Welcome to Day 19 of the French Revolution, my journey to teach myself as much of the French language as I can for an hour or two a day for 30 days.
Today will be another light day, as I'm starting the day (at least as far as French is concerned) at 10pm. It was warm outside today for once, so I took advantage and did a lot of the things I had neglected while the world had been a frozen barren icy wasteland. I met quite a few friends today just by circumstance, which made me feel really good because I was starting to feel a little isolated, "snowed in", so to speak.
RELIGION DEBATE AT THE RTK FORUMS
Right now, there's an interesting religion debate over at the RTK forums. RTK is short for "Reviewing The Kanji", and the forums there, despite the Japanese emphasis, are generally the best forums in the world when it comes to practical matters of second language acquisition. It's always interesting when a religious debate comes up in forums where the participants are so intelligent. You generally see really interesting points from all parties. When there's a common thread linking everyone, like self-study of Japanese, it makes for a much more enlightened debate than you'd get on, say, a forum devoted to religion.
I'm just saddened that modern day Christians make things so ridiculously complicated. The entire true Christian religion can be summed up as follows: "If you believe you're saved (from eternal damnation when you die), then you are saved." This is such an uplifting and freeing (and obvious) belief, and yet modern day Christians resist it with all their might; the people supposedly sworn to share such good news, fight it the most viciously. They create a whole lifestyle, with Bibles, and Churches, and Laws, and Political Action Committees, and all those efforts only pervert and corrupt the true teaching of Jesus, which is simply "Believe you're saved, and you're saved" and nothing more. I really feel pity for the modern day Christian, a lamb being led to the slaughter by evil men like James Dobson or Pat Robertson or George W. Bush.
REVIEWING SENTENCE FLASHCARDS
In case you're new to the Revolution, the bedrock of my French study is the cutting edge language acquisition technology known as Sentence Mining. Click that link to read my in-depth article about Sentence Mining. I'm using the spaced repetition system Anki to optimize the whole process even further. Today Anki has scheduled 200 sentences for me to review (176 old sentences coming up for re-review, plus 24 new sentences that I just entered yesterday).
I started reviewing the 200 sentence cards at 10:31 PM. I was listening to some relaxing ambient music during the review process (Amethystium, in case you're wondering). I finished at 11:31. That took exceedingly long, but it's because I was doing other stuff at the same time.
Anki doesn't seem to properly randomize the order of the scheduled cards. Somehow it seems to put the easiest cards first, so the tail end of a review session is a real pain in the @$.
REVIEWING AUDIO PRONUNCIATION FLASHCARDS
I also have a deck of pronunciation flashcards, where the "question" side of each card is a French word or sentence, and the "answer" side plays an audio file. I try to read the sentence or word aloud, and then check myself against the audio file. I started the audio review at 11:34PM. Of course, with all background music turned off. I finished at 11:48PM. I forgot to make a note of how many cards were scheduled out of this deck, it was a little over 100.
I'm feeling better and better about my pronunciation.
NASAL VOWELS IN AMERICAN ENGLISH
I was thinking about where nasal vowels get used in American English. They show up when we slur a word which ends with vowel-n-t, like "want".
To see the nasal vowel, first, you need to have an American English accent. (Maybe it'll work with some other dialects, I'm not sure) Look at the word, "Watt". There are two ways to say "Watt", you can either enunciate the "t" sound completely, touching your mouth just behind your upper teeth with the tip of your tongue. Or you can kind of slur the "t", replacing it with a sort of glottal stop.
Now, compare "Watt" with "want". You can actually pronounce "want" in three different ways. You can enunciate it completely, enunciating both the "n" and the "t". Or you can enunciate just the "n", and slur the "t" like we did for "Watt". In that case, it's just like the slurred "Watt", but with an "n" inserted just before the end. OR, you can slur both the "n" and the "t", saying the whole word "want" without ever tapping with your tongue. It's this last, most slurred form, where a nasal vowel shows up. The "an" sound when "want" is spoken in this way, is actually a nasalized "a" sound.
So, French nasals aren't that hard after all. We already use them (at least us American English native speakers), without even realizing it.
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 18
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 20
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles I wrote.
Five Reasons To Study A Foreign Language
My Time In The Seduction Community
A Modernized Version Of The Lord's Prayer
Intelligent Design And Intelligent Video Games
My Trip To The Fujitaisekiji Buddhist Cult
Today will be another light day, as I'm starting the day (at least as far as French is concerned) at 10pm. It was warm outside today for once, so I took advantage and did a lot of the things I had neglected while the world had been a frozen barren icy wasteland. I met quite a few friends today just by circumstance, which made me feel really good because I was starting to feel a little isolated, "snowed in", so to speak.
RELIGION DEBATE AT THE RTK FORUMS
Right now, there's an interesting religion debate over at the RTK forums. RTK is short for "Reviewing The Kanji", and the forums there, despite the Japanese emphasis, are generally the best forums in the world when it comes to practical matters of second language acquisition. It's always interesting when a religious debate comes up in forums where the participants are so intelligent. You generally see really interesting points from all parties. When there's a common thread linking everyone, like self-study of Japanese, it makes for a much more enlightened debate than you'd get on, say, a forum devoted to religion.
I'm just saddened that modern day Christians make things so ridiculously complicated. The entire true Christian religion can be summed up as follows: "If you believe you're saved (from eternal damnation when you die), then you are saved." This is such an uplifting and freeing (and obvious) belief, and yet modern day Christians resist it with all their might; the people supposedly sworn to share such good news, fight it the most viciously. They create a whole lifestyle, with Bibles, and Churches, and Laws, and Political Action Committees, and all those efforts only pervert and corrupt the true teaching of Jesus, which is simply "Believe you're saved, and you're saved" and nothing more. I really feel pity for the modern day Christian, a lamb being led to the slaughter by evil men like James Dobson or Pat Robertson or George W. Bush.
REVIEWING SENTENCE FLASHCARDS
In case you're new to the Revolution, the bedrock of my French study is the cutting edge language acquisition technology known as Sentence Mining. Click that link to read my in-depth article about Sentence Mining. I'm using the spaced repetition system Anki to optimize the whole process even further. Today Anki has scheduled 200 sentences for me to review (176 old sentences coming up for re-review, plus 24 new sentences that I just entered yesterday).
I started reviewing the 200 sentence cards at 10:31 PM. I was listening to some relaxing ambient music during the review process (Amethystium, in case you're wondering). I finished at 11:31. That took exceedingly long, but it's because I was doing other stuff at the same time.
Anki doesn't seem to properly randomize the order of the scheduled cards. Somehow it seems to put the easiest cards first, so the tail end of a review session is a real pain in the @$.
REVIEWING AUDIO PRONUNCIATION FLASHCARDS
I also have a deck of pronunciation flashcards, where the "question" side of each card is a French word or sentence, and the "answer" side plays an audio file. I try to read the sentence or word aloud, and then check myself against the audio file. I started the audio review at 11:34PM. Of course, with all background music turned off. I finished at 11:48PM. I forgot to make a note of how many cards were scheduled out of this deck, it was a little over 100.
I'm feeling better and better about my pronunciation.
NASAL VOWELS IN AMERICAN ENGLISH
I was thinking about where nasal vowels get used in American English. They show up when we slur a word which ends with vowel-n-t, like "want".
To see the nasal vowel, first, you need to have an American English accent. (Maybe it'll work with some other dialects, I'm not sure) Look at the word, "Watt". There are two ways to say "Watt", you can either enunciate the "t" sound completely, touching your mouth just behind your upper teeth with the tip of your tongue. Or you can kind of slur the "t", replacing it with a sort of glottal stop.
Now, compare "Watt" with "want". You can actually pronounce "want" in three different ways. You can enunciate it completely, enunciating both the "n" and the "t". Or you can enunciate just the "n", and slur the "t" like we did for "Watt". In that case, it's just like the slurred "Watt", but with an "n" inserted just before the end. OR, you can slur both the "n" and the "t", saying the whole word "want" without ever tapping with your tongue. It's this last, most slurred form, where a nasal vowel shows up. The "an" sound when "want" is spoken in this way, is actually a nasalized "a" sound.
So, French nasals aren't that hard after all. We already use them (at least us American English native speakers), without even realizing it.
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 18
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 20
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles I wrote.
Five Reasons To Study A Foreign Language
My Time In The Seduction Community
A Modernized Version Of The Lord's Prayer
Intelligent Design And Intelligent Video Games
My Trip To The Fujitaisekiji Buddhist Cult
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1 comments:
Recently returning to Australia from Japan I've really been noticing some of the horrible sounds in our accent. I hear people every day whose horrid gurglings I want to correct.
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