The French Revolution: Day 4

French Aristocrats tremble in their bunkers to the sounds of gunshots and explosions, as the sun rises on Day 4 of the French Revolution. This is my quest to teach myself as much French as I can in 30 days. Vive la Résistance!


REVIEWING SCHEDULED CARDS

Today I'm switching it up and reviewing pronunciation cards first. I'm not sure what's better, pronunciation cards first or sentence cards first. I'll experiment between the two for awhile until I can discern which one's better. Maybe they both have advantages and disadvantages.

I notice that if a card was rated "hard" yesterday, rating it "hard" again today will actually make its next appearance be 2 days from now. Interesting. I was thinking that for now I wanted to see my pronunciation cards at least once a day, but maybe the SRS people know better. They're the experts when it comes to optimizing memory, and if I really want, I can always use Anki's "cram" feature...

Some of the pronunciation rules, I know it comes down to one of two options (basically "e" as in "pet" or "e" as in "egg"), but my choices aren't much better than a straight 50/50 random guess would be. That's normal and expected, because I didn't spend any time consciously dwelling on the patterns. As days go on, my performance on these rules will improve as my subconscious mind figures out the patterns. Knowing the patterns subconsciously is better, because in a real life conversation I'm never gonna have the time to sit down and think "Ok, the syllable ends in a mute consonant so it's open, but the e has a dash over it..."

This time, I had the presence of mind to keep track of how long the sentence deck took me. It took 58 minutes to review all the scheduled cards. That doesn't include the pronunciation cards, which I wasn't timing.

I'm a little worried about the whole pronunciation thing. Well, it's only Day 4, I have 26 more days to work on it.


THE NUMBER PROBLEM

Already I'm running into a problem familiar to me from Japanese, the number problem. It's a problem which comes up when you use the sentence-mining technique. The problem is that languages far and wide use the same digits to express numbers, but obviously they are read very differently. So, you get a sentence with a number in it, written as digits instead of spelled out, and you're stuck. If you don't know how numbers work yet, you have to decide how much effort you're willing to expend figuring out how to read that number.

I imagine it's a fairly minor problem in French, where you just learn how to count and you're done with it. In Japanese it's much worse, because there are "counters", which often have irregular readings, and specific number+counter combinations may or may not be listed in dictionaries. If you don't know what a counter is, just consider yourself fortunate to have never studied a language with them. They're annoying... but fun once you start to understand them.


INPUT THROUGH MUSIC

Today I've been enjoying some music shared in the comments. Paris Combo is a pretty catchy band with some upbeat music. This song is interesting, it's kind of half English and half French, I don't know whether it's a fantastic idea for me to listen to it, or a terrible idea. Well, I'm never one to turn down an adventure! ;)


TEX'S FRENCH GRAMMAR

Today I'm gonna start adding some cards with blank "answer" sides, when the sentence is really obvious. In my Japanese deck, almost none of my sentence cards have any English anywhere on them, and it lets me enter a kind of "Japanese trance". Well, except for the past long time the deck's been swamped with Heisig cards and their English keywords... but all the sentences are free of English!

And, the first time I try making a card with a blank answer, I get a bug message from Anki. Making the answer be a single space, doesn't fix it. Annoying. This is AFTER going into the preferences and changing it so it should supposedly allow blank answers.

In my opinion, Anki would be better if it didn't force answers of cards to be unique. There are many situations where multiple sentences in the target language have the same translation in English. In fact part of the joy of learning other languages, is learning how many different ways there are to say something which, in English, is pretty clear cut.

I read the grammar points, and sentence-mined, the first 7 parts of the "adjectives" chapter. This took about 50 minutes. When I first embarked on this 30 day challenge, I would never have imagined I'd be learning so much about the University of Texas at Austin.. ;)


MAKING NEW PRONUNCIATION CARDS

I "card-mined" the 4th section, "Accents", of the LanguageGuide pronunciation guide. That was so short and had so few cards that I moved right on and card-mined the next section, "Consonants". 11 cards were added, making 47 total.

Looking ahead, I should be able to finish card-mining this guide tomorrow. Then, I'll start on some more interesting pronunciation work.


STRUCTURE

Studying French is really making me appreciate the fine structure of Japanese. The Japanese language is so structural, it's almost like doing mathematical logic. Romantic languages seem to be somehow less structural. Of course the same remarks go for my native tongue English, but it's difficult to judge structure in one's own language because it's all so automatic. (See my article, "The Sound Of Your Native Tongue") Of course, this isn't meant as a remark against French. French seems somehow more "fluid". Japanese makes me think of a highly patterned quilt, while French makes me think of flowing water.


Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 3
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 5
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.


Here are some other articles I wrote, back before my brain was hijacked by French mind control!
Prescriptive Linguistics Vs. Descriptive Linguistics
The Four Conditionals In Japanese
The Golden Rule Of Language Learning
Learning Language Through Travel
How To Improve The Music Listening Experience