Today is Day 3 of the French Revolution, my challenge to learn as much French as I can in 30 days. I'm doing this to put my language learning skills to the test. Language skills which I've developed by studying Japanese, a (supposedly) much harder language. It's also a good way to work on being a better self-teacher, and by writing about the whole process, I hope I can help anyone else who is interested in becoming a self-teacher.
FEELING A LITTLE SAD TODAY
Today I'm feeling a little sad and unmotivated. I'm really glad I'm doing this project publicly, because otherwise I could very easily neglect it. You readers are awesome, you keep me accountable. Typically, I've always felt gloomier around the Christmas season. I have a strong urge to put a lot of the blame for this on my parents and family, but I have to remember that I'm the only one with any power over myself. Many other Americans share these feelings around Christmas season, but keep it to themselves. In past years I mostly kept it to myself too, but maybe by talking about it openly I can rise above it.
UPDATING ANKI
I'm using Anki, a free computer flashcard program which uses sophisticated algorithms to optimize which cards get reviewed when. It got pointed out, based on what I wrote in Day 1, that I was running an out-of-date version of Anki. To be precise, I was running 0.9.8.7, and the most recent release is 0.9.9.3. Although this French Revolution is my first time seriously using Anki, I did download it before to play around with it, and that was awhile ago, I guess this is a piece of software which is really being actively developed! Hurrah!
Looking at the Release Notes, it looks like these aren't minor updates, either. It's awesome that such excellent, highly maintained software is provided free. Why these Spaced Repetition Programs aren't used in every college and university, is beyond me.
REVIEWING YESTERDAY'S SENTENCES
Since yesterday I decided to create the new pronunciation deck, today I'll spend less time worrying about pronunciation of the sentences deck. Basically, I'm changing my pronunciation strategy from a disorganized one to an organized one, and a more mechanical one as well. Rather than pick and choose when to think about pronunciation, I'll let SRS technology do that for me.
The sentences seem much easier than when I did my first review yesterday. Also, I already have a much better sense of the pronunciation even after just the minimal pronunciation study I've done. It's amusing that as I read these sentences in my head, my mental dialog has a huge French accent.
I did notice that as I went on, the surprisingly good grasp for pronunciation became less and less good. I guess I became fatigued fast, because I was having to consciously think about the pronunciation rules I knew. Generally, the conscious mind will never learn a second language (or even a first language). Only the subconscious mind can learn a language; to make the subconscious mind learn the language, we just have to struggle with it consciously enough until it gets carved into subconscious understanding.
STUCK SENTENCES
When you have relatively few flashcards and can actually finish a day's recommended reviews, it'll often be the case that you end up with a few sentence cards you just can't parse. There's no point reviewing these over and over: if you do that, you'll just memorize them outright, which isn't the point. The point of sentence-mining is not to memorize sentences or English translations, it's to understand sentences naturally. So, when you come down to some stuck sentences, just rate them "hard" which means they'll be put in tomorrow's review, and be done with it.
Today I was left with two "stuck" sentences, from Tex's French Grammar:
"Vous prenez du vin, n'est-ce pas?"
("You are having (some) wine, aren't you?")
"Ah bon? Ce ne sont pas seulement de bons amis?"
("Really? They are not just good friends?")
STRATEGIES FOR RATING FLASHCARDS
If you carefully deliberate about what to rate each question, the rating process can end up chewing up a nontrivial proportion of the actual review time. I find that I usually (automatically) fall into some strategies, to speed up the rating process. The strategies slowly vary over time. In Japanese study, I've gone through so many different rating strategies I can't even think of them all.
Right now I've fallen into a strategy for the sentence cards. If I miss a card, it will subsequently be rated "hard" when I come back to it. If a card is ridiculously easy, it gets rated "easy". Otherwise, it gets rated "good". I'm not endorsing this strategy as optimal or even good, it's just what I've fallen into after 2 days of reviewing these sentences. It'll probably change by the time the 30 days are up.
For the pronunciation flashcards, I'm rating everything "Again" or "Hard" for now, just cuz I want to keep these pronunciation rules in front of my eyes at least once a day, for the time being.
THE SHTOOKA PROJECT
From the comments, Romain pointed me toward something called The Shtooka Project. This looks really cool so far. From the site's description: "A cooperative project with the goal of creating audio material and software tools used to learn foreign languages."
I downloaded the Shtooka Explorer for Windows, and it came with audio files for languages "ces" (???), "chi" (Mandarin?), "deu" (German), "eng" (English), "fra" (French, yay!), "rus" (Russian), and "swe" (Swedish?). Each contains thousands of words. The French one apparently contains 14,000 French words and expressions. NICE!
It looks like there's some more advanced stuff there too, SWAC. From the comments, it seems there's some way using Linux magic to get it so you can play the audio file just by clicking the word in Anki. Unfortunately, I don't really know much Linux, and that'd be another 30 day language challenge of its own...
DICTIONARIES
Romain also sent me a link to a dictionary portal. Now, what would be really nice, would be something like Jim Breen's WWWJDIC (which is Japanese->English and, to a lesser extent, English->Japanese). The WWWJDIC has an option where you can paste in a whole block of text, and it'll auto-parse it for you, finding the borders of words (remember, Japanese has no spaces), and un-conjugating verbs, and so on. By contrast, most these French->English dictionaries don't even have an entry for "chatte" (the female form of "chat" ("cat")).
FORUMS AND COMMUNITY
The post I made in the forums yesterday was deleted. I did get a private message from someone though, who pointed me toward an interesting looking language site. It requires registration and looks rather commercial, and I don't feel like poring through end-user license agreements or privacy policies right now, so I'll have to check it out another day. If it's any good, I'll tell you more about it.
I'll do some more searching for the mythical Elephant Graveyard of French Forums later. Does France not have computers, or something? j/k I guess I'm just seeing that google isn't really best for finding the real gems of the internet when it comes to forums. Usually, when I study something, it's less structured than this French Revolution, and I just stumble around and eventually happen upon the really good forums. I never went out and actively sought them. I just assumed that if I did, they'd be right there for the finding.
TEX'S FRENCH GRAMMAR
I read and mined the 2nd half of the determiners chapter, and then the adverbs chapter. I wonder whether, as a polyglot, I'm going to have to sit through authors carefully explaining the concept of an "adverb" every single time ;)
There are some terms in these example sentences which would only make sense if you went to the University of Texas at Austin, where this is apparently hosted. But I think that's actually a good thing. In real life language, we always hear jargon and phrases we don't understand. All we really need to know is what part-of-speech it is (verb? noun? etc.) Part of being fluent is knowing what isn't a common word, and parsing the sentence despite not knowing what a word means. I talk about this a lot more in my article, What Is Fluency Anyway?
NASALIZED VOWEL SOUNDS
For pronunciation, I'm adding cards for the "Nasal Vowels" section from LanguageGuide. I'm really glad I've had a little practice with the Japanese nasal ん ("n"), or these French nasals would be even more intimidating than they already are. Japanophile readers: for some nasal fun, try saying 雰囲気 ("fun'iki", atmosphere) like a native.
I kind of doubt I'll get all these new sounds perfect in these 30 days. For now I'll do my best approximations. With Japanese, at first I couldn't pronounce the "r", "fu", or "n" sounds correctly. I learned them (in that order) very gradually through tons of exposure, and I'm still not very good at "n".
CARDS ADDED TODAY
I added 140 new sentence cards from Tex's French Grammar, and 1 from LanguageGuide. This brings the total to 303 sentence cards. I only added 9 pronunciation fact flashcards, making 36 total pronunciation fact cards.
CLARIFICATION ON AMOUNT OF TIME SPENT
I realized I haven't talked at all about how long I'm spending on this. No, I'm not doing French from waking til sleeping. These first 3 days, I've spent about 5 hours a day, which includes the writing of these articles. And outside those hours, I *haven't* been going out of my way to get French input (maybe I should).
As I progress in the French Revolution, I'll try to spend less time on it. There are other projects I want to work on. For example, I really want to take advantage of all my free time this Winter break, and hit the gym hard. Last quarter I averaged 6 workouts a week (I was working out every day mostly, but skipped some days and all of finals week). This break I wanna push it even further, and maybe even experiment with multiple workout sessions in a day (but only with lots of research to avoid overtraining). I'm also working on mathematical research.
PROGRESS SO FAR
I'm happy with progress so far. I've made so little progress, but then again, if I were taking French 101, this would've been about enough time to read the (English) syllabus and do maybe one dialog. Because I'm not directing artsy French films or leading a French uprising or anything, it seems like I've made very little progress, but I have to remind myself that if a professor demanded of a college class the amount of progress I've made so far, every single student would drop the course.
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 2
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 4
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. For extra comedic effect, imagine I'm reading them aloud to you in an overdone Franglish accent, like the French knights from Monty Python.
Dealing With A Neglected SRS Deck
Examples Of Japanese Onomatopoeia
Five Ways To Be Better At Math
Models Of Reality
30-Day Article-A-Day Challenge Completed!
FEELING A LITTLE SAD TODAY
Today I'm feeling a little sad and unmotivated. I'm really glad I'm doing this project publicly, because otherwise I could very easily neglect it. You readers are awesome, you keep me accountable. Typically, I've always felt gloomier around the Christmas season. I have a strong urge to put a lot of the blame for this on my parents and family, but I have to remember that I'm the only one with any power over myself. Many other Americans share these feelings around Christmas season, but keep it to themselves. In past years I mostly kept it to myself too, but maybe by talking about it openly I can rise above it.
UPDATING ANKI
I'm using Anki, a free computer flashcard program which uses sophisticated algorithms to optimize which cards get reviewed when. It got pointed out, based on what I wrote in Day 1, that I was running an out-of-date version of Anki. To be precise, I was running 0.9.8.7, and the most recent release is 0.9.9.3. Although this French Revolution is my first time seriously using Anki, I did download it before to play around with it, and that was awhile ago, I guess this is a piece of software which is really being actively developed! Hurrah!
Looking at the Release Notes, it looks like these aren't minor updates, either. It's awesome that such excellent, highly maintained software is provided free. Why these Spaced Repetition Programs aren't used in every college and university, is beyond me.
REVIEWING YESTERDAY'S SENTENCES
Since yesterday I decided to create the new pronunciation deck, today I'll spend less time worrying about pronunciation of the sentences deck. Basically, I'm changing my pronunciation strategy from a disorganized one to an organized one, and a more mechanical one as well. Rather than pick and choose when to think about pronunciation, I'll let SRS technology do that for me.
The sentences seem much easier than when I did my first review yesterday. Also, I already have a much better sense of the pronunciation even after just the minimal pronunciation study I've done. It's amusing that as I read these sentences in my head, my mental dialog has a huge French accent.
I did notice that as I went on, the surprisingly good grasp for pronunciation became less and less good. I guess I became fatigued fast, because I was having to consciously think about the pronunciation rules I knew. Generally, the conscious mind will never learn a second language (or even a first language). Only the subconscious mind can learn a language; to make the subconscious mind learn the language, we just have to struggle with it consciously enough until it gets carved into subconscious understanding.
STUCK SENTENCES
When you have relatively few flashcards and can actually finish a day's recommended reviews, it'll often be the case that you end up with a few sentence cards you just can't parse. There's no point reviewing these over and over: if you do that, you'll just memorize them outright, which isn't the point. The point of sentence-mining is not to memorize sentences or English translations, it's to understand sentences naturally. So, when you come down to some stuck sentences, just rate them "hard" which means they'll be put in tomorrow's review, and be done with it.
Today I was left with two "stuck" sentences, from Tex's French Grammar:
"Vous prenez du vin, n'est-ce pas?"
("You are having (some) wine, aren't you?")
"Ah bon? Ce ne sont pas seulement de bons amis?"
("Really? They are not just good friends?")
STRATEGIES FOR RATING FLASHCARDS
If you carefully deliberate about what to rate each question, the rating process can end up chewing up a nontrivial proportion of the actual review time. I find that I usually (automatically) fall into some strategies, to speed up the rating process. The strategies slowly vary over time. In Japanese study, I've gone through so many different rating strategies I can't even think of them all.
Right now I've fallen into a strategy for the sentence cards. If I miss a card, it will subsequently be rated "hard" when I come back to it. If a card is ridiculously easy, it gets rated "easy". Otherwise, it gets rated "good". I'm not endorsing this strategy as optimal or even good, it's just what I've fallen into after 2 days of reviewing these sentences. It'll probably change by the time the 30 days are up.
For the pronunciation flashcards, I'm rating everything "Again" or "Hard" for now, just cuz I want to keep these pronunciation rules in front of my eyes at least once a day, for the time being.
THE SHTOOKA PROJECT
From the comments, Romain pointed me toward something called The Shtooka Project. This looks really cool so far. From the site's description: "A cooperative project with the goal of creating audio material and software tools used to learn foreign languages."
I downloaded the Shtooka Explorer for Windows, and it came with audio files for languages "ces" (???), "chi" (Mandarin?), "deu" (German), "eng" (English), "fra" (French, yay!), "rus" (Russian), and "swe" (Swedish?). Each contains thousands of words. The French one apparently contains 14,000 French words and expressions. NICE!
It looks like there's some more advanced stuff there too, SWAC. From the comments, it seems there's some way using Linux magic to get it so you can play the audio file just by clicking the word in Anki. Unfortunately, I don't really know much Linux, and that'd be another 30 day language challenge of its own...
DICTIONARIES
Romain also sent me a link to a dictionary portal. Now, what would be really nice, would be something like Jim Breen's WWWJDIC (which is Japanese->English and, to a lesser extent, English->Japanese). The WWWJDIC has an option where you can paste in a whole block of text, and it'll auto-parse it for you, finding the borders of words (remember, Japanese has no spaces), and un-conjugating verbs, and so on. By contrast, most these French->English dictionaries don't even have an entry for "chatte" (the female form of "chat" ("cat")).
FORUMS AND COMMUNITY
The post I made in the forums yesterday was deleted. I did get a private message from someone though, who pointed me toward an interesting looking language site. It requires registration and looks rather commercial, and I don't feel like poring through end-user license agreements or privacy policies right now, so I'll have to check it out another day. If it's any good, I'll tell you more about it.
I'll do some more searching for the mythical Elephant Graveyard of French Forums later. Does France not have computers, or something? j/k I guess I'm just seeing that google isn't really best for finding the real gems of the internet when it comes to forums. Usually, when I study something, it's less structured than this French Revolution, and I just stumble around and eventually happen upon the really good forums. I never went out and actively sought them. I just assumed that if I did, they'd be right there for the finding.
TEX'S FRENCH GRAMMAR
I read and mined the 2nd half of the determiners chapter, and then the adverbs chapter. I wonder whether, as a polyglot, I'm going to have to sit through authors carefully explaining the concept of an "adverb" every single time ;)
There are some terms in these example sentences which would only make sense if you went to the University of Texas at Austin, where this is apparently hosted. But I think that's actually a good thing. In real life language, we always hear jargon and phrases we don't understand. All we really need to know is what part-of-speech it is (verb? noun? etc.) Part of being fluent is knowing what isn't a common word, and parsing the sentence despite not knowing what a word means. I talk about this a lot more in my article, What Is Fluency Anyway?
NASALIZED VOWEL SOUNDS
For pronunciation, I'm adding cards for the "Nasal Vowels" section from LanguageGuide. I'm really glad I've had a little practice with the Japanese nasal ん ("n"), or these French nasals would be even more intimidating than they already are. Japanophile readers: for some nasal fun, try saying 雰囲気 ("fun'iki", atmosphere) like a native.
I kind of doubt I'll get all these new sounds perfect in these 30 days. For now I'll do my best approximations. With Japanese, at first I couldn't pronounce the "r", "fu", or "n" sounds correctly. I learned them (in that order) very gradually through tons of exposure, and I'm still not very good at "n".
CARDS ADDED TODAY
I added 140 new sentence cards from Tex's French Grammar, and 1 from LanguageGuide. This brings the total to 303 sentence cards. I only added 9 pronunciation fact flashcards, making 36 total pronunciation fact cards.
CLARIFICATION ON AMOUNT OF TIME SPENT
I realized I haven't talked at all about how long I'm spending on this. No, I'm not doing French from waking til sleeping. These first 3 days, I've spent about 5 hours a day, which includes the writing of these articles. And outside those hours, I *haven't* been going out of my way to get French input (maybe I should).
As I progress in the French Revolution, I'll try to spend less time on it. There are other projects I want to work on. For example, I really want to take advantage of all my free time this Winter break, and hit the gym hard. Last quarter I averaged 6 workouts a week (I was working out every day mostly, but skipped some days and all of finals week). This break I wanna push it even further, and maybe even experiment with multiple workout sessions in a day (but only with lots of research to avoid overtraining). I'm also working on mathematical research.
PROGRESS SO FAR
I'm happy with progress so far. I've made so little progress, but then again, if I were taking French 101, this would've been about enough time to read the (English) syllabus and do maybe one dialog. Because I'm not directing artsy French films or leading a French uprising or anything, it seems like I've made very little progress, but I have to remind myself that if a professor demanded of a college class the amount of progress I've made so far, every single student would drop the course.
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 2
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 4
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. For extra comedic effect, imagine I'm reading them aloud to you in an overdone Franglish accent, like the French knights from Monty Python.
Dealing With A Neglected SRS Deck
Examples Of Japanese Onomatopoeia
Five Ways To Be Better At Math
Models Of Reality
30-Day Article-A-Day Challenge Completed!
Posts
3 comments:
I'm learning french too. You could try the BBC french website, it has a few courses with audio you can rip. Or I could just send you all the spreadsheets and audio I've made if you like.
Another neat tool might be the diglot weave firefox extension Language Bob. It transposes some words in an English web page into French, a bit like the Kanjilish add on.
I actually just recently started studying French a little again, not long before you started this blog post series. I haven't gotten really serious about it yet, though, so I don't really know of many good online resources yet.
Anyhow, I just thought I'd give you the link to this thing I made which makes it easier to browse French web pages: http://astroblahhh.com/languages/french/french-frame_demo.html
(I also made a Japanese and German one too. Links available on this page: http://astroblahhh.com/languages/language_frames_notes.shtml )
Also, WordReference.com has a dictionary entry for "chatte" (female cat): http://www.wordreference.com/fren/chatte
Good luck. :)
Hi,
This site presents vidéos and texts in 8 languages (english, french...):
http://www.euronews.net
French conjugations:
http://www.le-dictionnaire.com/
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