Memorizing and French

Thought I'd post an update. I'm still working on pmemory. I'm in the middle of Lesson 22 now. You're supposed to do the lessons in one sitting but this one is mammoth. Every time I attempt it, it's either too late and I'm too drowsy, or I'm somewhere noisy. But it's cool. The lesson is interesting and by now I know what I'm doing. Once I finish Lesson 22 and 23, Lesson 24 is a test, and then I'll begin the language course which I'm really looking forward to.

I've been hunting around, trying to find a restaurant or place of biz that'll hire me. So far my luck has been so-so. We'll see. Maybe something will go through soon.

I hurt my ankle last week so running is on a huge, sad pause. I miss being able to run. I'm careful about my walking, so I'll definitely have to ease back into running. I like running early in the morning, best way to start the day. Hopefully my ankle will be better soon.

I found a lot of great sites for learning French (or other languages too.) All free!

I figured out how to get public domain audio from websites not only to my iTunes but onto my iPod. I'm not sure if it's a Mac thing or what, but if you encounter any problem, let me know and I can probably walk you through it. (There are different file formats for public domain audio so there can be problems.. and trust me, you will have to hunt around to find answers. So just ask me instead. :)

Here are some great, free language learning sites. (Not sure if I've posted these already, but just for your info.) By the way, I'll probably apply GMS techniques to language learning once I've advanced far enough in GMS, but even so these are helpful, fun sites for anyone:

FSI ~ Foreign Service Institute Language courses that were used by the US Foreign Service Institute to train US diplomats in other languages. Now the courses are available free to the public online. Totally public domain, which means you can listen, copy, record, print, share, etc. without paying a dime! Not only that but there are a ton of languages to choose from. I'm impressed with the lessons. There's a full 10 chapters on pronunciation before you even get to lesson 1 in the Basic Course for French. Tres impressive. I plan to use FSI heavily, particularly the pronunciation course, once I hit the GMS language course and can apply that to my language learning.

The Linguist ~ Lingq
A helpful and free resource. The Linguist taught himself something like 9 languages! He knows about language learning. Read his free book online, and then sign up (for a free account) to LingQ to get a lot of input in whichever language you're learning. The downside from my perspective is that the translations are word by word, rather than a full sentence translation (which has it's pluses and minuses in my opinion.) So it helps I think to already have some knowledge with the language, unless you don't mind having to figure out every sentence word by word at first. But definitely a great resource and worth reading his book for tips on becoming fluent in another language. (A lot of my friends are bilingual, and his input idea seemed to ring true to me.)

The Gutenberg Project
30,000 free ebooks! All the public domain books in the world practically! You can download them to your iPad, Kindle, read 'em on a website, etc. You get the pic. I've got The Three Musketeers bookmarked.

What does this have to do with language learning?

Well, I also bookmarked Les Trois Mousquetaires ~ yes, The Gutenberg Project is multi-lingual. The Three Musketeers was originally in French. I've never read it before all the way, and I'd like to (am interested) ~ good qualities as far as input is concerned, and even better...

Librivox has Les Trois Mousquetaires which means I can listen to the story in French, read the French text, and know what the heck is going on by referring to the English text. Of course, this is a slow process. I have the Preface printed out with translation sentence by sentence, and the audio downloaded into my iPod, but it's still a bit advanced for me. 6 minutes of advanced French is pretty long for me as far as comprehension goes. But I love the sound of the volunteer's French voice. A native French speaker. I think she does an excellent job.

Then I also have French with Michel Thomas (not free but a great investment) which I intend to use to get me to some sort of working level with the language. I have other French language learning resources as well, but I'm fairly sure once I've gone through the GMS language course and start applying what I learn to language learning, I'll be using Michel Thomas. I think it's one of the best ways to learn another language's grammar. Probably because of how it's structured out ~ completely fun and interesting. Not dry and boring.

I'm at a cafe and there is a French couple by me chatting away. I just talked with them for a bit. The guy is French and the girl learned French in France. They were both really helpful! He gave me his card and later on, when I'm at a point where I can speak French, he said he'd help me! She said she lives 2 hours away but he lives in the city. Both very nice peeps. I told them I was just beginning but wanted to do this on the cheap, and the girl said it definitely helps to start talking with people once you're at that point. She took intensive classes in France for a year. Sigh. I wish.

Anyway. For some reason blogger won't publish this post right now. I'll have to publish it when I get home. Which I should do. I'd like to be out and about, despite the glum weather. But I really should get to Lesson 22. And run some other errands.

Au revoir, mon amis.