Two Years of French!

I don’t know the exact date, but this June was also my two year anniversary of learning French! I shot this video on June 26th, which is approximately the two year anniversary date (I think it’s either that or the 25th – I know I started learning French a few days before starting Duolingo, and my two year Duolingo anniversary was June 28th). Unfortunately I didn’t have time that week to start working on the subtitles (then it took a really long time to subtitle the video using Movavi Video Editor, which has an autosave feature which cannot be turned off and saves after every change you make). On top of that, I realized that the default subtitles were sometimes hard to read because I wore white, so on Saturday I needed to go in and add an outline on most of them to make them easier to see (it took about 2 hours just to make that change because there’s no mass edit feature in the program)! So a week and a half after shooting it, here it is:

I stitched two recordings together for this video – the introduction, then the whole second part of the video where I talk about other things. I found I kept getting through the introduction alright, but if I tried to keep going from there I was kind of floundering to start my next topic (these videos are completely unscripted to give a better showing of how well I’m able to use the language). Stopping the recording there gave me a chance to figure out what to talk about without it being too awkward.

I was really happy with how well this video went. While I do still struggle at times with some words, I feel like my French is flowing better now, and I can jump back into French much quicker after having to slip in an English word or two. I 100% believe this is thanks to the instruction I’ve been able to get from the Novocentre, the local place I mention in the video that I was able to connect with to get help with my French. I’ve been doing one two hour lesson once a week, and the lesson is an immersive environment; I’ve noticed that my French comprehension has skyrocketed since starting with them last fall. More recently my speaking is improving, too – I’m more confident, and not as afraid to make mistakes, which is fantastic. Everyone makes mistakes when learning a new language, and it’s okay, nothing to be worried about, it’s just part of the process. 🙂

In the video, I also mention wanting to read one of the French children’s chapter books I got from the library. I ended up reading David et le Salon Funéraire by François Gravel in its entirety over the July 1st weekend. 🙂

While writing this post, I went back and watched my One Year French video. I can’t believe the difference this one year has made, and I can’t wait to see what next year will bring, too! 🙂

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Two Years of Ukrainian!

Yesterday was my two year anniversary of starting to learn Ukrainian! As promised, I shot a video of me speaking:

The video was shot on the actual anniversary (June 5th), but was uploaded earlier today (it took me a few hours to add the subtitles).

Like last year’s video, I wasn’t able to do this in one long take (I kept losing my train of thought, or babbling because I couldn’t think of what to talk about next). So I decided to stop the video, then film a second clip and stitch the two together. But unlike last year, it’s only the two clips (I don’t remember how many clips I stitched together for the One Year vid, but I know there were times where I could only get like a sentence or two out). I also feel like my speaking is a bit smoother this time around (at least once I figured out what I wanted to say!)

Moving Movavi, my video editing software, to my gaming laptop was a real lifesaver when it came to adding the subtitles! My regular computer has to think about it every time I add or move a subtitle, while the gaming one was able to make the changes pretty much immediately. It still took a few hours to add them all in, but that was okay – I would probably still be working on it for a few more days if I hadn’t made the computer switch!

So here’s where I’m currently at with Ukrainian. I will be shooting a video for French at the end of the month; if you’re interested, stay tuned for that. 🙂

One Year French Video!!!

Here it is: my one year of French video!

I shot the video 3 weeks ago (so I’ve now been learning on Duolingo for 387 days!), and managed to shoot the whole thing in one take. There are some places where I pause to try to come up with the word I’m looking for (and most of the time find it). I thought about cutting those pauses out, but thought this would be a good benchmark so I can see how badly I’m still doing that in the future. 🙂

The video almost got delayed AGAIN because of technical difficulties. My computer kept crashing when I tried to export the video from Movavi Video Editor, but thankfully restarting fixed the problem. 🙂

In the video, I ended up saying “Je ne connais pas” for “I don’t know,” rather than “Je ne sais pas.” I’m not sure if I used the verb “connaître” correctly, or if some of those instances I should have used “savoir” (although I do believe I got it right in terms of “I don’t know this word”). I tried to annotate the video where I used it, but I’m really not sure if I got those right, either.

This was hands down the longest video I have made speaking in another language though, so it’s pretty exciting that I was able to make this, even with all the pauses (and the couple of times I speak in English because I don’t know the word). 🙂

Other French updates: over the weekend, I actually did start reading French Short Stories for Beginners by LingoMastery (that’s the book I mention wanting to start in the video). I got the audiobook version of it as well on iTunes because I need to work on my listening comprehension. I also had another French lesson on iTalki on Sunday, which I really enjoyed. I’ll be booking more. 🙂

Finally, I took a French listening test online last Thursday as well. I need to score at a certain level to enroll in a local French program. There’s both a written and oral comprehension test; I tried them both back at the end of May and scored really well on the written comprehension test, but not high enough on the listening comprehension test. When I took the listening test again, I scored better (but still not quite high enough to enroll in the program). It was nice to see that progress though – the test itself seemed a bit easier after a few more months of working on French. 🙂

One Year French Video Still Coming…

Hey everyone, how’s it going? I’m still plugging away at putting the subtitles onto the one year French video. I’ve got less than one minute left to go, so I *should* have it posted before this time next week!

In the meantime, I realized that I never did share this video from work. It was put together for this year’s International Mother Language Day, which is February 21st. As I’d been learning Ukrainian, which is the language of my forebears, I was invited to participate as well. It was a lot of fun filming this (although it was brutally cold that week – we had to shoot outside because of covid restrictions).

I just wish more people had participated. We have many people who speak different Mother Tongues at the library, including Finnish (which would have been great to hear – Thunder Bay has a large Finn population), Polish, and French.

But that being said, I still love watching this video. It’s super fun hearing the phrase “we hear you” in all of these languages! 🙂

One Year French Video Delayed :(

Hey everyone, how’s it going? I just wanted to let you know that the one year French video is coming, but it’s going to take me a bit longer to get it posted to YouTube. The video is a bit longer (after a few tries, I managed to do it all in one take! I think it’s over 9 minutes long, and most of it is in French!), so it’s taking me a bit longer than I’d hoped to add the subtitles to it! I’m hoping to have it posted before next week, but this is going to be a busy week, so we’ll see how it goes.

One Year of Ukrainian Learning!

Hi everyone, how’s it going? I’ve been meaning to post something here for awhile, but I’ve been super busy lately with the book editing project that’s still ongoing (and that will probably be the case for quite some time). So I will post when I can!

But I definitely had to make time for a new Ukrainian video because I’ve now been learning Ukrainian for over one year! I thought the one year-mark was June 8th, but when I looked back at my notes, I realized it’s actually June 5th. So my video wasn’t made on the one year anniversary like I’d planned (and honestly, I didn’t get around to filming it until the 14th, and I put the subtitles in over the weekend when I posted it to Youtube).

So without further ado, here it is:

I didn’t realize it until writing this post, but this video was shot exactly six months after my “First Video Speaking Ukrainian,” so that ended up quite the coincidence! 🙂

I wasn’t able to do this video in one take, so I used some transitions to put the separate clips together. But I was generally able to get a sentence or two out between takes, so that was great. While this video is shorter than “First Video Speaking Ukrainian,” there’s actually a fair bit more Ukrainian in it (in that first video, I spoke a lot of English). It’s also really neat to see the difference that six months has made – while I am still struggling with finding the right words (and still need to increase my vocabulary a lot), you can see that I’m a little more confident when speaking the language. 🙂

As I mention in the video, I haven’t finished 100 Easy Ukrainian Texts yet. I will make a point of getting back to it this summer, and attempt to finish it by the fall. I’d really like to move onto reading some of the other Ukrainian books that I have!

I’ll also be putting together a “one year speaking French” video. I don’t know the exact date that I started learning French last year, but I know it’s a day or two before the 27th of June, because that’ll be my one year anniversary of starting Duolingo (and my 365 day streak!) and I started French a day or two before starting Duolingo (I zipped through the Transparent Language French quick start just before transitioning to Duo). So if you’re interested, watch for that video, which I will hopefully be making next weekend. 🙂

#WriteTuesday: The Return!

Happy September everyone!  Did you have a good weekend?  This weekend was Labour Day here in Canada; I was very happy to have an extra day off (although I mainly spent the time reading The Huntress by Kate Quinn – I needed to get through it for a book review that’s due this week)!  I am happy to say though that I also fit in some editing time.  I actually pulled out the notebook I use to break down my goals for the week into manageable chunks (I haven’t used it since February! 😮 ) – I used it just to plan out what I needed to do over the weekend (mostly reading and editing). I’m happy to say that I managed to get through pretty much all of my goals. 🙂

Oh, and earlier in the week, I was also a guest host on the Thunder Bay Public Library’s weekly show Read This Next, which airs on Fridays. Nicole and I chatted about video game books – we gave highlights based on games that are coming out this fall, talked about our personal video game book recommendations, and just generally chatted about video games.  I had so much fun!  Check it out here:

Other than that, I’m still working on French and Ukrainian, mainly on Duolingo.  I tried watching a movie in French without subtitles about a week ago; I couldn’t follow the dialogue, but thankfully I was able to follow the story thanks to the visuals.  Then a few nights ago I watched a movie in Ukrainian, but with English subtitles; my Ukrainian isn’t as strong as my French, but I was happy to be able to pick out a few words on my own here and there.  Oh, and I was really excited: while reading The Huntress, one of the characters has a tattoo on her foot in Cyrillic.  Even though it was in Russian, I was able to understand what it said (it was the numbers for six hundred and sixteen)!

So how’s your week been?  Anything new and exciting? 🙂

#WriteTuesday – YouTube and A Whole Lot of Thinking

About a week ago, I saw some ads for Viral Academy 2.0.  Specifically they were offering some free videos about how to make a profitable channel on YouTube and I was curious.  I’ve considered starting a YouTube channel for Sustainably North (although I admit that I have no idea about what sorts of videos I’d actually make for my blog), so I signed myself up to get the videos (knowing they were probably part of some sort of pitch for something, kind of like how a free exercise course I signed myself up for was pitching a longer course that you pay for).

So I wasn’t surprised when Video 4 ended up being a pitch for Viral Academy 2.0.  After watching Video 4, you had about a week to decide on whether or not to sign up for Viral Academy 2.0 before enrollment closed.  Every day I was sent an email about the virtues of signing up for Viral Academy 2.0.  I read them all and considered them deeply.  One particular email hit me pretty hard: it talked about how society conditions us to spend lots of money on the newest consumer gadget, but not so much on our own development.

I ended up sitting and contemplating whether or not I wanted to sign up for Viral Academy 2.0 right down to the last 30 minutes (I was sitting and playing a video game at the time, which was kind of just a mindless exercise while I debated whether or not I wanted to sign myself up).  And in the end I chose not to.  The more I considered it, the more I thought that starting a YouTube channel right now would just be a distraction from the writing I really want to do (both Sustainably North and short stories/games).  Plus when it got right down to it, I don’t really want to be making videos.  I want to write!

So I emailed them back, thanking them for getting me to think long and hard about what I want to be doing right now.  🙂

When all of that was done, I then started to think a lot more about Sustainably North.  Last summer I sat down and came up with an editorial calendar, which I then proceeded to ignore.  I know that starting to write for bUneke Magazine kind of threw me for a loop (I was so not expecting this awesome opportunity!) so I now need to actually come up with a solid plan for what I want the blog to be.  That will mean a lot less flying by the seat of my pants, so to speak (which is how I’ve pretty much been operating for the last while).

April is also the official first anniversary for Sustainably North. So most likely I’m going to keep winging it through March so that I have a solid plan come April.  I also bought a book on blogging on my Kindle some time ago, and I’m going to make a point of actually reading it before April as well!

To finish off my week, I also submitted another book review and article to bUneke Magazine.  Those will be appearing in the April issue. 🙂