Mission: French et al. | Page 4 | My language mission and my log | Forum

First of all: I got the results of my Latin course. I have got the distinction, 99/100 for the final exam and I am very glad

This ends the Latin part in this thread. I am going to start a new mission in few months, as soon as I have finished other projects. This time I would like to do too many things, so I have to choose something palpable first.

My Welsh will be tested in Saturday. I go to Llanilltud on the Eisteddfod. This time I feel quite confident and I will look for some conversation with the people there.

I have also been given another grant so I will be learning Intermediate French from the next February. This includes also the residential school in Caen. I still don't know if I could go this year to France, I hoped that, but there are a little bit of legal complications.

OK, now I have got another essay to write.

J'écrivais assez beaucoup de textes brefs et je dois admettre que j'en ai marre. Les vacances, le travail, la journée : tout de même tous le temps. Maintenant je suis en train de faire le grand devoir. Je n'ai pas d'occasion pour parler parce que personne ne veut jamais bavarder avec moi

Aussi, j'ai récemment vu 'La vie en rose'. J'adore les chansons d'Edith Piaf!

Bien, j'ai réussi à gagner 76 points. La bonne composition, un peu d'erreurs, la mauvais prononciation.

Mais j'ai lu un magazine de bandes dessinées – sans le dictionaire!

The problem with my pronunciation is that I mishear the French, for example, I can't hear the difference between the nasal vowels and the long vowels and the difference between ø, ǝ, œ, e and ɛ, so I am able to pronounce them only by consciously moving the muscles of my face; I can't even hear the difference when I myself speak. It's something like driving when you are blind. And I can hardly hear the French r, for me there is something like the gap between you and are in you are, so I don't notice it as a phoneme.

J'ai préparé une petite présentation et je l'ai publiée à Soundcloud.

J'ai réussi à écrire mon dernier devoir! Quel soulagement! Je l'ai fait tôt et j'ai le temps pour le raffiner. Je voudrais y inclure un exemple d'imparfait mais je n'ai pas aucune idée comment parce qu'il perdrait le coulé. Aussi j'ai préparé quatre présentations pour mon examen oral. Il prendra lieu samedi prochain. Je suis un peu nerveux mais je n'ai pas de peur de parler. J'ai eu l'examen de maquette et il était assez bon.

J'ai passe une heure en parlant français avec une Espagnole. Elle avait l'accent que j'aimerais avoir mais, en revanche, elle ne pouvait pas prononcer z dans par exemple besoin. La chose difficile pour moi, c'est se souvenir du genre des substantifs. Je ne me souviens pas combien de fois j'apprenais par coeur que la chose est "la"…

OK, the time for a summary. During last year I learned French quite intensively. I gained some skills.

First of all I feel very confident that I can write an essay in French, organize it well and I am overall satisfied. My vocabulary is bigger even though I didn't actively learned it. I developped a habit of checking what I wrote and make only few mistakes. Usually I keep the agreement and gender right, the word order is sometimes anglicised or polonised but this is not a thing to worry. What worries me is the time I need for writing an essay. 200 words take me 2 hours of writing, 1 hour of honing and checking, but up to 5 hours of thinking what to write about. It is very hard but doable.

Now, the reading skills went down, I understand less and less (or the texts have become harder?) I used extensively the Google Translate for my course texts. It was like that: I looked for the words I didn't know in the dictionary but even so I couldn't make a sense from a sentence so often that I was very frustrated. Neither could I identify a subject, a verb, objects and complements. So I failed to do well almost all exercises after texts. So far I don't know what to do, I try to read articles and get stuck very often. On the other side I bought a few comics and I enjoyed reading them.

My speaking skills generally improved. I could stand the conversation in French in the sense that I could say something. I am not fluent in the sense that I regularly shut down in the middle of sentence. In this time I am not looking for words or think what to say, I just linger, I have no thoughts whatsoever. Then I restart, try to remeber what was going on and usually I am at loss. It happens in English and Polish as well, but is shorter. Anyway, my pronounciation was assessed as mediocre by my tutor, according to her I mispronounce vowels, nasal vowels and rs. Yet, I am personally convinced that I don't speak bad, I really try to make es and as as soft as possible and I know that this doesn't matter in the real life, but my scores are lower and this matters. Also, I more and more often think in French.

My listening skills improved but I am still behind of what I would like. If the rest of the capabilities I assess as well on the B1, my listening is still at A1. But it depends on the human factor. I understand more when talking to non-natives, less with a radio or natives. So I can talk with non-natives somewhat fluently, but I am lost with the rest. However, I currently catch some phrases instead of single accentes syllables. I miss the beginnings, and I can only say something very general that it is said about the history or politics or a match, but I cannot specify who, where, when, why, how is talking. I fail to answer right the listening exercises on rfi website, all of them; if I get something right it is because I clicked at random.

Now, I am more proactive which means the rate of failures also increased. I wrote to some strangers asking for a chat, I have the account on italki, I follow several people, I used to go to Bristol on the meetings of Francophones. So far almost nobody answered. I had one French skype talk yesterday with Lyrated from this forum and that's all. That is the reason that I find Benny's claims that there are plenty of people who want talk as unbelievable. My experience is exactly contrary. HOWEVER, somebody else proposed me a conversation and we talked twice via Skype. Maybe it's just hard beginnings.

(I want to mention that there is a chance of me tutoring Polish to an American also).

Unfortunately I lost the motivation in my studies on the OU after the assessment of my tutor which was not compatible with what I think of my skills. I enrolled on the next level and I am not excited at all. I expect that due to my decreasing understanding of the harder texts, not good enough listening skills, shutdowns, amnesia (weak memory or incapability to fast recall), fatigue, stress and failures, I would get behind and lost. This is worse than going to France to the residential school and not understanding natives. Really, I would like to enjoy learning French, but if I am to struggle with reading or spend some 20 hours on writing a 1000-word essay and get some C not knowing what is wrong – this is not funny

I was thinking. I tried to find any solutions to my problems.

First of all, I am going to enrol on a writing course, I think this is the best idea to accelerate the process of writing, because there will be somebody to answer my questions.

I am going to go on with reading short articles and comics. If I find some good linguistic book about the syntax, it would help me to understand the language.

Regarding the pronunciation and enunciation (that's the word!) I suppose this is strongly connected to my listening skills. I won't improve speaking in the terms of fluency (no shutdowns) until I start more understanding the spoken word. So far it doesn't especially matter – I don't have contact with any natives and I won't be marked until the march next year. My Polish friend with whom I talk via Skype (she is very proficient polyglot and translator) would correct me if I told something horribly wrong.

I have no idea how to improve listening, then – the only strategies I have found are like hear, hear, hear and your brain somehow someday clicks on. With English it lasted some 7 years, I think that with French it might be shorter – 4 years.

I have enlisted on South Wales French Speakers meetup group, because last time I haven't any good opportunity to go to Bristol. And I have my friend Margot for practice.

If you have any idea how to get rid of this setbacks, write here

D'accord, I have the results of my second year of French. I passed at the 76%. As I thought, the bad pronunciation lowered my final score. Unfortunately there are no feedback re written task so I don't know what went not well.

So I will start the next module in two months. I hope I would have a different tutor and more speaking practice.

La deuxième semaine (du 26 janvier au 1er février):

J'ai passe 9 heures mais ça m'a pris plus longtemps. J'ai fait le reste d'exercices. Oui, c'était difficile parce que je suis trop lente généralement ou après dix heures au dehors de la maison. J'écoutais de la radio, je lisais des textes. J'ai acheté quatre bandes dessinées de Thorgal. J'ai regardé deux épisodes de série comédie. C'est bizarre parce que les sous-titres françaises ne correspondent pas à ce qu'on parle donc il faut que je les éteigne.