The sun has set on day 5, and now day 6 begins in the French Revolution: one man's quest to teach himself as much of the French language as he can in a few hours a day for 30 days.
I'm stuffing my face with food as I study today, frantically loading up on protein after absolutely destroying myself at the gym. Nothing like a little self-annihilation to get over the gloom of Winter!
MAKING PRONUNCIATION CARDS
Normally, the first thing I do in a day is review the scheduled cards. But today I'm going to focus first on making some pronunciation cards. I wanted to do this yesterday, but ran into a problem with Anki, the free optimized flashcard program I'm using. It was freezing when I tried adding the mp3s from Tex's French Grammar. I posted about that at the Anki Forums, and the solution is to convert the MP3's into OGG format.
Making audio cards was already time-consuming, and now I had to spend a good half hour trying out converters before I found a free one which wasn't utterly crippled. However, the folks at the Anki forums said they're going to eventually change the audio libraries Anki uses, which should fix the problem with the freezing audio support. It would be awesome if that would happen soon :)
The way I'm making these pronunciation cards is as follows. The question side has some text, and the answer side plays an audio file. In an ideal world, the audio file should be exactly the text on the question side. Unfortunately, the audio files available from Tex's French Grammar site are for entire dialogs, not individual sentences. So for now, the audio files will have the answer I desire, plus some other junk which I'll try not to pay attention to. I don't know how well this will work... that's the whole joy of experimentation :) Because Japanese is so easy to pronounce, I never had to work specially on Japanese pronunciation. I'm learning a lot by working on pronunciation for French.
In total, I made 18 pronunciation cards. And it took more work than making 50 text cards with copy-and-paste. But, for French, I'm finding pronunciation is by far the most difficult part of the language, so it's worth all the effort.
REVIEWING CARDS
First, I gave those 18 new pronunciation cards a run-through. I've never done audio flashcards before, so I'm very new to the whole thing. It's much slower than text flashcards since you have to wait for the audio to actually play. One feature I might suggest for the Anki team would be the ability to halt an audio file mid-play. It took me 16 minutes to go through the 18 pronunciation cards, but that's not to say I mastered them all. I just approximated the speaker for all the cards and rated them all "hard".
Next, I went through the old pronunciation fact cards. This took only 3 minutes and I got all but 3 or 4 cards right the first time. A tremendous improvement from last time. Too bad knowing the formal rules isn't the same thing as being a master pronouncer (and even if it were, there don't seem to be any formal rules for when ending consonants should be spoken and when they should be silent).
Next, the main attraction: reviewing the sentence cards. This took 55 minutes, and I was feeling very fatigued near the end, like an intense urge to go nap.
SENTENCE MINING
I don't have a lot of time to finish the French studies this evening so I'll just do some more sentence mining at Tex's French Grammar, but I had a good idea for where to go for sentence mining, a perfect type of source which will be interesting to collect and at the same time quite usable. You'll have to wait til tomorrow to find out about it ;)
In part 10 of the verbs section, the example dialog goes briefly "meta", breaking the fourth wall of language: "Tex, explique-moi la différence entre savoir et connaître." ("Tex, explain to me the difference between `savoir' and `connaître'.")
I sentence-mined up to and including the "quitter, partir, etc." section of the verbs chapter. In all, 75 sentence cards were added, and it took 37 minutes.
MORE INPUT THAN OUTPUT
You might have noticed that in this French Revolution, I've been taking in a LOT more input than I've been giving output. That's natural: a baby learns by taking input, not by doing output. There are cases of children who went a long time without ever speaking, and when they finally spoke, they were already fluent. Furthermore, a baby is never corrected or expected to do perfect, as college students in an introductory language course are. A baby can say the dumbest crap and everyone will go "ooh" and "ahh". That's how we're supposed to learn language. That's one reason it's so good to be a self-teacher.
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 5
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 7
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles I wrote. Enjoy!
The Evolution Of Penmanship
Teach Steadily, Not Quickly
How To Be A Better Teacher
Introduction To Lucid Dreaming
Would You Worsen The World For A Billion Dollars?
I'm stuffing my face with food as I study today, frantically loading up on protein after absolutely destroying myself at the gym. Nothing like a little self-annihilation to get over the gloom of Winter!
MAKING PRONUNCIATION CARDS
Normally, the first thing I do in a day is review the scheduled cards. But today I'm going to focus first on making some pronunciation cards. I wanted to do this yesterday, but ran into a problem with Anki, the free optimized flashcard program I'm using. It was freezing when I tried adding the mp3s from Tex's French Grammar. I posted about that at the Anki Forums, and the solution is to convert the MP3's into OGG format.
Making audio cards was already time-consuming, and now I had to spend a good half hour trying out converters before I found a free one which wasn't utterly crippled. However, the folks at the Anki forums said they're going to eventually change the audio libraries Anki uses, which should fix the problem with the freezing audio support. It would be awesome if that would happen soon :)
The way I'm making these pronunciation cards is as follows. The question side has some text, and the answer side plays an audio file. In an ideal world, the audio file should be exactly the text on the question side. Unfortunately, the audio files available from Tex's French Grammar site are for entire dialogs, not individual sentences. So for now, the audio files will have the answer I desire, plus some other junk which I'll try not to pay attention to. I don't know how well this will work... that's the whole joy of experimentation :) Because Japanese is so easy to pronounce, I never had to work specially on Japanese pronunciation. I'm learning a lot by working on pronunciation for French.
In total, I made 18 pronunciation cards. And it took more work than making 50 text cards with copy-and-paste. But, for French, I'm finding pronunciation is by far the most difficult part of the language, so it's worth all the effort.
REVIEWING CARDS
First, I gave those 18 new pronunciation cards a run-through. I've never done audio flashcards before, so I'm very new to the whole thing. It's much slower than text flashcards since you have to wait for the audio to actually play. One feature I might suggest for the Anki team would be the ability to halt an audio file mid-play. It took me 16 minutes to go through the 18 pronunciation cards, but that's not to say I mastered them all. I just approximated the speaker for all the cards and rated them all "hard".
Next, I went through the old pronunciation fact cards. This took only 3 minutes and I got all but 3 or 4 cards right the first time. A tremendous improvement from last time. Too bad knowing the formal rules isn't the same thing as being a master pronouncer (and even if it were, there don't seem to be any formal rules for when ending consonants should be spoken and when they should be silent).
Next, the main attraction: reviewing the sentence cards. This took 55 minutes, and I was feeling very fatigued near the end, like an intense urge to go nap.
SENTENCE MINING
I don't have a lot of time to finish the French studies this evening so I'll just do some more sentence mining at Tex's French Grammar, but I had a good idea for where to go for sentence mining, a perfect type of source which will be interesting to collect and at the same time quite usable. You'll have to wait til tomorrow to find out about it ;)
In part 10 of the verbs section, the example dialog goes briefly "meta", breaking the fourth wall of language: "Tex, explique-moi la différence entre savoir et connaître." ("Tex, explain to me the difference between `savoir' and `connaître'.")
I sentence-mined up to and including the "quitter, partir, etc." section of the verbs chapter. In all, 75 sentence cards were added, and it took 37 minutes.
MORE INPUT THAN OUTPUT
You might have noticed that in this French Revolution, I've been taking in a LOT more input than I've been giving output. That's natural: a baby learns by taking input, not by doing output. There are cases of children who went a long time without ever speaking, and when they finally spoke, they were already fluent. Furthermore, a baby is never corrected or expected to do perfect, as college students in an introductory language course are. A baby can say the dumbest crap and everyone will go "ooh" and "ahh". That's how we're supposed to learn language. That's one reason it's so good to be a self-teacher.
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 5
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 7
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles I wrote. Enjoy!
The Evolution Of Penmanship
Teach Steadily, Not Quickly
How To Be A Better Teacher
Introduction To Lucid Dreaming
Would You Worsen The World For A Billion Dollars?
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1 comments:
Remember "the French don't care what you do as long as you pronounce it correctly." (My Fair Lady)
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