Study Blog

Main: earlgrey—tea Native: English Learning: Chinese HSK5, French B2, German A1

[corvid-language-library]

"My speaking skills suck, I should really spend more time working on them!" *Continues to exclusively work on reading*

[pompadourpink]

Kids’ magasines

Super Picsou géant (1977-):

Bimonthly 196 pages magasine containing comic strips starring classic Disney characters, tests, games, etc. Legendary for people age 20+. (do click the link, someone has been pdfing them for free on a blog)

Le petit quotidien (1998-):

Daily (six days a week) magasine for young kids (age 6 to 10), educational : four pages for ten minutes of daily reading.

Sciences et vie junior (1988-):

Monthly scientific popularization magasine (news, questions, comic strips…)

Le journal de Mickey (1934-):

Weekly comic starring classic Disney characters, oldest french kids magasine. It contains comic strips as well as bits about nature, tech, news, etc.

J’aime lire (1977-):

Monthly magasine containing a short novel, games and a comic strip. It is the most popular children’s magasine in France. Those who read it will remember the parts about annoying siblings Tom-tom and Nana.

[whunt]

18th century tumblr user

[creepingmonsterism]

highlighting these tags:

#the great thing about that guy is that he is an absolutely *fundamental* primary source

#for the study of life in the French countryside in the 18th century

#because he wrote a very detailed book about his own life & his childhood in bumfuck nowhere

#(his parents were métayers which is like a specifically French type of sharecropping so you learn a lot

#about rural culture & like the relationship to religion & the way work was organised etc like he really goes into it

#incidentally also really interesting for the history of childhood & especially around the issue of physical punishment

#& what was socially perceived as abuse - but I digress)

#BUT this is all mixed in with endless anecdotes about his sexcapades & how he discovered he had a foot fetish etc

#AND you can't really like dissociate the two because he has a way of telling stories where they're all slotted into each other#so the set-up is [story A[story B[story C[story D]story C]story B]story A]

#what I mean by that is that I sat in early modern history classes

#& we all had to be Very Serious as we read & commented a text which we were interested in because he discusses the system of crop rotation

#between fond digressions about how clean countrywomen are & what a delight it is to smell their armpits

#& how he lost his virginity & then had to lose it again because he didn't do it right the first time etc

#he's a guy! he's a guy of all time & he has made himself indispensable to certain branches of French scholarship

#& also it is not unlikely he lied a whole bunch about a lot of stuff he put in that book but we have no real way to tell <3 a role model

[a-random-fandom-friend]

Because of Re: Carmilla, I thought you all would enjoy my edition of Carmilla :

The holes go all the way through, the sides of the book are red, and on some pages the text is colored red just under the holes !

I was so happy when I found it in a little french bookshop specialized in queer texts ❤️

[rigelmejo]

Other article "went from 0 to C2 in Italian in 8 Months Roadmap."

Useful. I'd probably have put more hours in than 1000 but they clearly succeeded. Useful tips on how to use textbooks. I wish they'd gone into more of how they practiced speaking, they mention shadowing and doing the textbook exercises but I'm curious if they did anything else for speaking.

They mention listening to podcasts 2 hours a day, and watching Simpsons (and the range of vocabulary and how frequently people talk in Simpsons which definitely effects how I pick stuff in Chinese for studying).

They mention studying the language test prep material - this is probably a key activity if working to pass a specific test.

I think there's many ways to study, so people should do what works for them. I think this particular person has a good example of planning a structured study schedule if you don't know what to do: find a good textbook series that teaches up to the level you want to reach, plan enough daily study time to achieve the goal you're aiming for in the days/months you want to, find a textbook that has exercises for reading/writing/speaking/listening and do ALL of them, listen and read a bit to materials for native speakers so you get practice understanding the language used naturally (2 hours of podcasts a day was probably very useful as listening skill seems to take the longest to develop). So there's 2 hours of built in Practicing listening per day. (And if a person had a well rounded study schedule they might put in some reading on their schedule, and some conversations with tutors or language exchange partners, and some journal writing or other writing - which many people do add, depending on their personal goals).

The only thing I don't love about the linked study plan... is that this person used ChatGPT to correct them... which could just as easily result in learning incorrect things from incorrect results from ChatGPT. But with the textbook answers and test prep material, that seems to have kept the majority of their feedback correct.

But yeah. Overall I think the linked post is a great example of how to make a structured study plan, if you're learning on your own. You can make progress like taking structured classes that increase in level, on your own.

[translatingpostsinfrench]

salut! i was wondering; do you know any clean-singing metal bands that sing in french? i'd assume that'd be something in the direction of power metal (like powerwolf does some german songs) as they tend to like clean singing, but i'm open to anything :)

(i noticed you posted about french language music earlier so figured you might know)

merci - un ami suédophone

oulah sorry but i don't know much about metal (i do listen a bit but don't know much about subgenres etc), only know like 4 french bands and none sounding like what like you're looking for, even tried to ask my metalhead friend but she doesn't know either. recs open!

[me-thal]

Honestly it's funny you mention powerwolf because they did one of their song in french (Bête du Gévaudan)

Other than that, most french metal bands dont sing in french. BUT I have a father who is an og french metal head and he gave me some bands for you :D

ADX, Sortilège, Trust, Lofofora, Gojira, Ultra Vomit (it's a parodic band but they're pretty fun), Tagada Jones (a bit more punk than metal but they're very nice too)

He told me they're all pretty old lol, but It's some bands :D

[soupedepates]

I want to mention that Rotting Christ, which is a Greek black metal band, did a song out of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, "Les Litanies de Satan"

Which is, arguably, a French classic

And the singing is quite clear too

Henri Dès, who sings for children usually, also did some metal songs!

There is also Mass Hysteria, which is a great band (my favourite song from them is "L'enfer des Dieux")

Mademoiselle K has some very metal-adjacent songs ("Je veux que tu crèves" for example), I haven't listened to her in a while because she reminds me of my ex (who made me discover her music)

There is also the band Fox Hole (I know the lead singer's brother) but I don't remember if they sing in French too

[calugaritsa]

Eths has some growls but also a lot of clean vocals, if you're cool with Nu metal

[jack-my-star]

J'ai essayé de trouver des bands métal québécois qui chantent en Français, pis clean et ça pas été facile. Fake ben v'la une liste de metal/punk de bands canadien/québécois

Anonymus, La Corriveau, Exterio, Quo Vadis, Kataklysm, Mononc' Serge (pas clean mais classique), The Agonist, Observant, Despised Icon, Vulgaires Machins, GrimSkunk, Eric Panic, Overdrunk

[chaotic-history]

I am probably sharing a resource that everyone else already knew about, but I just found this book:

Glossaire érotique de la langue française depuis son origine jusqu'a nos jours, contenant l'explication de tous le mots consacrés a l'amour

and holy shit this is going to save me so much time looking through Google Books to find what contexts a certain word is being used in. It has a list at the beginning of all the works it cites from, and it goes back to the Middle Ages. Also it cites from Voltaire 😌✨

[rigelmejo]

@earlgrey--tea you asked who learned French just by watching TV shows and I'm thrilled you asked.

Here is the paper Peter Llewellyn Foley published: Picking up a second language from television: an autoethnographic L2 simulation of L1 French learning. Looking over the paper again now, he did 1500 hours of audio-visual French material for native speakers. He read toward the end of that period for some hundreds of hours, and he talked to people in French similarly toward the end of that period for some hundreds of hours. I read the whole thing, and I recommend anyone else who's curious reads the whole thing. Because my takeaways may not be the same as another person's. The paper includes what he did, how he studied, how he tracked his study, what study materials worked best (he found children's cartoons with a lot of visuals of what is being talked about were the easiest to learn from in the first few hundred hours - and adult television where they talk about things not directly visually shown as some of the hardest stuff that he used once he had more understanding of the language).

His paper shows at least 1 person could learn French by watching shows (with children's cartoons being best at the beginning stage until you learn more words), and trying to figure out what each thing means as you hear it. He did a lot of puzzling out the sounds he heard, using context and guessing what was being talked about (for curiosity's sake he did the opposite of what ALG Automatic Language Growth articles tend to suggest people do). He did not do any reading later sometime after 1000 hours, and it's fascinating how different he imagined French spelling was based on his guesses from the sound, compared to how it is actually spelled. He did use some graded readers for learners once he was reading.

He did not look any word translations up when watching all those shows. He personally makes the guess that if he HAD looked up words, if he HAD used French subtitles, and if he had focused entirely on children's shows at first, his progress might have taken less time. But his experiment did not do that, so it's only a guess, and actual success of people who've looked up words should be referenced instead for how successful or not it is (people like r/Refold learners look up words while watching shows), and he did not use any video materials made for language learners but my personal thinking is that Comprehensible Input type lessons at the beginning stage may have worked even better than children's cartoons.

To me, his level of understanding and ability to do things lines up fairly well with Dreaming Spanish's roadmap estimated hours to do X things. That makes sense to me as Peter basically studied with stuff made for native speakers, which eventually became more comprehensible. And Dreaming Spanish is designed to be fully comprehensible to a learner, until they can comprehend stuff for native speakers. I imagine Peter had a harder time initially, but as an English speaker learning French, with all the cognates, maybe he didn't have to learn as much to cross the threshold into comprehending children's shows as someone learning a language with no cognates.

I wrote my in depth thoughts about his paper here but it's mostly just rambling.

[callmebliss]

Y’ever read something and have understanding that has eluded you interminably suddenly stop, curl up, and snuggle neatly into a fold in your brain because a new way way opened to it?

[macleod]

I've seen this passed around a few times, and I have one thing to say:

It's online. The book was carefully and wonderfully recreated online by hand. You can find it here. The entire book is this easy.

calculusmadeeasy.org

[depsidase]

[albertserra]

Ok this is kinda funny but imagine being surrounded by people who sound like this. The French language was a mistake in the first place but combining it with English.... abomination

[macadamianutmilk]

@033h we've been saying

[tchaikovskaya]

"toc toc toc toc you are now a porcupicicle"

[sandersstudies]

“directement above your appartement”

[a-demigod-witch]

For French learners: So, I’ve found THIS: It’s a complete book that I’ve found for beginners, which includes: Grammar, exercises, and also vocabulary! Download and Enjoy! (Bonus Points: Print it.) Note: I took a screenshot of the contents for you. Click on the pictures above for a clearer image, better quality. Here’s the Link to download it.

[florial]

[what-even-is-thiss]

Taking up Japanese as a side project for myself has reminded me of something.

So like a long time ago I had a professor that I absolutely adored. She happened to be Japanese American. She grew up speaking Japanese at home but never really spent a lot of time in Japan. She mostly spoke with other Japanese Americans and read books.

So one day early in her teaching career there’s an exchange student from Japan who’s having a hard time understanding a concept so she explained it to him in Japanese and then he looked absolutely rattled. Like in shock. Pale.

This is how she learned that the way she speaks Japanese makes her sound like a gang member.

Japanese doesn’t exactly have cuss words in the same way as English does but imagine that the nicest professor you’ve ever had pulls your paper over and says “Okay listen here you little piece of shit I’m gonna fucking explain this to you. Violently.”

[cloacatak]

This (studying in Chile for a year) is more or less how I realized my two PhD-having, tenured professor expat parents raised me to speak the most disrespectful and swearword-riddled version of Spanish possible (with plenty of ancient slang I didn't know was slang thrown in). It was like:

[parkchanwoohoo]

[ramune-notes]

today, i tried out langcorrect !! i love all the writing prompts on there and how kind everyone has been so far (i’ve already gotten corrections!!). and i do want to post more journal entries on here, but posting on a website dedicated to corrections feels like a good start!

have any of you guys used this website? do you like it?

[i-put-the-hyper-in-hyperfixated]

french is all well and good to learn once you've got the basics of grammar and verbs down etc., however. there is one final hurdle and it wants to kill you. numbers.

[teaboot]

92 my old enemy