Leçion vingt-un 21

Feb 28 2010 Sunday

My day officially ends at 1am, Monday. I have been sane and working for over 12 hours. I am not complaining but my brain is shutting down. My logical functioning is deactivating. I am starving and I want to take a bath. Normally I would like to do the French Steps, but I am totally not in the mood.

But anyway, I tried the French Steps Introduction part. I thought it would be easier if I’ve done the part in radio archive. But no, the wording French steps is actually harder! I guess it’s because I’ve skipped the job and family parts. This discouraged me further. Since I don’t want to start over, so I tried my best to read after the French Steps, hoping to finish everything so I could finally sleep.

Leçion vingt 20

Feb 27 2010 Saturday

Today I spent my session on doing introduction (when meeting people) and exercise on turning nouns to adjectives. In unit 11 of the radio archive, it talked about turning a male noun into a female noun, or into an adjective.

For example:

Étudiant (male student) -> étudiante (female student)

étudiant (adj.)

Français (male French) -> Française (French lady)

Français (adj.)

Special case :

Canadien (male Canadian) – Canadienne (Canadian lady)

Canadien (adj.)

Belge (Beigian male or lady)

belge (adj.)

The hateful truth

After following the radio archive for 11 sessions, I find myself harder to concentrate on the content. Sometimes, it becomes my background noise, merged with the roaring bus engine. The frequency of rewinding has increased since the completion of the vowels; this has something to do with the increasingly boring reading and repeating content, instead of those lovely songs : (

Inadequate sleep and busy homework have drained most of my energy, I cannot withstand monotonous lesson after a day’s work. More interactive material like the French steps or the LanguageGuide.org is preferred.

Leçion dix-neuf 19

Feb 26 2010 Friday

Today’s French Steps taught me how to get a snack.

a sandwich – un sandwich

A sandwich is fine, but a sausage sandwich is better. May be I will have a beer. Don’t forget to be polite !

Je voudrais un sandwich au saucission et une bie, si vous pla.

Today’s lesson is harder in terms of new sentence pattern. Still, I can’t eat sandwich au saucission for the rest of my life. At least I have more choices now.

La nourriture (food)

TGIF

I know I will enjoy more about this one day.

Leçion dix-huit 18

Feb 25 2010 Thursday

Today I learned more about money in next part of French Steps. It involves more sentence patterns in buying things. Since it’s not hard, I have decided to learn more vocabs related to money.

l’argent (m.) (money)

I found something interesting today. The French language tends to put the adjectives at the back of an object. For example, le véhicule blindé, in English, it’s an armoured vehicle; le guichet automatique (automatic ticketing machine).

The headache is killing me, hope I can sleep well tonight.

Leçion dix-sept 17

Feb 24 2010 Wednesday

Today I learned how to get tickets and maps for tourist spots. The sentence format is in requesting something from someone.

The format is simple:

A XX and two AA, etc, please.

Un XX et un deux, s'il vous plaît.

The lesson puts numbers I learned into a practical level: paying for stuff, and describing which floor it is (e.g. second floor).

I found it difficult to understand sentences although I know the meaning of the words. In spoken French, when certain combinations of words are run together, the ending sound and beginning sound are always combined, it’s called a liaison. But in many cases, the ending sound is omitted. It’s too fast for me to hear a conversation without a subtitle. I need to read and listen more!

Leçion seize 16

Feb 23 2010 Tuesday

I continued with directions in French steps today. The expression is simple and words are not so hard. My day started at 9:30 and ended at 9:30pm, I don’t have much time to sit in front of a computer to learn. Also, I doubt if I would have enough energy left to learn. I want to try out a new mode of learning. Instead of doing it at night, I try to do earlier.

Here’s what I prepared:

1. Memorized the pronunciation of the vocabs before I left home

2. Transferred screen captures to my phone (my nokia only supports English)

My memory served me well on the vocab part, but not on the script in the previous conversation. May be I can download the audio file into phone as well. But I cannot do this every day as I do have other reading materials or revision notes to complete on bus.

Followed unit 9 of the radio archive, it’s a revision on French numbers. I realized that I sometimes mixed up the sound of deux(2) and douze(12).

Notice that the hand sign of French 2, 3, 6 7 and 8 are different from Chinese ones. It will surely create big confusion if I use the Chinese ones to a Frenchman！！

Leçion quinze 15

Feb 22 2010 Monday

I finished unit 8 of the radio archive on bus. This unit is really funny, it features a French guy in Taiwan teaching in his own charming way. He makes amusing sounds to the normal, boring vowels, without affecting the teaching quality adversely. This unit is basically a follow up to the rash of vowels in its previous unit. Therefore, I decided to learn something new.

Most parts of the BBC French language site is accessible to me, it is the Talk French videos that shuts me out…>.< I really do want to try out those real life conversation type learning videos.

Thx for the suggestion Alice. The French Steps covers a wide range of topics which seems promising. After all, I do wanna have a step by step progress in my vocab learning. I tried out part 1 of stage 1; since it was mainly about basic salutations which I’ve covered before, so I started a little bit of part 2. Will continue this part tomorrow.

Leçion quatorze 14

Feb 21 2010 Sunday

Leçion treize 14

This lesson is packed with all the vowels left. Not an easy lesson, I tripled my time just on repeating the sounds.

Song of the day: Fais dodo, Colas mon p’tit frère (22:15)

It’s a bed time song. Mama is making cake while Papa is making chocolate…

Words:

Dodo – d

P’tit – p

Gâteaux (cake) – g

Papa – P

Bas – b

Chocolat – ch

Leçion treize 13

Feb 20 2010 Saturday

I started unit 6 of the radio archive. Today I learned the semi-voyelles.

Song of the day: Alouette

It’s a children’s song, features a bird called lark (云雀). The song is about depilating this bird, its back, beak, head, tail…

Pronunication:

Alouette – ou

Les yeux (eye)- ue (closed sound)

Les ailes (wing) – ai (open sound, should combine the two sounds together)

Leçion douze 12

Feb 19 2010 Friday

Another a few days of vowels learning, I’ve decided to learn to tell a date. It’s a flash program which is more interactive than plain paper.

Le Calendrier

It involves new vocabularies that are familiar but somehow different.

The wish you a happy birthday listening exercise is difficult as I almost the French numerals…

In order to tell a date, I have to revise the numbers as well.

les nombres

This is repetitive and boring.

Leçion onze 11

Feb 18 2010 Thursday

As expected, I could not recognize half of the consonant sounds that I learned yesterday. It’s difficult for me to learn these sounds as this is totally a new world. Luckily, the Unit 5 of the radio archive gave me some comfort as it went through the things in Unit 4 again. This time, it focuses on nasal vowels (voyelles nasals).

The associated phonics words in the example column is useful to provide memory assistance to both the vowels and words. The vowel in the third row, , has another example – bonbon. It’s a French word borrowed by the English. It reminds me of a very funny movie Night at the Museum, which the Moai statue always says something like ‘Hello dum dum! I want bonbon!’

Today’s song: J’ai du bon tabac (I have good tobacco), starts from archive 19: 50

Related vowels:

bon - on,

dan –an,

Tu n’en – en

J’en ai du fin – en

Ton – on

Vilain – ain

Second song: Le pont d’Avignon (A bridge at Avignon), starts from archive 22:25

Related vowels:

Pont – on,

On y danse – on, an

Tout en – en