eldiablov
Contributor
I've decided that I want to read some books in their original language, L'Etranger and Candide to be specific.
The idea is to do intense study of the language by attempting to completely immerse myself in it for 30 days. I watch a movie? It's going to be in French. Listen to music? French? Game? French Radio? French and so on. By minimising my exposure to English and maximising my exposure to French I am hoping to accelerate the language learning process, it certainly won't hurt regardless
The heart of the method lies on memorising as many sentences as possible. The theory goes that if you take enough input you will learn all these 'grammar rules' by default, just as you do in English. Grammar will not feature in this experiment.
There are many resources to 'sentence mine', games with dialogue, films with subtitles, books. The idea is to mine from things you enjoy to ensure you don't get bored. Boredom is the enemy of this experiment and anything that I consider boring will be dropped in favour of a more interesting French based activity.
The primary resource in use for this experiment will be Anki. Anki is a 'spaced repetition system' program that optimises the memorisation of information. I have created a deck in Anki titled 10,000 French Sentences.
This idea was not thought up by me, the technique is a copy-cat of the ideas used in the http://www.ajatt.com blog ran by a guy who used these same techniques to learn Japanese. He claims that in the majority of language, 10,000 sentences, though seemingly arbitary, is the amount of sentences you need to know to be considered 'fluent'.
Due to the shortness of this experiment I have decided not to pay much attention, if any at all, to speaking. This is all about maximising input, almost in a baby-like manner. The speaking and pronunciation, apparently nightmarish in French, can come later.
I am going to document each day as I go through this in the first post. If anyone is interested in learning languages, feel free to post and let this turn into a discussion. Maybe someone wants to take a similar challenge along with me for a bit of moral support?
The idea is to do intense study of the language by attempting to completely immerse myself in it for 30 days. I watch a movie? It's going to be in French. Listen to music? French? Game? French Radio? French and so on. By minimising my exposure to English and maximising my exposure to French I am hoping to accelerate the language learning process, it certainly won't hurt regardless
The heart of the method lies on memorising as many sentences as possible. The theory goes that if you take enough input you will learn all these 'grammar rules' by default, just as you do in English. Grammar will not feature in this experiment.
There are many resources to 'sentence mine', games with dialogue, films with subtitles, books. The idea is to mine from things you enjoy to ensure you don't get bored. Boredom is the enemy of this experiment and anything that I consider boring will be dropped in favour of a more interesting French based activity.
The primary resource in use for this experiment will be Anki. Anki is a 'spaced repetition system' program that optimises the memorisation of information. I have created a deck in Anki titled 10,000 French Sentences.
This idea was not thought up by me, the technique is a copy-cat of the ideas used in the http://www.ajatt.com blog ran by a guy who used these same techniques to learn Japanese. He claims that in the majority of language, 10,000 sentences, though seemingly arbitary, is the amount of sentences you need to know to be considered 'fluent'.
Due to the shortness of this experiment I have decided not to pay much attention, if any at all, to speaking. This is all about maximising input, almost in a baby-like manner. The speaking and pronunciation, apparently nightmarish in French, can come later.
I am going to document each day as I go through this in the first post. If anyone is interested in learning languages, feel free to post and let this turn into a discussion. Maybe someone wants to take a similar challenge along with me for a bit of moral support?
During the first day I found a great resource through the help of a blog that did the same thing I'm doing now, albeit in a slightly different manner. The resource is Tex's Grammar, it looks great as a starting point for sentence mining. Remember, I'm not going to read up on the grammar rules, the idea is to get enough input to let my brain work them out on its own.
I mined the majority of the noun section from Tex's grammar, about 70 sentences in my Anki deck. After getting bored of this I decided to play Pok
I mined the majority of the noun section from Tex's grammar, about 70 sentences in my Anki deck. After getting bored of this I decided to play Pok