This is it, three hellish weeks of revolution, three weeks of fighting in the streets, fighting for liberty. Welcome to the French Revolution. This is my holy quest to learn as much French as I can in an hour or two a day for 30 days. And this is day 21.
I ended up with a lot less time today than I was calculating. When I went to the gym today, I totally destroyed myself. In addition to the new machines I recently added to my upper body workout day, I finished off today by benching myself to exhaustion. That means, you go to a bench press, already exhausted from your scheduled routine, put on some light weight (like 85lbs in my case), and lift them 'til you can't no more. Then, reduce the weight by 10 lbs and repeat. Keep going until you're benching the naked bar, and then keep going 'til your tortured arms can barely even lift that. Congratulations, you've nuked yourself. I hope you have lots of protein in the fridge.
Of course, the next couple hours, while I was showering and shoveling food down my throat, I was on an unbelievable endorphin rush. I was laughing happily at every little thing, smiling constantly, basically glowing like the Glowing Face Man I am. It's really a very pleasant state and you should go nuke yourself so you can experience it too. But then the after-workout drowsiness caught up with me and hit me like a battleship full of bricks. I crashed, not even bothering to turn the lights out, and became dead to the world until around 10pm. Oh, the alarm clock went off a few times, but I was so exhausted I had almost no choice but to set it an hour later each time.
Only my stern and unwavering devotion to the Revolution kept me from drinking the cup of sleep to the bitter dregs. I'm still drowsy and groggy (but also still glowing from the endorphin high), but the Revolution cannot wait!
REVIEWING SENTENCES
There were 202 sentence flashcards scheduled for review. In case you're enlisting late for the Revolution, I'm using the cutting edge language-learning method known as Sentence Mining. I'm using the free Anki software, which optimizes the hell out of the whole flashcard process. I'm like a cyborg, learning language with the assistance of all kinds of crazy computers and machinery embedded in my body. Except that it's not embedded in my body, just in my laptop.
It took 27 minutes to review the 202 scheduled sentence cards, which is about 7.5 cards per minute, and actually it's a little more because Anki slowly adds new cards to the pile in real time, so it was actually slightly more than 202 cards but I have no way of finding the exact number. This is pretty efficient! Of course, I was doing the review without music.
PRONUNCIATION PRACTICE
As a matter of fact, to illustrate what I meant above about Anki adding flashcards, after I typed the above paragraph and went back to the Anki window, another card had been scheduled. I'm kind of worried that if I had a really huge deck, like my Japanese deck (which is in Mnemosyne instead of Anki), it could easily get to where new cards are being scheduled faster than I can review them... talk about discouraging, if you were watching the "Remaining" cards actually grow as you did your review. I definitely prefer Mnemosyne's tactic where the scheduled cards are added in one big chunk around 3:30am.
There were only 35 scheduled pronunciation cards. A pronunciation card has a French word or sentence on the "question" side, and plays an audio file on the answer side. Of course my objective is to get the reading right, and I check it against the audio file. It took around 10 minutes to review the 35 cards, but I wasn't timing it.
TENSE AND MOOD
It's time for me to begin sentence mining further into Tex's French Grammar. I'm just about done, with just two more chapters to go. The second-to-last chapter is on tense and mood, and from its table of contents it looks like it's three or four times as long as most other chapters! I like to imagine that after I internalize this chapter through sentence mining, I'll be able to affect all the passion and romance that French rakes are supposed to have. Maybe I can transfer that into English!
At least initially, I'm gonna actually read the grammar explanations that come along with the example sentences, since, off the top of my head, I have no idea what "tense and mood" is all about in French.
I love how politically incorrect the dialogs at Tex's French Grammar can be. Right at the beginning of the Tense-and-Mood chapter, the dialog is describing the ecstasy the main character gets by smoking a cigarette! Not that I like cigarettes (they're rather disgusting), but it's refreshing to see whoever wrote these dialogs didn't give a good goddamn about censoring that kind of thing. In U.S. society, a lot of people really censor themselves, and there's a great need for more openness.
The passé composé, a French construction for past tense, is interesting from a Sentence Mining perspective, because it has three different ways of being translated into English, depending on context. Of course, that's nothing compared to Japanese, where sentences very routinely leave out the whole subject entirely. When sentence mining such sentences, just pick one possible interpretation, it doesn't matter so much which one. In the bigger picture, try to mix up which ones you pick. The subconscious mind will sort it all out. Remember that noone ever explains this ambiguity to a French baby, and yet the French baby somehow learns the language without trouble. The answer side of a sentence flashcard isn't all that important anyway, it's just for checking whether you comprehended the sentence or not, and most the time I don't even read the English translations on the answer side.
I took a break from Sentence Mining at 11:45 to go hang out at the OutRInn (a nearby bar) for New Years countdown. Unfortunately my girlfriend is in Tokyo right now, which seems almost like a crime against humanity. But even when you are in a situation where it wouldn't be appropriate to make out with drunken New Years revelers, you should still get out there for the countdown, just so you can feel a little connected with the other people in your city.
I eventually finished Sentence Mining the tense-mood chapter as far as and including "passé composé of pronominal verbs". 85 new sentences were mined.
MINING NEW PRONUNCIATION CARDS
Aside from mining their entire French Audio Dictionary, I think I pretty thoroughly mined the French pronunciation guide from about.com. So, I went into the wilds of Google searching for more material. It's very hard to find good audio files of sentences, because most pages tend to make one big audio file for a whole huge dialog or list of words. Annoying. Finally, though, I found a real treasure trove: this stash of individual sentence audio files from French Pronunciation - Learn How To Pronounce French vowels in sentences. Parfait!
Those audio files represent a transition from individual sound audio files to entire sentence audio files. (I already had a few sentence audio files from Tex's French Grammar, but those are very painstaking to mine and I only mined a few of them) This will make my audio pronunciation deck substantially more difficult, but it will also totally amp up my pronunciation 'til I'm talkin' like a pro. I mined 21 new audio sentences from that link.
And no, I don't care that the link provides no English translations. I might care a little bit if I were mining the sentences for my sentence deck, but there's no shortage of French sentences in this world. French sentences with individual audio files, now that's manna from heaven!
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 20
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 22
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.
The Sound Of Your Native Tongue
Learn The Idioms, Not Just The Word
Getting Motivated To Go Lift Weights
A Goldmine Of Engrish
Leadership In Relationships
I ended up with a lot less time today than I was calculating. When I went to the gym today, I totally destroyed myself. In addition to the new machines I recently added to my upper body workout day, I finished off today by benching myself to exhaustion. That means, you go to a bench press, already exhausted from your scheduled routine, put on some light weight (like 85lbs in my case), and lift them 'til you can't no more. Then, reduce the weight by 10 lbs and repeat. Keep going until you're benching the naked bar, and then keep going 'til your tortured arms can barely even lift that. Congratulations, you've nuked yourself. I hope you have lots of protein in the fridge.
Of course, the next couple hours, while I was showering and shoveling food down my throat, I was on an unbelievable endorphin rush. I was laughing happily at every little thing, smiling constantly, basically glowing like the Glowing Face Man I am. It's really a very pleasant state and you should go nuke yourself so you can experience it too. But then the after-workout drowsiness caught up with me and hit me like a battleship full of bricks. I crashed, not even bothering to turn the lights out, and became dead to the world until around 10pm. Oh, the alarm clock went off a few times, but I was so exhausted I had almost no choice but to set it an hour later each time.
Only my stern and unwavering devotion to the Revolution kept me from drinking the cup of sleep to the bitter dregs. I'm still drowsy and groggy (but also still glowing from the endorphin high), but the Revolution cannot wait!
REVIEWING SENTENCES
There were 202 sentence flashcards scheduled for review. In case you're enlisting late for the Revolution, I'm using the cutting edge language-learning method known as Sentence Mining. I'm using the free Anki software, which optimizes the hell out of the whole flashcard process. I'm like a cyborg, learning language with the assistance of all kinds of crazy computers and machinery embedded in my body. Except that it's not embedded in my body, just in my laptop.
It took 27 minutes to review the 202 scheduled sentence cards, which is about 7.5 cards per minute, and actually it's a little more because Anki slowly adds new cards to the pile in real time, so it was actually slightly more than 202 cards but I have no way of finding the exact number. This is pretty efficient! Of course, I was doing the review without music.
PRONUNCIATION PRACTICE
As a matter of fact, to illustrate what I meant above about Anki adding flashcards, after I typed the above paragraph and went back to the Anki window, another card had been scheduled. I'm kind of worried that if I had a really huge deck, like my Japanese deck (which is in Mnemosyne instead of Anki), it could easily get to where new cards are being scheduled faster than I can review them... talk about discouraging, if you were watching the "Remaining" cards actually grow as you did your review. I definitely prefer Mnemosyne's tactic where the scheduled cards are added in one big chunk around 3:30am.
There were only 35 scheduled pronunciation cards. A pronunciation card has a French word or sentence on the "question" side, and plays an audio file on the answer side. Of course my objective is to get the reading right, and I check it against the audio file. It took around 10 minutes to review the 35 cards, but I wasn't timing it.
TENSE AND MOOD
It's time for me to begin sentence mining further into Tex's French Grammar. I'm just about done, with just two more chapters to go. The second-to-last chapter is on tense and mood, and from its table of contents it looks like it's three or four times as long as most other chapters! I like to imagine that after I internalize this chapter through sentence mining, I'll be able to affect all the passion and romance that French rakes are supposed to have. Maybe I can transfer that into English!
At least initially, I'm gonna actually read the grammar explanations that come along with the example sentences, since, off the top of my head, I have no idea what "tense and mood" is all about in French.
I love how politically incorrect the dialogs at Tex's French Grammar can be. Right at the beginning of the Tense-and-Mood chapter, the dialog is describing the ecstasy the main character gets by smoking a cigarette! Not that I like cigarettes (they're rather disgusting), but it's refreshing to see whoever wrote these dialogs didn't give a good goddamn about censoring that kind of thing. In U.S. society, a lot of people really censor themselves, and there's a great need for more openness.
The passé composé, a French construction for past tense, is interesting from a Sentence Mining perspective, because it has three different ways of being translated into English, depending on context. Of course, that's nothing compared to Japanese, where sentences very routinely leave out the whole subject entirely. When sentence mining such sentences, just pick one possible interpretation, it doesn't matter so much which one. In the bigger picture, try to mix up which ones you pick. The subconscious mind will sort it all out. Remember that noone ever explains this ambiguity to a French baby, and yet the French baby somehow learns the language without trouble. The answer side of a sentence flashcard isn't all that important anyway, it's just for checking whether you comprehended the sentence or not, and most the time I don't even read the English translations on the answer side.
I took a break from Sentence Mining at 11:45 to go hang out at the OutRInn (a nearby bar) for New Years countdown. Unfortunately my girlfriend is in Tokyo right now, which seems almost like a crime against humanity. But even when you are in a situation where it wouldn't be appropriate to make out with drunken New Years revelers, you should still get out there for the countdown, just so you can feel a little connected with the other people in your city.
I eventually finished Sentence Mining the tense-mood chapter as far as and including "passé composé of pronominal verbs". 85 new sentences were mined.
MINING NEW PRONUNCIATION CARDS
Aside from mining their entire French Audio Dictionary, I think I pretty thoroughly mined the French pronunciation guide from about.com. So, I went into the wilds of Google searching for more material. It's very hard to find good audio files of sentences, because most pages tend to make one big audio file for a whole huge dialog or list of words. Annoying. Finally, though, I found a real treasure trove: this stash of individual sentence audio files from French Pronunciation - Learn How To Pronounce French vowels in sentences. Parfait!
Those audio files represent a transition from individual sound audio files to entire sentence audio files. (I already had a few sentence audio files from Tex's French Grammar, but those are very painstaking to mine and I only mined a few of them) This will make my audio pronunciation deck substantially more difficult, but it will also totally amp up my pronunciation 'til I'm talkin' like a pro. I mined 21 new audio sentences from that link.
And no, I don't care that the link provides no English translations. I might care a little bit if I were mining the sentences for my sentence deck, but there's no shortage of French sentences in this world. French sentences with individual audio files, now that's manna from heaven!
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 20
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 22
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.
The Sound Of Your Native Tongue
Learn The Idioms, Not Just The Word
Getting Motivated To Go Lift Weights
A Goldmine Of Engrish
Leadership In Relationships
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