Comment dit-on «bungee jumping» en français?

[compilerbitch]

I had my first French lesson at the language centre last night.

For some reason, I got put into the Intermediate II group, which seems to be the most hardcore taught course that they currently run. To my considerable shock (and I wasn't alone), the teaching was entirely in French, with no English used at all. I amazed myself by actually managing to keep up, but by the end of two hours I was a nervous wreck. Being picked on first to describe my conversation partner in French scared the living bejeesus out of me, it having been the first time anyone had made me do that since 1983. Yep, 22 years ago. I have been working at de-rustifying myself for the last month or two, with some moderate success. 2 months ago, I was hazy on the difference between avoir and être, so to already be (just about) coping at this level is rather more than I'd have expected.

To be honest, the material covered in the lesson was pretty basic, but the fact that it was covered entirely in French meant that I had to go into concentration super-overdrive. If you're a Dragonball Z fan, imagine Goku powering up into Super-Saiyan mode. I don't think I went blonde (although I probably came across that way, albeit in deed rather than actuality), and I'm farly sure my eyes weren't glowing, but that was me.

I am officially the Worst In Class. And it gives me a buzz like bungee jumping. Or, at least, like the buzz that I'd imagine I'd probably, in theory, get if I did attempt bungee jumping in an ideal world. A more likely reality would be being terrified out of my mind, shaking in a corner for several days. Thinking about it, I think that would have been a more sensible response to the French class too, but one does what one must.

Comments

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

My teacher is French, about 10 years younger than me, and really nice, very friendly. I explained to her at the end of the session that my 'in' direction is working pretty well, it's just that I've had no conversation practice in 20 years. Actually, I've *never* had decent conversation practice, ever, because my school French teacher was mindbogglingly merde. She seems happy not to throw me out.

It's a bit like my experience of Russian Basic last year. I joined three weeks late when a place became available after someone dropped out. I was way, way behind at the start, but managed to pull through to be fine toward the end. I hope I can pull off the same trick again -- I am, if anything, even further behind this time. Other people seem to be able to chatter away in French without any trouble, and even though I can understand them fine, I am not practiced enough to be able to find the words myself. French is definitely much easier than Russian for an English speaker, however, and I do seem to be learning fast. But then, I hope I can learn fast enough not to be chucked out.

The other problem is that there seems to be a mandatory listening comprehension test at the end of term that we're supposed to turn up for on pain of death, but it clashes with me visiting NASA and the US airforce space research group, so I'm not going to be there. I'm also going to miss the second lesson, but since my excuse is that I'm going to Paris anyway to give a lecture at ENS, she let me off! I am lecturing in English, of course, but maybe one day I'll be able to manage French. We shall see.

[chard.livejournal.com]

You probably haven't been reading my moaning about being in an immersive Japanese class 6 hours a day, but you might want to go back through and see if there's anything useful in the study techniques I've mentioned. The Leitner-based word-card system is working very well for memorizing vocabulary (and kanji, but you won't need that).

After four months of classes I still wasn't really talking. Recently I've managed to set up one-to-one language exchanges, and it has worked wonders. I don't know if you'll have any luck finding a French person who wants to exchange with you, but if you can do it then it's really great. Perhaps mylanguageexchange.com is worth a shot. I'd be interested to hear about it if you give it a try.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

The language centre does offer to set up 1 on 1 language exchanges, maybe I should try that.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Hmm, the Leitner idea seems good. It reminds me of an idea I had recently, which was to crawl a bunch of internet news sites in the language of choice, build word lists, and flash-card the most commonly occurring words. It would be helpful to have access to a machine-readable dictionary, but not essential, because this could be fixed up by links to web-based dictionary sites and of course by linking to the source news item so you can see the word in context.

Whilst being a constant source of studyable vocabulary, it has the advantage of staying up to date, whilst also guarateeing to teach the most useful words first (i.e. the minimum words necessary to understand the greatest amount of news content). It may help to upgrade the weighting of unknown words that appear on their own in sentences, but that is something that could be figured out. Hmm... Maybe I'll do some CGI hacking at the weekend and see what falls out.

[chard.livejournal.com]

Some advice: resist the temptation to make information too visible. For example, it's tempting to make flash cards with lots of information on them. Similarly, your software might display words along with lots of information about them. It's better if it doesn't. What makes your brain retain things is being forced to recall them. This seems to flag the information for longer term storage. Hence the Leitner system. It's important to go throught the painful effort of recalling the meanings of things and all sorts of stuff associated with them, rather than simply repeatedly looking at that information.

Recalling words in real conversations has a really strong effect, which is one of the reasons that language exchanges are great.