personal_mythos

In the francophone blogosphere (I mostly read CanalBlog), I keep hearing about Marmiton.org, a site where users submit and comment recipes. It's not quite as photo-filled and flashy as some of its English-language competitors, but you're not here to learn English, right? And it's pretty good nonetheless, with features about seasonal recipes, categorized recipes, and versions in Spanish, Italian, and English (the English one is called "Let's Cook French"). Because it's all about user-submitted content, the four sites are probably rather different, but if I was studying those languages I might give them a whirl.

There are a few things to know when using French recipes - they (the French) use the metric system, and measure most dry ingredients (sugar, flour, etc.) by weight, not volume, though liquids are usually in mL and cL. The exception is for small quantities, which I'll explain below. All temperaures will be in celcius or (occasionally) refer to the settings on old French ovens.

( vocabulary after the cut )

Push Start is a French show about video games that I discovered recently. They have all the videos on their website and on Dailymotion - a total of 35 episodes thus far. It reminds me a bit of when I used to watch X-Play on TechTV/G4TechTV/G4TV back in the day, except that you never see the hosts and it's not played as much for laughs. The previews are also mostly in the promotional vein, whereas X-Play never had any compunctions about ripping the designers a new one if they didn't like a game. In other words, the two shows are about as unalike as two shows about video games could be.

Many of the interviewees speak English and are dubbed into French - something I always found a little disconcerting (speaking out of my monolingual American childhood here) because it drives home the fact that we're not in Kansas anymore, or at any rate the expected audience isn't. Interviewees who speak French are not subtitled even when they have a noticeable accent (perhaps the producers of Push Start have a better opinion of their viewers' intelligence than G4 execs do). I understand Quebecers (at least of the urban variety) pretty well, but it takes a bit of getting used to if the only accents you know are some of the more 'standard' French ones. French video game terminology is often borrowed from English, much like French computing terminology in general, which could be a boon, although personally I didn't recognize very many of the English words in French when I first started seriously working on my listening comprehension.

As you may know from this previous entry, I think that the easiest (not to mention most fun) way to learn languages is to simply watch, listen to, and read things that you enjoy, even if you don't understand them. That is to say that in the beginning, you'll need to find things that you can enjoy with little to no understanding, and you may want to start mainly with videos, because you can get a lot out of the visuals in many cases.

I didn't come to this idea entirely on my own - I started watching French in Action on my own in order to go faster than my far-too-easy university French course on the advice of the good folks at How to learn any language, and started into internet radio (RFI) and reading novels and French-language Wikipedia, it was slow going and I resented it, because even though it was a goal I had set for myself, RFI was boring, and I was frustrated with not understanding.

Learning Japanese has been a much more positive experience, perhaps partly because, unlike French, it was something I wanted from the start, and also because I already knew a bit about Japanese pop culture and Japanese things I liked, and so when I found All Japanese All The Time, whose author promotes the idea of doing fun things in your target language all the time, I had some idea where to start. I also started doing this three months, rather than four or five years into my studies, and the result is that my progress in Japanese has been fairly rapid and seemed easy, even though I remember months of almost total noncomprehension. Said months were easier to bear because they came towards the beginning - I knew I shouldn't be able to understand, and had no false pride - and because the things I was watching were generally entertaining. I also came to like the Japanese language more than I have ever liked French.

Recently, after I found out that I wasn't going to Japan next year after all, I decided to refocus on French, because I want to study in Montreal and will need all the language ability I can muster. I am still rather ignorant about French things compared to my level of knowledge about Japan, but there's a lot more out there online than a few years ago, and I've found things I really like, which has made me feel a lot better about the language.

Anyway, the authors of All Japanese All The Time and Antimoon have explained the idea at great length, and Khatz of AJATT also gives a lot of ideas of things to watch/read/listen to if you're learning Japanese. There's also 100 Japanese Things, which lists and explains Japanese things for Japanese learners. But I have yet to find such a thing for learners of French (tell me if you've seen one!), and of course I have a lot of favorite Japanese things the above sites don't mention. So I figured I'd start my own list. ( Number one, of course, is the above-mentioned French in Action. )