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rainbowunicorn_readsBeginning French: A cultural approach
The other day I was able to buy "Beginning French: A cultural approach" for Php75 at Booksale. It's a thick, old, musty book, from the 60s, with brittle, yellowing pages and a nice dusty library kind of smell. I'm a bit sad about its binding though, since it's weak, so each time I use it I open it carefully, lest the pages get removed.
At the start there's an introduction to the student, and I'm amazed at how effective the tips are, like "Do not write the EN equivalent of the words, it hinders learning"--something I need to be doing. I do this forbidden thing because I am frightened of being called to recite and then not knowing the answer (haha deeper issues hello).
I've been avoiding looking at the dictionary at the end of the book, and they're right, somehow through context clues you really can get how "pays" could get to mean "country". Heh.
Each day I try to finish a chapter of the book, which includes reading and understanding a block of text (helped by the accompanying image) then answering some comprehension and grammatical questions about it after. The grammar section at the back is specially helpful, and serves also as a refresher for English grammar. I love this find. I discovered that studying bits of it at the office is tons more effective than at home, where I'm distracted by movies or the intrawebs or other books or sleeping.
What I think: 8 unicorns
Without Reservations by Alice Steinbach
I've also been savoring "Without Reservations" by Alice Steinbach for a few days now. She leaves the comfort of her home for a bit of soul-searching at Paris, Oxford and Milan, sending herself postcards from each location. Sneaking a few pages every now and then at work, while waiting for the edits of my project. I particularly like this part:
It was a lesson I hoped to learn in the months ahead: how to stop rushing from place to place, always looking ahead to the next thing while the moment in front of me slipped away unnoticed.
I knew it once, of course--the feeling of connection that comes from seizing the actual world. When I was a child, very little that happened in the real world escaped my attention. Not the brightly colored ice in small paper boats we bougt at Mr. Dawson's snowball stand; or the orange-and-white pattern that formed a map of Africa on my cat's back; or the way Mother sat at her dressing table, powdering her beautiful face to a pale ivory color. It used to surprise me, the intensity with which I still remembered these distant memories. But when I entered my fifties--the Age of Enlightenment, as I came to call it--I understood their enduring clarity. By then I'd knocked around enough to know that, in the end, what adds up to a life is nothing more than the accumulation of small daily moments."
What I think: 8 unicorns
The other day I was able to buy "Beginning French: A cultural approach" for Php75 at Booksale. It's a thick, old, musty book, from the 60s, with brittle, yellowing pages and a nice dusty library kind of smell. I'm a bit sad about its binding though, since it's weak, so each time I use it I open it carefully, lest the pages get removed.
At the start there's an introduction to the student, and I'm amazed at how effective the tips are, like "Do not write the EN equivalent of the words, it hinders learning"--something I need to be doing. I do this forbidden thing because I am frightened of being called to recite and then not knowing the answer (haha deeper issues hello).
I've been avoiding looking at the dictionary at the end of the book, and they're right, somehow through context clues you really can get how "pays" could get to mean "country". Heh.
Each day I try to finish a chapter of the book, which includes reading and understanding a block of text (helped by the accompanying image) then answering some comprehension and grammatical questions about it after. The grammar section at the back is specially helpful, and serves also as a refresher for English grammar. I love this find. I discovered that studying bits of it at the office is tons more effective than at home, where I'm distracted by movies or the intrawebs or other books or sleeping.
What I think: 8 unicorns
Without Reservations by Alice Steinbach
I've also been savoring "Without Reservations" by Alice Steinbach for a few days now. She leaves the comfort of her home for a bit of soul-searching at Paris, Oxford and Milan, sending herself postcards from each location. Sneaking a few pages every now and then at work, while waiting for the edits of my project. I particularly like this part:
It was a lesson I hoped to learn in the months ahead: how to stop rushing from place to place, always looking ahead to the next thing while the moment in front of me slipped away unnoticed.
I knew it once, of course--the feeling of connection that comes from seizing the actual world. When I was a child, very little that happened in the real world escaped my attention. Not the brightly colored ice in small paper boats we bougt at Mr. Dawson's snowball stand; or the orange-and-white pattern that formed a map of Africa on my cat's back; or the way Mother sat at her dressing table, powdering her beautiful face to a pale ivory color. It used to surprise me, the intensity with which I still remembered these distant memories. But when I entered my fifties--the Age of Enlightenment, as I came to call it--I understood their enduring clarity. By then I'd knocked around enough to know that, in the end, what adds up to a life is nothing more than the accumulation of small daily moments."
What I think: 8 unicorns