This is day 5 of the French Revolution, my quest to teach myself as much French as I can in 30 days.
I've done 30-day challenges of other things before, like 30 days in a row working out and 30 days in a row writing an article, but this is the first time I'm taking my readers with me along the way, posting daily reports on my progress. I'm pleased with how much connection I'm getting with my readers through this. I've got a lot of people offering support and resources.
Today I'm pretty drowsy because I'm in the middle of switching my sleep schedule. I'd like to get into a sleep schedule where I'm up by 8am. (Yeah, yeah, that's not that early, but I'm a grad student. Many of my peers are still in bed at noon) At first, that means going to sleep on a late schedule and forcing yourself to wake up on an early schedule. Meaning you get very little sleep until you adjust to going to sleep earlier. Right now I have such a temptation to take a nap, but I know if I do that then I'll have to start the whole process over again tomorrow.
REVIEWING SCHEDULED CARDS
Yesterday I started with pronunciation cards first. Today I'll start with sentence cards first. For those coming late to the Revolution, I'm using Anki, a computerized flashcard program which uses sophisticated algorithms to optimize the flashcard reviewing process.
Today, I was scheduled to review 221 sentence cards, of which 138 I had added yesterday and hadn't ever reviewed before, and the other 83 were older. It took about 55 minutes to finish the sentence reviews, but that included making and eating some food.
I was scheduled to review 33 pronunciation cards, including 11 new cards and 22 previously reviewed cards. This took only 7 minutes to review. Considering how much trouble pronunciation is in French, this is not an optimal state of affairs, is it! I will have to address this shortly...
HOW WE LEARN LANGUAGES FROM SENTENCES
Doing these reviews, I've come to understand how we learn languages by doing the sentence-mining method.
Picture billions of paths running through the brain, all criss-crossing each other endlessly. When we're presented with a sentence in a language we understand, the sentence is sent down those paths. It makes many turns as it comes to many forks, and eventually reaches a destination, which is the meaning of the sentence.
Now, suppose we encounter a sentence in a totally foreign language. It starts out on its journey, comes to a fork, and immediately gets stuck since we don't know how to parse it to figure out which fork it should take.
But, suppose we've been studying the language's grammar. And maybe some of the words are cognates and the rest we can figure out by context. Then we can manually trace out the path the sentence ought to follow, sort of manually pushing it along, "forcing" the appropriate neurons in our brain to be fired off. The sentence reaches an artificial destination, and thus a meaning is formed. We flip the card to look at the English translation to see whether the meaning was correct. If so, we pass the card and the SRS schedules it to appear again much later; if not, we fail the card and the SRS shuffles it back into today's reviews.
But here's the thing. As paths are traced in this artificial way, trails are blazed. It's like when people repeatedly walk through a field, over a long time a trail is naturally formed by all those footsteps. A natural "trail" is carved into our mind. Subsequently, new sentences will tend toward following that carved trail.
As we repeat this process with many, many sentences, the trails are refined and deepened. Eventually they're fully paved superhighways complete with highway patrols and carpool lanes and truck stops :) That's when we're fluent in the language. (At least, the reading part)
ANOTHER JAPANESE-FRENCH-ENGLISH POLYGLOT
Although my attempt to establish a base at the WordReference forums was deleted by triggerhappy forum moderators, a private message pointed me toward this girl's Youtube videos: LeylaRandomness. She is French native, English fluent 2nd language, and Japanese 3rd language, with a bunch of others to a lesser extent. That's pretty encouraging, if she can do it so can I and so can you. I'm not sure what would be harder: starting with English and learning French, or starting with French and learning English. (English might seem easy if it's your mother tongue, but it's actually a real pain of a language. See my article, 10 Reasons English Is A Hard Language.)
SENTENCE-MINING TEX'S FRENCH GRAMMAR
I finished the last few parts of the adjective chapter. Then, I saw how long the verb chapter is. I was expecting it to be long, but not this long. I decided to look ahead and see what other chapters are really long. Most are okay, it looks like verbs and tense/mood are the two really long chapters. Oh well, I'll do what I can.
I'm really spoiled by Japanese verbs. They're so much easier to conjugate. Did you know Japanese verbs don't change based on the subject? Doesn't matter if it's you, me, him, her, them, or us, the verb is the same.
In the "faire expressions" section, there are many sentences starting with "Il". These are very hard to copy and paste because the author uses a sans-serif font, so the capital i is very thin. In fact, I just noticed the author is using a sans-serif font for the French, and a serif font for the English. This is very strange. When you're learning or teaching French, or any language which uses capital i's and lowercase L's a lot, you should use a serif font so people can tell which is which.
I sentence-mined the verbs chapter up to and including "faire expressions", which actually turns out to be a good half of the chapter or more. This chapter has a lot of sections, but most are very short. Sentence mining took an hour and 4 minutes. I added about 161 cards, bringing the total to 602 sentence cards.
Khatzumoto makes a big deal about the goal of 10,000 sentences to reach fluency. Of course that number is somewhat arbitrary (never trust such an even power of ten), but according to the 10,000 sentence logic, I'm over 1/20th of the way to fluency ;)
CARD-MINING FOR PRONUNCIATION
I looked at the next section at LanguageGuide, "Final Consonants", and am a little worried that this section doesn't actually say anything whatsoever. The whole section can basically be summed up as: "sometimes final consonants are spoken, sometimes they're silent". This could make the pronunciation part of the French Revolution very interesting :) Well, I love a challenge...
I think it's time to change tack entirely with respect to pronunciation. For starters, I noticed it is possible to get the Tex's French Grammar audio files in MP3 format, or at least most of them: near the top of most pages there's a feed button labeled "download MP3s..." I probably just missed that before, but I'd like to imagine that my previous rants about Quicktime actually spurred the author into action ;) Makes me feel big and important ;)
In that case, I'm gonna make a 3rd deck, for pronunciation practice. Rather than have pronunciation rules, this third deck will have cards where the question side is a dialog and the answer side plays the audio file. To review these cards, I'll try to speak the dialog and get it similar to the audio file. A much more natural way for learning pronunciation, plus it'll reinforce the sentence-mining method.
Of course, it takes a lot more work to set that up, so I'll have far fewer cards here than in the main sentence deck, where I can just copy-and-paste sentences with ease...
Ok, made the first such card, and Anki seems to have totally frozen. That's not good. I guess I will post for help at the Anki forums, and come back to this tomorrow.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND STUDYING
I've started to notice that I'm not all that conscious while doing some parts of this. Mainly the sentence mining. When I sentence mine Japanese, it's less mechanical because I have to carefully parse each sentence before adding it, to make sure I actually know how to read it at all (thanks to our friends the Chinese characters).
I'm thinking about how I can make sentence-mining more interesting. The problem is that at my stage, I need the English translations, and authentic French text doesn't usually have those. And even if it did, I'd probably just end up getting in the same unconscious copy-and-paste rut. I'll think about this dilemma and tomorrow I might be able to surprise you with something cool... if the Greek muses smile on me before then ;)
Today was a fairly short day, only about 3 and a half hours of French study, including typing up this article. By the way, I type these articles as I go, not all at once. The downside might be less planning, but the up side is that it's like we're studying together. By doing it this way I'm providing readers with a closer connection, and it should be very profitable for those who want to use this as an example for studying a language or developing their Inner Autodidact in general.
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 4
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 6
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, if the French Revolution should be put down and I be executed at the guillotine, this shall be my legacy!
Ergative Verbs
Five Reasons To Study A Foreign Language
Irregular Verbs In Japanese
Self-Responsibility
Scientists And Leadership
I've done 30-day challenges of other things before, like 30 days in a row working out and 30 days in a row writing an article, but this is the first time I'm taking my readers with me along the way, posting daily reports on my progress. I'm pleased with how much connection I'm getting with my readers through this. I've got a lot of people offering support and resources.
Today I'm pretty drowsy because I'm in the middle of switching my sleep schedule. I'd like to get into a sleep schedule where I'm up by 8am. (Yeah, yeah, that's not that early, but I'm a grad student. Many of my peers are still in bed at noon) At first, that means going to sleep on a late schedule and forcing yourself to wake up on an early schedule. Meaning you get very little sleep until you adjust to going to sleep earlier. Right now I have such a temptation to take a nap, but I know if I do that then I'll have to start the whole process over again tomorrow.
REVIEWING SCHEDULED CARDS
Yesterday I started with pronunciation cards first. Today I'll start with sentence cards first. For those coming late to the Revolution, I'm using Anki, a computerized flashcard program which uses sophisticated algorithms to optimize the flashcard reviewing process.
Today, I was scheduled to review 221 sentence cards, of which 138 I had added yesterday and hadn't ever reviewed before, and the other 83 were older. It took about 55 minutes to finish the sentence reviews, but that included making and eating some food.
I was scheduled to review 33 pronunciation cards, including 11 new cards and 22 previously reviewed cards. This took only 7 minutes to review. Considering how much trouble pronunciation is in French, this is not an optimal state of affairs, is it! I will have to address this shortly...
HOW WE LEARN LANGUAGES FROM SENTENCES
Doing these reviews, I've come to understand how we learn languages by doing the sentence-mining method.
Picture billions of paths running through the brain, all criss-crossing each other endlessly. When we're presented with a sentence in a language we understand, the sentence is sent down those paths. It makes many turns as it comes to many forks, and eventually reaches a destination, which is the meaning of the sentence.
Now, suppose we encounter a sentence in a totally foreign language. It starts out on its journey, comes to a fork, and immediately gets stuck since we don't know how to parse it to figure out which fork it should take.
But, suppose we've been studying the language's grammar. And maybe some of the words are cognates and the rest we can figure out by context. Then we can manually trace out the path the sentence ought to follow, sort of manually pushing it along, "forcing" the appropriate neurons in our brain to be fired off. The sentence reaches an artificial destination, and thus a meaning is formed. We flip the card to look at the English translation to see whether the meaning was correct. If so, we pass the card and the SRS schedules it to appear again much later; if not, we fail the card and the SRS shuffles it back into today's reviews.
But here's the thing. As paths are traced in this artificial way, trails are blazed. It's like when people repeatedly walk through a field, over a long time a trail is naturally formed by all those footsteps. A natural "trail" is carved into our mind. Subsequently, new sentences will tend toward following that carved trail.
As we repeat this process with many, many sentences, the trails are refined and deepened. Eventually they're fully paved superhighways complete with highway patrols and carpool lanes and truck stops :) That's when we're fluent in the language. (At least, the reading part)
ANOTHER JAPANESE-FRENCH-ENGLISH POLYGLOT
Although my attempt to establish a base at the WordReference forums was deleted by triggerhappy forum moderators, a private message pointed me toward this girl's Youtube videos: LeylaRandomness. She is French native, English fluent 2nd language, and Japanese 3rd language, with a bunch of others to a lesser extent. That's pretty encouraging, if she can do it so can I and so can you. I'm not sure what would be harder: starting with English and learning French, or starting with French and learning English. (English might seem easy if it's your mother tongue, but it's actually a real pain of a language. See my article, 10 Reasons English Is A Hard Language.)
SENTENCE-MINING TEX'S FRENCH GRAMMAR
I finished the last few parts of the adjective chapter. Then, I saw how long the verb chapter is. I was expecting it to be long, but not this long. I decided to look ahead and see what other chapters are really long. Most are okay, it looks like verbs and tense/mood are the two really long chapters. Oh well, I'll do what I can.
I'm really spoiled by Japanese verbs. They're so much easier to conjugate. Did you know Japanese verbs don't change based on the subject? Doesn't matter if it's you, me, him, her, them, or us, the verb is the same.
In the "faire expressions" section, there are many sentences starting with "Il". These are very hard to copy and paste because the author uses a sans-serif font, so the capital i is very thin. In fact, I just noticed the author is using a sans-serif font for the French, and a serif font for the English. This is very strange. When you're learning or teaching French, or any language which uses capital i's and lowercase L's a lot, you should use a serif font so people can tell which is which.
I sentence-mined the verbs chapter up to and including "faire expressions", which actually turns out to be a good half of the chapter or more. This chapter has a lot of sections, but most are very short. Sentence mining took an hour and 4 minutes. I added about 161 cards, bringing the total to 602 sentence cards.
Khatzumoto makes a big deal about the goal of 10,000 sentences to reach fluency. Of course that number is somewhat arbitrary (never trust such an even power of ten), but according to the 10,000 sentence logic, I'm over 1/20th of the way to fluency ;)
CARD-MINING FOR PRONUNCIATION
I looked at the next section at LanguageGuide, "Final Consonants", and am a little worried that this section doesn't actually say anything whatsoever. The whole section can basically be summed up as: "sometimes final consonants are spoken, sometimes they're silent". This could make the pronunciation part of the French Revolution very interesting :) Well, I love a challenge...
I think it's time to change tack entirely with respect to pronunciation. For starters, I noticed it is possible to get the Tex's French Grammar audio files in MP3 format, or at least most of them: near the top of most pages there's a feed button labeled "download MP3s..." I probably just missed that before, but I'd like to imagine that my previous rants about Quicktime actually spurred the author into action ;) Makes me feel big and important ;)
In that case, I'm gonna make a 3rd deck, for pronunciation practice. Rather than have pronunciation rules, this third deck will have cards where the question side is a dialog and the answer side plays the audio file. To review these cards, I'll try to speak the dialog and get it similar to the audio file. A much more natural way for learning pronunciation, plus it'll reinforce the sentence-mining method.
Of course, it takes a lot more work to set that up, so I'll have far fewer cards here than in the main sentence deck, where I can just copy-and-paste sentences with ease...
Ok, made the first such card, and Anki seems to have totally frozen. That's not good. I guess I will post for help at the Anki forums, and come back to this tomorrow.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND STUDYING
I've started to notice that I'm not all that conscious while doing some parts of this. Mainly the sentence mining. When I sentence mine Japanese, it's less mechanical because I have to carefully parse each sentence before adding it, to make sure I actually know how to read it at all (thanks to our friends the Chinese characters).
I'm thinking about how I can make sentence-mining more interesting. The problem is that at my stage, I need the English translations, and authentic French text doesn't usually have those. And even if it did, I'd probably just end up getting in the same unconscious copy-and-paste rut. I'll think about this dilemma and tomorrow I might be able to surprise you with something cool... if the Greek muses smile on me before then ;)
Today was a fairly short day, only about 3 and a half hours of French study, including typing up this article. By the way, I type these articles as I go, not all at once. The downside might be less planning, but the up side is that it's like we're studying together. By doing it this way I'm providing readers with a closer connection, and it should be very profitable for those who want to use this as an example for studying a language or developing their Inner Autodidact in general.
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 4
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 6
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, if the French Revolution should be put down and I be executed at the guillotine, this shall be my legacy!
Ergative Verbs
Five Reasons To Study A Foreign Language
Irregular Verbs In Japanese
Self-Responsibility
Scientists And Leadership
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