The quarter is finally over, and I have several weeks before the next one starts. Therefore, I'm commencing the French Revolution. Mission: To learn as much French as I possibly can in 30 days, and write about the process. This is not so much because I particularly like French or French culture, but because I like languages and Earth culture. With first language being English, I've spent a lot of time studying Japanese, which is one of the hardest languages for an English speaker to learn. In the process, I've learned a lot about HOW to learn a language. The French Revolution will take this knowledge about second language acquisition and put it to the test. This is Trench Warfare Language Learning.
WHY FRENCH?
I wanted a language which is fairly easy for English speakers, so that my language learning skills will really stand out and be highlighted. Perhaps the most obvious candidate would be Spanish, but I took that for two semesters in junior college. Granted, I haven't maintained it and so I've forgotten most of it, but still I don't want to taint the experiment with prior study. Same goes for German, in which I took a reading course as part of the requirements for a math PhD. I don't want to do a conlang (constructed language), even though I did study a little Esperanto on my own at one point. I want to work on a language which is really used, so I'll be developing a skill I can really use all my life.
French is the best candidate, based on these considerations. It's among the most widespread languages in the world, it's easy for English learners, and besides that, at the time of writing this, I don't know the tiniest thing about it. Perfect.
French also has the virtue of being incredibly sexy.
BECOMING A BETTER SELF-TEACHER
This project will also train my Autodidact muscles. That's fancy talk for saying, it'll further train my ability to teach myself stuff. I won't be using any classroom or teacher to learn French, unless maybe you count internet forums. Read more about being a self-teacher at my article: Autodidact: Be A Self-Teacher. In the modern world, being able to teach yourself complex subjects is like playing a game with cheat codes turned on. I highly recommend everyone develop their self-teaching ability.
Hopefully, by reading about my French Revolution, you can gain a little extra knowledge about self-teaching, since I'll be trying to record as much about what I do as possible.
ADVANTAGES FROM JAPANESE STUDY
Perhaps the biggest advantage I have from Japanese study is a mastery of Spaced Repetition Systems (SRS). An SRS is a computer program which you put your flashcards into and then review on it. The thing is, when you review a flashcard, you have to rate it on how well you know it (from completely forgetting it to knowing it easily). The beautiful part is that the program takes your ratings and uses them in a sophisticated calculation to determine which cards to show you. It takes flashcard study and optimizes it to the max. As you learn cards better, they show up less, so the SRS is also excellent for *maintaining* a language. Once I finish the French Revolution challenge, I can stop studying new things and just let the SRS take care of reviewing what I know. Gradually, with the way SRS works, it'll take less and less time out of every day, and yet I'll keep my knowledge of the language perfectly maintained.
Another big advantage is a better sense of what material is good and what material isn't. With Japanese, it's a very difficult language, AND it's a language very popular among people who are also good with computers. Those factors combine to create a lot of RIDICULOUSLY high quality, free Japanese learning material online. Consequently, I'm rather spoiled, and if you try shoving some low-quality, inefficient French textbook on me, I'm gonna see right through it.
Japanese has also given me some strong language-learning self-discipline training. I've been studying Japanese every single day for a very, very long time now, so it'll be a cinch to do French study every day. Studying every day is extremely important, even if it's just 100 cards a day.
Studying Japanese has spoiled me in another way: the writing system. I've gotten pretty good reading Japanese, which has two crazy syllabaries and thousands of Chinese characters. Compared to that, reading the Roman characters used in French should seem almost TOO easy, like a body-builder going from huge barbells down to those 2 pound weight-bracelet things. Heck, I can already get the basic gist of an easy French passage just from my ridiculously nuanced knowledge of English, which has tons of French cognates.
Speaking of the Japanese-Chinese characters (kanji), in memorizing those crazy characters I've learned a lot about how to efficiently use visualization to remember things. I already know over 3/4ths of the 2000 really important kanji (the Jouyou kanji), and believe me, I didn't learn them by writing them all out 1000 times each. I used a ridiculously cutting edge learning technique to memorize them, developed by a guy called James Heisig. You can read about it in the book review I wrote for his book, Remembering The Kanji. Of course, French doesn't have kanji, so the knowledge doesn't directly transfer over, but I'm sure it'll help somehow. Maybe since French nouns are gendered, I can do some creative visualization to remember noun genders.
And last but certainly not least...
SENTENCE MINING
Studying Japanese I was introduced to the brilliant concept of sentence mining. Basically, real speakers don't learn languages by studying textbooks, they learn them by hearing and reading millions of sentences. The sentence mining concept goes like this: rather than make flashcards out of vocabulary lists, you make flashcards out of sentences (or at least clauses). The "Question" part of the flashcard is a sentence in the target language, and the "Answer" part is just some supplemental info like pronunciation help, maybe the meaning of some obscure words in the sentence... or sometimes the "answer" side is just plain BLANK. See also my article: Foreign Language Sentences With No English Translations. The point of the flashcard is not to translate the sentence into English, but to comprehend the sentence directly, like a real Frenchman would.
A NOTE ABOUT PRONUNCIATION
I'm gonna start mining sentences even though I don't yet know all the rules of how to pronounce them. This is controversial, but I believe as I learn the correct pronunciations, my mind will automatically fix any incorrect pronunciations I've made. With Japanese, for example, most books don't even go into the subtle and complex rules about pitch and tone, which are a real nightmare and change between dialects anyway. And yet, I've gradually gotten intuitively used to them.
DIFFERENCES FROM WHEN I STUDIED JAPANESE
When I studied Japanese, initially I made flashcards with grammar items, like "What is the past tense of a verb ending in tsu?" This time, I'll try skipping those, trusting my brain to naturally learn such rules from example sentences, just like a French baby. If the grammar gets to where it's hindering me from making progress, maybe I'll rethink this, but for now I'll see just how necessary rote memorization really is.
Another change is when I deal with long sentences or collections of sentences, I'm going to try breaking them up more when I put them into card form. From studying Japanese, I've found when I have sentences or paragraphs which are too long or complicated, it's just not worth the time it takes to review them. To train reading such things, it's better to actually read the real language.
Another thing is that, because of the more familiar writing system, I can be much more liberal with what sentences I add. With Japanese, if I don't know a word, I can't even read the sentence-- I can't even make a phonetically educated guess. It's amazing that already I'm adding sentences with complex subjects like "existentialism". Doing that in Japanese would be very difficult even now, much less when I was first starting out. With Romance languages, it's almost like the more obscure the word, the more likely you'll recognize it as an easy cognate.
LANGUAGE LADDERING
An interesting idea proposed by Khatzumoto at All Japanese All The Time, is Language Laddering. That means, taking one foreign language which you've studied, and using it to study another one. In my case, that would mean studying French using Japanese. I might experiment with that a little and see how it works. Not today, though.
DAY 1
First thing I did was switch off the Japanese songs I was listening to and replace them with some French ones. I don't know jack about French music, so for now, that means listening to Kate Ryan, a German singer who sings in French for whatever reason. That's a temporary band-aid obviously, I'll need to poke around and see what good French music is out there. I love Eurodance, so hopefully that might help.
Next I did a google search for "French Grammar". The top result is something called "Tex's French Grammar", which looks very well made, but it's also associated with an official online university course, which sets off alarm bells in my head. I'm not some freshman taking French because it's required for a 4 year degree program. I was really hoping I'd find something akin to Tae Kim's Japanese Guide To Japanese Grammar, but an initial search didn't find anything like that. Tex's Grammar seems to have lots of sound files, unfortunately they require Apple Bloattime, err I mean, Apple Quicktime, which I'm not putting anywhere near my computer.
I started reading the first section at Tex's French Grammar, and it has some example sentences, so it's time to start a new Spaced Repetition System deck. I've always used Mnemosyne as my SRS, but for the French Revolution I'll be using Anki. Anki is an SRS designed specially for Japanese, so as someone who is pretty active in the Japanese Learning community, I really should know more about Anki. So, I'll learn about it by using it for French. It also has some really cool features which Mnemosyne lacks, so maybe in time I'll move everything over to Anki. I'd already downloaded Anki before to try out my Japanese cards on it, but never stuck with it because it failed to import any cards with blank "answer" sides (which for me was a LOT of cards!)
I quickly got tired of the very limited number of French Kate Ryan songs I had, and started listening to nature sounds instead. Music can be really distracting. See my article: Drilling Flashcards Without Music.
I finished the "nouns" chapter of Tex's French Grammar, putting all the example dialogs as sentences. Some of the lines with many sentences were broken into multiple cards. I only glanced over the grammatical discussion. The good thing about this Grammar is that it has lots of example dialogs with English translations. That's extremely nice for sentence mining when you're first starting a language. The point of a sentence flashcard is to comprehend the sentence, but to rate the card you need to know whether you comprehended it correctly or not, and an English translation is good for that. Although, when I become more advanced, I'll start making English translations invisible.
Next, I went to Google and searched "French pronunciation". I'm not sure whether I should make flashcards for this or not. I might make pronunciation flashcards but make them as a new deck, to keep them separate from sentences. I'll consult some forums and ask for their input on the matter. None of the top google hits seem to be outstandingly high quality.
I wandered over to Wikipedia and skimmed their article on "French language". Wow, I never realized there was a Luxemburgish language, did you? When learning a language, it's good to read about the history, culture, and trivia of the language.
Finally, to end the day, I went to google and searched "french language forum". Coming from the Japanese learning community, I was rather shocked at the dismal quality of the online community for learning French. For the day, I settled with making an account at the about.com French For Beginners forum. I posted asking for some general reading recommendation and so on; here's my first post there.
NEW CARDS ADDED TODAY
I added 85 sentences, most from Tex's French Grammar, but a few from Wikipedia. Tomorrow I'll actually review these cards. I'm still getting used to Anki, which is considerably different than Mnemosyne. It's like a smaller learning project on its own.
Next day in the French Revolution: Day 2
You can also go to the French Revolution Table of Contents.
Here are some articles I've written. Maybe someday I'll translate them into French.
Autodidact: Be A Self-Teacher
10 Reasons Why English Is A Hard Language
Will The Languages Of The World Ever Merge?
What Is Fluency Anyway?
How The Mind Learns
WHY FRENCH?
I wanted a language which is fairly easy for English speakers, so that my language learning skills will really stand out and be highlighted. Perhaps the most obvious candidate would be Spanish, but I took that for two semesters in junior college. Granted, I haven't maintained it and so I've forgotten most of it, but still I don't want to taint the experiment with prior study. Same goes for German, in which I took a reading course as part of the requirements for a math PhD. I don't want to do a conlang (constructed language), even though I did study a little Esperanto on my own at one point. I want to work on a language which is really used, so I'll be developing a skill I can really use all my life.
French is the best candidate, based on these considerations. It's among the most widespread languages in the world, it's easy for English learners, and besides that, at the time of writing this, I don't know the tiniest thing about it. Perfect.
French also has the virtue of being incredibly sexy.
BECOMING A BETTER SELF-TEACHER
This project will also train my Autodidact muscles. That's fancy talk for saying, it'll further train my ability to teach myself stuff. I won't be using any classroom or teacher to learn French, unless maybe you count internet forums. Read more about being a self-teacher at my article: Autodidact: Be A Self-Teacher. In the modern world, being able to teach yourself complex subjects is like playing a game with cheat codes turned on. I highly recommend everyone develop their self-teaching ability.
Hopefully, by reading about my French Revolution, you can gain a little extra knowledge about self-teaching, since I'll be trying to record as much about what I do as possible.
ADVANTAGES FROM JAPANESE STUDY
Perhaps the biggest advantage I have from Japanese study is a mastery of Spaced Repetition Systems (SRS). An SRS is a computer program which you put your flashcards into and then review on it. The thing is, when you review a flashcard, you have to rate it on how well you know it (from completely forgetting it to knowing it easily). The beautiful part is that the program takes your ratings and uses them in a sophisticated calculation to determine which cards to show you. It takes flashcard study and optimizes it to the max. As you learn cards better, they show up less, so the SRS is also excellent for *maintaining* a language. Once I finish the French Revolution challenge, I can stop studying new things and just let the SRS take care of reviewing what I know. Gradually, with the way SRS works, it'll take less and less time out of every day, and yet I'll keep my knowledge of the language perfectly maintained.
Another big advantage is a better sense of what material is good and what material isn't. With Japanese, it's a very difficult language, AND it's a language very popular among people who are also good with computers. Those factors combine to create a lot of RIDICULOUSLY high quality, free Japanese learning material online. Consequently, I'm rather spoiled, and if you try shoving some low-quality, inefficient French textbook on me, I'm gonna see right through it.
Japanese has also given me some strong language-learning self-discipline training. I've been studying Japanese every single day for a very, very long time now, so it'll be a cinch to do French study every day. Studying every day is extremely important, even if it's just 100 cards a day.
Studying Japanese has spoiled me in another way: the writing system. I've gotten pretty good reading Japanese, which has two crazy syllabaries and thousands of Chinese characters. Compared to that, reading the Roman characters used in French should seem almost TOO easy, like a body-builder going from huge barbells down to those 2 pound weight-bracelet things. Heck, I can already get the basic gist of an easy French passage just from my ridiculously nuanced knowledge of English, which has tons of French cognates.
Speaking of the Japanese-Chinese characters (kanji), in memorizing those crazy characters I've learned a lot about how to efficiently use visualization to remember things. I already know over 3/4ths of the 2000 really important kanji (the Jouyou kanji), and believe me, I didn't learn them by writing them all out 1000 times each. I used a ridiculously cutting edge learning technique to memorize them, developed by a guy called James Heisig. You can read about it in the book review I wrote for his book, Remembering The Kanji. Of course, French doesn't have kanji, so the knowledge doesn't directly transfer over, but I'm sure it'll help somehow. Maybe since French nouns are gendered, I can do some creative visualization to remember noun genders.
And last but certainly not least...
SENTENCE MINING
Studying Japanese I was introduced to the brilliant concept of sentence mining. Basically, real speakers don't learn languages by studying textbooks, they learn them by hearing and reading millions of sentences. The sentence mining concept goes like this: rather than make flashcards out of vocabulary lists, you make flashcards out of sentences (or at least clauses). The "Question" part of the flashcard is a sentence in the target language, and the "Answer" part is just some supplemental info like pronunciation help, maybe the meaning of some obscure words in the sentence... or sometimes the "answer" side is just plain BLANK. See also my article: Foreign Language Sentences With No English Translations. The point of the flashcard is not to translate the sentence into English, but to comprehend the sentence directly, like a real Frenchman would.
A NOTE ABOUT PRONUNCIATION
I'm gonna start mining sentences even though I don't yet know all the rules of how to pronounce them. This is controversial, but I believe as I learn the correct pronunciations, my mind will automatically fix any incorrect pronunciations I've made. With Japanese, for example, most books don't even go into the subtle and complex rules about pitch and tone, which are a real nightmare and change between dialects anyway. And yet, I've gradually gotten intuitively used to them.
DIFFERENCES FROM WHEN I STUDIED JAPANESE
When I studied Japanese, initially I made flashcards with grammar items, like "What is the past tense of a verb ending in tsu?" This time, I'll try skipping those, trusting my brain to naturally learn such rules from example sentences, just like a French baby. If the grammar gets to where it's hindering me from making progress, maybe I'll rethink this, but for now I'll see just how necessary rote memorization really is.
Another change is when I deal with long sentences or collections of sentences, I'm going to try breaking them up more when I put them into card form. From studying Japanese, I've found when I have sentences or paragraphs which are too long or complicated, it's just not worth the time it takes to review them. To train reading such things, it's better to actually read the real language.
Another thing is that, because of the more familiar writing system, I can be much more liberal with what sentences I add. With Japanese, if I don't know a word, I can't even read the sentence-- I can't even make a phonetically educated guess. It's amazing that already I'm adding sentences with complex subjects like "existentialism". Doing that in Japanese would be very difficult even now, much less when I was first starting out. With Romance languages, it's almost like the more obscure the word, the more likely you'll recognize it as an easy cognate.
LANGUAGE LADDERING
An interesting idea proposed by Khatzumoto at All Japanese All The Time, is Language Laddering. That means, taking one foreign language which you've studied, and using it to study another one. In my case, that would mean studying French using Japanese. I might experiment with that a little and see how it works. Not today, though.
DAY 1
First thing I did was switch off the Japanese songs I was listening to and replace them with some French ones. I don't know jack about French music, so for now, that means listening to Kate Ryan, a German singer who sings in French for whatever reason. That's a temporary band-aid obviously, I'll need to poke around and see what good French music is out there. I love Eurodance, so hopefully that might help.
Next I did a google search for "French Grammar". The top result is something called "Tex's French Grammar", which looks very well made, but it's also associated with an official online university course, which sets off alarm bells in my head. I'm not some freshman taking French because it's required for a 4 year degree program. I was really hoping I'd find something akin to Tae Kim's Japanese Guide To Japanese Grammar, but an initial search didn't find anything like that. Tex's Grammar seems to have lots of sound files, unfortunately they require Apple Bloattime, err I mean, Apple Quicktime, which I'm not putting anywhere near my computer.
I started reading the first section at Tex's French Grammar, and it has some example sentences, so it's time to start a new Spaced Repetition System deck. I've always used Mnemosyne as my SRS, but for the French Revolution I'll be using Anki. Anki is an SRS designed specially for Japanese, so as someone who is pretty active in the Japanese Learning community, I really should know more about Anki. So, I'll learn about it by using it for French. It also has some really cool features which Mnemosyne lacks, so maybe in time I'll move everything over to Anki. I'd already downloaded Anki before to try out my Japanese cards on it, but never stuck with it because it failed to import any cards with blank "answer" sides (which for me was a LOT of cards!)
I quickly got tired of the very limited number of French Kate Ryan songs I had, and started listening to nature sounds instead. Music can be really distracting. See my article: Drilling Flashcards Without Music.
I finished the "nouns" chapter of Tex's French Grammar, putting all the example dialogs as sentences. Some of the lines with many sentences were broken into multiple cards. I only glanced over the grammatical discussion. The good thing about this Grammar is that it has lots of example dialogs with English translations. That's extremely nice for sentence mining when you're first starting a language. The point of a sentence flashcard is to comprehend the sentence, but to rate the card you need to know whether you comprehended it correctly or not, and an English translation is good for that. Although, when I become more advanced, I'll start making English translations invisible.
Next, I went to Google and searched "French pronunciation". I'm not sure whether I should make flashcards for this or not. I might make pronunciation flashcards but make them as a new deck, to keep them separate from sentences. I'll consult some forums and ask for their input on the matter. None of the top google hits seem to be outstandingly high quality.
I wandered over to Wikipedia and skimmed their article on "French language". Wow, I never realized there was a Luxemburgish language, did you? When learning a language, it's good to read about the history, culture, and trivia of the language.
Finally, to end the day, I went to google and searched "french language forum". Coming from the Japanese learning community, I was rather shocked at the dismal quality of the online community for learning French. For the day, I settled with making an account at the about.com French For Beginners forum. I posted asking for some general reading recommendation and so on; here's my first post there.
NEW CARDS ADDED TODAY
I added 85 sentences, most from Tex's French Grammar, but a few from Wikipedia. Tomorrow I'll actually review these cards. I'm still getting used to Anki, which is considerably different than Mnemosyne. It's like a smaller learning project on its own.
Next day in the French Revolution: Day 2
You can also go to the French Revolution Table of Contents.
Here are some articles I've written. Maybe someday I'll translate them into French.
Autodidact: Be A Self-Teacher
10 Reasons Why English Is A Hard Language
Will The Languages Of The World Ever Merge?
What Is Fluency Anyway?
How The Mind Learns
Posts
7 comments:
Esperanto is really neat and I'd encourage people to look it over. I studied it a little bit before Japanese. It's a great "warmup" language. For someone who's never considered themselves bilingual, it can be very encouraging to actually think in a new language, and with Esperanto you can be thinking in that language very fast. Of course, French has hundreds or even thousands of times as many speakers around the world.
Hi, Glowing Face Man
French prononciation.
I use the collections with the programs: swac-play + qstardict (linux). When i double-click a word in whichever program (web browser, text editor... and Anki), qstardict displays and plays the related sound.
You can also use shtooka-explorer or swac-explorer.
french singers (I'm French):
- Jeanne Cherhal: Douze fois par an
- Pauline Croze: Pauline Croze
- Camille: Le Fil
- La Rue Kétanou: Y'a des cigales dans la fourmilière
News (press, radio, television).
The lists of the most commons French words:
there and there.
« It's among the most widespread languages in the world, it's easy for English learners »
Easy for English learners? Are you sure? You could be suprised.
I'm extremely excited by your French adventure! :)
I enjoy reading about your 30-day adventures. The fact that this current adventure concerns language learning(!) is icing on the proverbial cake.
For some reason, Japanese doesn't scare me, but French does. French terrifies me, in fact! Go figure.
I really love French music and movies. You can also find some French dubs of shows on Veoh and such.
Paris Combo is a wonderful band. They're swingy and jazzy. "Living Room" is the song that got me hooked.
This song is in Franglish and is oh so funny.
Kate Ryan is Flemish with Dutch parents and because she lives in Belgium she also sings in French. :-)
Any possibility of you posting your French flashcards sometime? I'm trying to learn Japanese with Mnemosyne & your cards for that and would be very interested in learning French as well.
Hi.
Your project sounds really interesting especially that card program if there is a chance to get it i would love to.
By the way. I found this page with your post about chrono trigger. All my english (i know its not very good) comes from playing videogames asking my brothers
"what does that mean?" and running for dictionarys.
I'm learning french right now Im gonna play FFVI. I also studied a little japanese a long ago Im planning on re taking it after french.
Well hope you still check this =)
Im from mexico
(my english sucks i know jejeje)
i personally think learning french is a waste of time, if you live in USA you can find a lot of people who speak spanish so why not learn spanish? you may even be able to talk to your neighbor in spanish... i think it is hard to find a native french speaker over here
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