledge of Tammy's character to understand she's saying Texas A&M is the worst university, not the best university.
I guess this is okay; after all, the point is not to memorize vocabulary, but simply to have lots of French sentences pass through the fields of my mind, blazing trails with their footprints so that in the future, brand new sentences will effortlessly navigate those fields.
And if you think about it, that's how real language learners learn their mother tongues. No vocabulary drill, instead everything is context.
The same comments go for the Chrono Trigger sentences, where I can usually deduce exactly what is meant just using my encyclopedic knowledge of that game.
BACK INTO THE OL' SENTENCE-MINES
I mined a couple sections from Tex's French Grammar, up to and including the "depuis vs. il y a..." section of the prepositions chapter.
At this point, I ought to mine a lot more, maybe mine some Chrono Trigger, and I should definitely mine some more audio pronunciation cards. But, I don't feel like it. *Glowing Face Man sticks his tongue out* That's the great thing about self-teaching. No deadlines, no teachers, no exams. You get to study at your own pace. I highly recommend everyone become a self-teacher. It is very sweet. I don't feel like doing all that other work right now, so I'm not gonna, and you can't make me :) And, the coolest thing is, all those "shoulds" I just listed, get trumped by the ultimate "should", which is: you should have fun while learning, because you learn better while you're having fun.
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 9
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 11
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles I've written.
Five Reasons To Study A Foreign Language
What Is Fluency Anyway?
Unconditional Thanksgiving
Fighting Perfectionism: Shorter Articles
The Higher Infinite
Lately I've been wondering whether I should really go the whole 30 days. I've learned tons about language and language acquisition in general through this experiment, but I feel like that type of benefit is starting to peter out. Of course, I'm still learning French steadily, but the point of the experiment is more to learn about language in general than about French in particular.
If I push through with the whole 30 days, it'll be a great way to train self-discipline. On the other hand, there are other projects I could do which would have just as much of a benefit on self-discipline. If self-discipline training was my sole objective, I could go dig ditches for 30 days. Heck, that would probably be a good workout.
For now, I'll take it one day at a time, and go on until I really feel like I don't wanna do it anymore or that I'm not gaining anything any more. And who knows, maybe I'll wake up, say "well, time to do one more day", then suddenly realize it's day 30.
UNDERSTANDING ROMANIAN THROUGH FRENCH?
Earlier, a very interesting phenomenon occurred. I was lying down, very relaxed and feeling pretty good, soon to take a nap, and I was listening to this DJ Project megamix, which is in Romanian. Suddenly, I realized that I was understanding bits and pieces of the songs! I was clearly, unambiguously recognizing words based on Latin roots, and all without really "trying". If I were consciously straining to hear the Latin roots, it would be quite impossible because the words are sung way too fast.
I'm not sure how similar Romanian and French are, nor how much of the phenomenon was simply my mind making shit up because I was extremely drowsy. Right now, I can still make out words here and there, but nowhere near as strong as earlier today.
It's not the first time I've noticed how the brain's language parsing changes when it's sleep deprived. I've even written here, in my article The Sound Of Your Native Tongue, about an experience where I was listening to a book-on-tape while very drowsy and started hearing the English without parsing it, allowing me to hear what English "sounds like". Today the phenomenon was kind of the opposite, like my brain temporarily gained new language-parsing powers. I wonder if that's somehow related to how my Japanese seems to improve when I'm drunk?
REVIEWING SCHEDULED CARDS
I started out with the audio pronunciation deck, where there were 21 scheduled cards. It took about 15 minutes to go through them. Compare these 21 cards with the 6 cards scheduled yesterday. This illustrates a general phenomenon with spaced repetition systems: if you add cards in big irregular clumps, they'll come up for review in big irregular clumps, at least initially. Of course, over a longer period of time, they'd gradually even out if I were never adding new cards.
Next came pronunciation rule cards. There were 24 scheduled and it took 3 minutes to review them. I noticed that for one of the cards I used my knowledge from the audio pronunciation deck to figure out the rule. That's good, that's how a real French person would do it: rather than have pronunciation rules memorized, they'd quickly think of some example words which they know how to pronounce.
Finally, the biggy, the sentence deck. 304 cards were scheduled. This took 56 minutes.
I'm finding for some of the sentences, I'm (unconsciously) relying on my knowledge of the characters from the storyline at Tex's French Grammar, to deduce the correct answer. For example, I'm often mixing up "meilleur" (best) and "mauvaise" (worst), so when I see a sentence like "Tammy: Texas A&M est la plus mauvaise université du monde.", I unconsciously use my knowledge of Tammy's character to understand she's saying Texas A&M is the worst university, not the best university.
I guess this is okay; after all, the point is not to memorize vocabulary, but simply to have lots of French sentences pass through the fields of my mind, blazing trails with their footprints so that in the future, brand new sentences will effortlessly navigate those fields.
And if you think about it, that's how real language learners learn their mother tongues. No vocabulary drill, instead everything is context.
The same comments go for the Chrono Trigger sentences, where I can usually deduce exactly what is meant just using my encyclopedic knowledge of that game.
BACK INTO THE OL' SENTENCE-MINES
I mined a couple sections from Tex's French Grammar, up to and including the "depuis vs. il y a..." section of the prepositions chapter.
At this point, I ought to mine a lot more, maybe mine some Chrono Trigger, and I should definitely mine some more audio pronunciation cards. But, I don't feel like it. *Glowing Face Man sticks his tongue out* That's the great thing about self-teaching. No deadlines, no teachers, no exams. You get to study at your own pace. I highly recommend everyone become a self-teacher. It is very sweet. I don't feel like doing all that other work right now, so I'm not gonna, and you can't make me :) And, the coolest thing is, all those "shoulds" I just listed, get trumped by the ultimate "should", which is: you should have fun while learning, because you learn better while you're having fun.
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 9
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 11
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles I've written.
Five Reasons To Study A Foreign Language
What Is Fluency Anyway?
Unconditional Thanksgiving
Fighting Perfectionism: Shorter Articles
The Higher Infinite
Posts
2 comments:
Regarding your improved Japanese when drunk, and impression of understanding Romanian - maybe you're experiencing a form of xenoglossy. ;-)
Probably not, of course. But, I just figured you might enjoy that trivia. :-)
I couldn't understand a single word from that excellent Romanian megamix, despite having studied French in the 9th/10th grades in high school. I also barely got any impression that any of it was at all familiar.
(However, I never have placed enough emphasis on getting a good ear for foreign languages - I always focused mainly on just reading and writing.)
J'aime beaucoup votre blog. Votre blog est le meilleur. :-)
I couldn't understand a single word from that excellent Romanian megamix, despite having studied French in the 9th/10th grades in high school. I also barely got any impression that any of it was at all familiar.
I couldn't understand a single word from that (not excellent) Romanian megamix either despite I'm French. Romanian language is very different of French.
So I congratulate Glowing Face Man for his amazing exploit. :P
The same comments go for the Chrono Trigger sentences, where I can usually deduce exactly what is meant just using my encyclopedic knowledge of that game.
Be careful. I hope that Chrono Trigger French translation is better than Final Fantasy VII French translation (which was horrible). I can verify them if you want.
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