For L’étranger I am only still halfway in the first chapter so I’m not too worried about ruining the book. I am happy to just understand what I am reading. I went back to the kit ember book after more than a month, the story came back easily but it is a graded reader and relatively simple content.
Yea ne quitte pas is sad. That playlist was just something I found online, I think it is created by an online school. It is mostly happy songs, and fairly clear in their singing.
I saw GIMS in that playlist.
Cool it looks very interesting, Metro also has French audio, added to my list of games to play.
That is cool I listen to french songs sometimes in background but have not used them for intensive study. I think those song which repeat words/phrases alot help me remember the word/phrases.
I like this artist, Stromae
I listen to this playlist of various artists sometime.
One of the first song I heard that got me interested in the language. Jacques Brel - Amsterdam another one of his song. Jacques Brel - Ne me quitte pas
For variety, you can try opera as well. They drag out each word which I find interesting. Example Habanera de “Carmen”: “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle”
I paused on L’étranger last week (will push through this week maybe 1 page per day) because I got more engrossed in the graded book called “Ã la découverte du Canada”, It was right at my level. Most of the words/phrases bolded in the book were the ones that I didn’t knew. It was more pleasant to read due to less look ups. I completed reading the book.
The next graded reader will be a book by Kit Embers which I stopped at 64% previously.
lol yea, same experience when I first saw people using TL/NL. I think people use that to stay neutral on language on some forums. I’ve fixed the post.
Yes,
TL = Target Language
NL = Native Language
Great. I will look into that. I was planning to share how to sentence mine from games someday.
I used the refold French deck for my first 1k words. As I was looking into the German version FAQ, I noticed they included the show which they used to extracts the high frequency words from (french FAQ doesn’t have this info :( ). That information might be useful for content to consume while doing the 1k deck.
That happened to me too, when I first started reading a book/graded reader. I think one of the reason was due to lack of vocab and lack of knowledge of commonly used tenses and grammar.
My research lead to this wiki article. It gave me an idea how many high freq words I need to know to read books.
The effects of vocabulary size on language comprehension The knowledge of the 3000 most frequent English word families or the 5000 most frequent words provides 95% vocabulary coverage of spoken discourse.[21] For minimal reading comprehension a threshold of 3,000 word families (5,000 lexical items) was suggested[22][23] and for reading for pleasure 5,000 word families (8,000 lexical items) are required.[24] An “optimal” threshold of 8,000 word families yields the coverage of 98% (including proper nouns).[23]
I wonder if those 5k Anki premade deck on ankiweb are based on those numbers. Anyway, I completed a 1k deck a while back. Now, I am going through a 5k deck to test myself and also see new words. But I mostly do sentence mining from books and games. I use Anki addons AnkiMorphs and FrequencyMan to keep track of how many words I’ve seen or know. It is mostly an experimental for me, not sure if it is good or bad.
It is going to take me a while to complete that book since I am reading it intensively looking up everything I don’t understand. L’Étranger doesn’t use the passé simple tense so I went with it after trying several other books. Passé simple only seems to be used in books but not used in spoken French.
I also read graded readers like those from CLE to have something easier to read with hardly any lookups. InnerFrench podcast transcript are also good for easy read.
Continue with
Ask your teacher to give you homework.
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Aren’t they getting rid of the community decks?
You can try a combination of different resources. don’t do too many at one time, 1-3 is enough, depending on your interest and learning style and schedule.
I would exhaust the free and cheap resources first, like Tv5monde, CI stuff, language transfer and some basic grammar. Use ANKI or whatever other flashcard app to go through 1k high frequency words to build up vocab.
Get yourself up to being able to read your first book and listen to your first podcast (innerfrench). After that, you can focus a lot on practice by consuming content.
Remember the goal is to start using/practicing the language not duolingo/grammar/anki the language but USE the language which is read/write/listen/speak. :-
Duome - free
ANKI - free flashcard app. If you like it get the refold 1k deck or community deck.
TV5monde - Free
LeFrançais Facile avec RFI - Free
Tex’s french grammar Free
Morpheem - Free, this is a cool concept using AI try it.
Lingua $9.9/year cheap for what you get. Reading, Listening, Dictation, Grammar, Vocab
Lingolia Paid (grammar) or Kwiziq (expensive)
LinQ for reading and listening (paid)
Linguno - Free simple games.
Free4talk - free. Practice speaking with others.
LanguageTransfer free
InnerFrench (free podcast) Keep trying to be able to understand him.
AliceAyel (youtube) free + paid(site) CI very easy to understand stories
French CI easy CI.
Speakly (paid) strong focus on listening and flashcard style.
Refold document has a list of CI resources
Hyplern - graded interlinear books.
Graded reader on amazon/kindle.
Grammar book on amazon/kindle.
Discord French-Learn French in a friendly community - resources and voice channel to participate
Discord Refold - French - more resources and community.
I will be trying Harry Potter as soon as I finish L’etranger
Following this blogger method. https://www.linguatrek.com/blog/2010/12/harry-potter-the-book-that-taught-me-polish/
I tried several deck but the one I completed was the Refold Deck for French. It is a paid deck.
Now I am going through a “5000 most frequently used French words” mainly just to test myself. It is super easy since I am now about A2 level but I still encounter new words. This deck has a speak section which I will be practicing with soon.
Other than that I mostly sentence mine from books I am reading to create new sentence cards.
For words/structure that I have difficulty with, I search them on Reverso Context and grab even more sentences from there.
To add, If you are going to use Refold Deck, note that It does not have super high frequency words like “I, you , he, she, they, am” . Reason being, you would acquire them just from other learning method, grammar, graded books, apps and etc.
For cards that I create myself, I use Ankimorphs / Frequencyman add-on to sort my cards according to frequency. FrequencyMan is easier to setup but I like Ankimoprh various options. Both provides useful stats. I use HyperTTS to create the Audio.
I also use the FSRS Helper add-on, which helps me with postponing cards, reschedule cards, and flatten future due cards.
I did GOMAD, actually more like 1/2 GOMAD. https://www.healthline.com/health/food-nutrition/gomad-diet for 4-5 months to gain weight. Went to gym as well so at least some of the weight goes to muscles.
Trying to eat more is going to be very difficult for you due to early satiety and not knowing how much more you actually need to eat and it is hard to count calories from random food and do math in your head all the time is annoying.
We skinny people think that we are eating enough but actually need to eat a lot more than we think. Maybe our bodies are not efficient at extracting the calories from food or high metabolism, I have no idea. I will be eating the same as my normal/over-weight/ friends but not gain weight. With GOMAD you can monitor the calories and can figure out at which point (calories) you start to gain weight, the math is easy to do as well.
In my opinion, Milk is the most easiest if you can handle milk. It is fast to consume, 0 preparation, easy to monitor/count the calories, easy to adjust as needed and can fit easily in to your normal habit/schedules and lastly no dishes (only cup) to clean up. The more easy something is to do the more likely you will stick to it.
I built up to it, started with 2 glasses of milk a day and slowly increased every few day to 1/2 GOMAD. Your bowels will tell you if you are drinking too much too soon. Go slow, the body digestive system, microbes needs to build up to it. Once I notice I was gaining weight I stayed at that amount for a few months, it was 1/2 GOMAD for me.
Note that this is not a long-term thing, I don’t think it is healthy long-term, once you reach your goal, focus more on variety of food. I still drink about 1 liter of milk a day. One thing I notice that once you gain quite a bit of weight it is quite difficult to lose it.