Just a couple inarticulate rants

[arrowwhiskers]

I have a couple of aggravations that I feel like writing down before they fade. Meh.


1. Language comprehension. Particularly in French. It's difficult, and annoying. As I'm learning Spanish, the straightforward phonetics make it relatively easy to pick out words, even if I haven't learnt them, from context, cognates, and Latin roots. However, I've been studying French for so much longer, and it's exponentially more difficult. Even cognates are often hard to catch, because the French accent and way of phoneticizing them differs so vastly from English.

I'm mostly irritated because I -do- miss so much class, so what I'm losing from my absence is the consistent oral/aural practice that comes from attending lessons and participating in discussions. I'm already at a disadvantage since everyone else in the class has at least three more years of French than I do. So I have to get the practice elsewhere, and a really decent way to do that is through films. Almost every DVD has a French dub, so this is pretty easy to manage.
However, I've found a really frustrating trend in my behavior when I try to watch French dubs of movies I haven't seen. Today, home sick and bored, I decided to watch 'Forty Year Old Virgin' which my father had rented (I've been watching so many films lately. It's such an awful waste of time...) But anyway, first, I switched the language to French, deciding I could at least make it educationally worth my while. Naturally, I couldn't keep up, especially since they were talking quickly, using lots of expressions, and talking about raunchy things which my vocabulary didn't encompass. So, first solution, English subtitles. Voilà, now I can follow, but I'm focusing more upon just understanding (just reading the subs) than on listening, such that I'm barely listening at all, and furthermore, I'm focusing more on the subtitles than actually watching the visuals on screen. This is totally stupid, to lose the effect of the movie from reading subtitles which I only need because it's in a language I'm not really listening to anyway. The only reasonable thing to do is to just give in and watch it in English. Which means the French practice doesn't happen.

So essentially, the problem is that I'm in sort of a transitional stage, where listening is -necessary- to improving my skill, and yet my skill is not yet sufficient to understand what I'm watching/listening to enough to truly get something out of it for what the thing actually is. Aka, follow the plot of a complex film/radio broadcast, etc. And if I can't get meaning out of it for what it is, I'm discouraged from watching it. Geh. I guess the solution is watching movies I've seen before, or cartoons and kiddy movies which have easy plotlines. Though that gets tiresome too.

2. So instead of watching the movie in French, I watched it in English and then later went on BBC.com to the language learning section and listened to all the French practices and did a lot of exercises...pawed through lots of the informative sites and slang dictionaries. It was really fun, and I probably spent six or seven hours intermittently chatting and working on the site. It was totally my decision, my own initiative--and the thing that frightens me a little is that I -know- if that school had assigned me to check it out, I would have been far less interested, far less likely to spend a long time, or even to explore the site at all. It's awful when I'm fully aware that school makes me LESS likely to do something. Meanwhile, of course, while I was playing around on the site, I -was- putting off the assignments I -did- get.

So I should probably start them, now that it's approaching 2.30 AM.

On a different note, I just took a really hot shower and shivered for ten minutes under the scalding water. That so does NOT bode well for tomorrow. >_< Dammit, but I'm missing so much school. It's not really the best thing.

*wanders off to do her homework...maybe -_-*

Comments

[meorae.livejournal.com]

One thing I've done before is watched movies with spanish dubs and spanish subtitles. So if I don't catch something I'm listening to, I can still read it in spanish and try to figure out what it was. Although that takes away some of the aural comprehension, it's better than it being in english as you don't learn anything when you're reading the subtitles in english.

[arrowwhiskers.livejournal.com]

That's true, I do like French audio/French subs...but it's almost like, most of the focus I need is listening. If I turn on subs, most of the time, I understand almost perfectly, and it's the same deal as the English subs. But it is a good compromise.

Unfortunately, a trend among DVDs is that often there is English/French audio, and English/Spanish subs. It's relatively rare for there to be French subtitles as well as French audio, though it often is present in really popular or mainstream pictures.

[penguinutopia.livejournal.com]

Something I did recently was that I was watching an episode of West Wing that I'd seen enough to know the dialogue somewhat, but I was watching it with a commentary, and instead of turning the english subtitles on, like I usually do, I turned on the french subtitles, which was actually cool, and interesting, and helpful. Unfortunately, there wasn't any listening comprehension going on, but...

[arrowwhiskers.livejournal.com]

Yeah...either way, listening suffers. --;