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Gary’s TAC 2014: Spanish, Italian, French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5200 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 89 of 138 31 July 2014 at 12:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've not been amazingly productive recently but things are still moving along...
Italian I finally watched Non ci resta che piangere... it's a well-loved film; I thought it was enjoyable enough but nothing amazing, not my sort of humour I suppose. And I needed subtitles to understand Troisi's thick accent. I also got halfway though La tigre e la neve before giving up: I just couldn't get into it at all. In terms of reading I'm about three quarters through Che la festa cominci and my verdict so far is that it's the strangest and most difficult of the Ammaniti books I've read. If you're looking for a first book to read in Italian then this is not it. But I'm enjoying it: it gives a sort of morbid curiosity to keep turning the pages and find out how it's all going to end. I had a long conversation at the weekend and a meetup a couple of days later, but at both I was tired and quite aware of the many mistakes I was making. A couple of people at the meetup were a bit funny towards me, asking me if I could follow the conversation and that sort of thing, but considering my Italian was bad at that particular moment it was understandable. But it was fun and more animated than usual, with a younger crowd than the normal one; shame I wasn't really capable of taking part very well but just listening was good. I love how open Italian people often are, willing to talk about fairly personal stuff with people they barely know and not afraid to approach certain subjects and express opinions. Nice change from sterile British small-talk and I'm sure I could learn something from them... if you're open then it often makes the people you're talking to more willing to be open as well. Some more pronunciation work is overdue, for when I have a bit more time and energy. I've also started doing a bit of diary-type writing, which I did as a beginner but then got out of the habit. I think it was Stelle who said recently that she tries to hit the four skills every day: speak, listen, read, write. It's exactly the sort of idea that's great in its simplicity, and I'm trying to take it on. Someone at the meetup told me about the Italian Institute. It's practically round the corner from my house and has a big library full of books and films. Sounds great... but it's only open from 9 to 5 on weekdays, which is when I work and my work is in a different part of town. So that's no use, but still it's really cool knowing that that sort of thing even exists. Spanish I watched one film, Tacones lejanos, since everyone keeps recommending me Almodóvar's work when I ask about Spanish films. Aside from that I've done very little since the meetup I wrote about last week. I had this idea that Spanish would be a huge focus this year and I'd be spending tons of time on it and speaking it at every opportunity, but in reality it's turned out to be a "slow growth", to quote a post from the recent wanderlust thread. To be honest I just don't have the same passion for Spanish that I did for Italian when I was at the early stages and still do have, and that's the reason I'm not prioritising it more. And it's not a bad thing: it means I'm less invested in it so I'm not too bothered about slow progress and I'm less likely to take it personally if I get bad reactions from native speakers or have an off day. Passion gives motivation but it also amplifies the frustration when things don't go well. And I hardly have time to make it more of a priority at any rate. Most of the time I freed up by quitting French has been filled in by music and I'm happy about that. And lastly... well, Spanish is an "easy language" for me with my Italian and French knowledge, so intense learning isn't even necessary to keep progressing. I suppose my main goal for now is getting my listening comprehension to a high level. At the moment I get the gist but miss a lot of the subtleties. I talk a lot about the areas I'm bad at in languages, like oral production, but if there's one thing I do seem to have a "talent" for it would be listening. In French and Italian I seemed to get to the "understanding almost everything" stage fairly quickly and effortlessly and I realise it's something that language learners often struggle with. And it's not to be taken for granted: you can't understate the usefulness of being able to easily understand conversations, and of course it's hard to join in on a conversation if you can't follow it in the first place. So work on listening is low-hanging fruit at this stage. French I went to French meetup last night! First meetup and first proper conversation in months. I did a bit of warm-up beforehand by watching and reading some French stuff and listening to a bit of radio. The vocabulary and spoken fluency mostly came back after a short while, which I was happy to see, but my pronunciation was extremely rusty and even worse than before. Now that I'm over the "break-up period" with the language I think it would be sensible to perhaps invest even 30-60 minutes or so per week to keep it somewhat fresh and not let it wither away completely. Maybe some video and some self-talk. And for all I complain about the meetups, they have nice people and good conversations so they're worth going to if I don't have other plans. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5200 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 90 of 138 01 August 2014 at 6:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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I did enough self-absorbed writing in that last post, so I'm giving something back: a list of some of the Italian resources I've discovered and been enjoying recently.
Caffeina Magazine and their Facebook page: lots of short cultural articles on lots of different subjects: arts, literature, travel, cuisine, you name it. Unfortunately the site suffers from intermittent technical issues like slow loading and pages not displaying correctly, but as HTLAL regulars we can deal with that ;). OltreUomo: Buzzfeed-style humour site that I just discovered today. I wouldn't be caught dead on these sorts of sites in English, but for a language you're learning they can be a great resource for having some fun while learning some useful colloquial vocabulary. They have some entertaining quizzes. I opted to be taken to a random quiz, and this is what happened: 
Initial laughs aside, there's some great colloquial expressions even just on that one page... yes, it's a bit rude, but for someone who socialises with Italians of my age, it's all essential knowledge. The obviously vulgar title cacciatore di figa reminds me of a sex-obsessed Tuscan friend; provarci con qualcuno is the standard expression to use to say "to try to attract someone"; riempire di botte is a graphic way of saying "to beat someone up" or "kick their ass" that I've come across quite a lot; "mettere in mostra" is a nice way of saying "to show off"; and... in "chi ce l'ha più lungo" let's just say that the context makes it quite obvious what is longer. Oh yeah, and that's a nice example of a typical idiomatic use of "tanto" at the start of a phrase that's really common in conversation but hard to find in a dictionary, that has a sense something like "anyway", "at any rate", "in the end"... Now that I've lowered the tone... "I Trombamici" webseries. These webseries with <5-minute episodes are handy when you have a few minutes to spare but not enough for a proper TV episode. Of course, as the title would suggest, this probably isn't a good one to watch at work. Another comedy webseries that I've mentioned before is The Pills. I'm sure there are more but I've yet to find them. Podcasts Radio 3 Scienza: Science programme. Radio 3 is good in general for cultural/intellectual stuff (see, I can do high-brow too!). Il disinformatico: Swiss podcast about computers and technology, particularly facts and myths about security, viruses, etc. Edited by garyb on 01 August 2014 at 6:10pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5200 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 91 of 138 05 August 2014 at 11:41am | IP Logged | ||
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Films and books
- Watched Il marchese del grillo (started off well but got tedious), Diario de una ninfomana (practically socially-acceptable porn with a marginally less predictable storyline), and Balada triste de trompeta (a rather dark film about clowns). Both the Spanish films had accurate Spanish subtitles; Diario was relatively easy to understand while Balada was much more difficult and I had to pause to look up a lot of important words. - Finished Che la festa cominci. I'm in the mood for something a bit more literary now so I've decided to attempt Calvino again, thinking that my level is a bit more advanced than when I struggled through Le città invisibili near the start of the year. I read the first story of Gli amori difficili, but it's still above my level with lots of unknown words per page. I'm not sure whether to (a) keep slogging on, (b) try another of his books to see if it happens to be any easier, or (c) just stick to simpler modern fiction for the moment, especially as it's more useful for my goal of conversational proficiency. I'll read a couple more of the short stories and see how I feel. Pronunciation As I said I've been doing a bit of Italian pronunciation work again. For the moment I feel like the most useful thing to do is recording myself, finding what my main weaknesses are, and working on them. I'm finding that my rhythm is pretty good (even if I listen and repeat a phrase in Audacity and look at the sound waves, they match quite closely), probably thanks to all the chorusing I did a couple of months ago. But my intonation is inconsistent (sometimes accurate but sometimes way off the mark); my stress is again inconsistent and I often try to pack too many words into a single stress group, which makes the sentence sound flat and unnatural; and I still have a bad habit of not always pronouncing vowels as "fully" as an Italian would. Even when speaking quickly, they make the time for the vowels. I think it's best to focus on one thing at a time, rather than trying to do it all at once at once with simple chorusing or shadowing. For now I think the vowels are the most important part (big native English speaker giveaway!) and probably the easiest to fix, so for the next few weeks I'll try to correct my vowel pronunciation habits. If that goes well then I'll start thinking about stress and then intonation. Intonation does vary a lot amongst regional accents, so there's a certain margin for error. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sarnek Diglot Senior Member Italy Joined 4208 days ago 308 posts - 414 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: German, Swedish | Message 92 of 138 05 August 2014 at 12:29pm | IP Logged | ||
I'm not sure whether you already know this, but there's a huge difference (linguistically) between Italian and English regarding this aspect. Italian is a language linguists refer to as syllable-timed whereas English is a stress-timed language. this Wikipedia article explains it better than I could, and hopefully it'll be of help. Edited by Sarnek on 05 August 2014 at 12:30pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5200 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 93 of 138 05 August 2014 at 6:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the post Sarnek! I've read a few phonetics books and I'm aware of the difference between syllable and stress timing, and that Italian is syllable timed... Yet in practice Italian often doesn't really sound "even" in the way that French for example does. Probably because it has strong lexical stress, which perhaps fools English-speaking ears into thinking that stressed syllables are longer since they stand out more. This would make me more inclined to mispronounce unstressed syllable vowels based on habits from speaking a stress-timed language, such as reducing them or by giving them less time than stressed vowels. French, on the contrary, doesn't have lexical stress, so it's pretty easy to remember to give equal time and clear pronunciation to every vowel.
Double consonants also make things a bit more confusing... I suppose the syllables "at" and "att" are the same length, but the vowel shortens to make space for the longer consonant. I'll try and keep this in mind! My problem pronouncing vowels correctly could well just be a symptom of not applying syllable-timing correctly. Edited by garyb on 05 August 2014 at 6:16pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5200 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 94 of 138 08 August 2014 at 12:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've done a bit of pronunciation work most days this week. I'm indeed finding that if I focus more on keeping an even rhythm of syllables, the vowel problems seem to take care of themselves. Generally it's the very first and very last syllable of a syllable group that I tend to shorten and consequently mispronounce, almost as if I'm in a rush to start and to finish the group, so taking time to make sure I give them a full "beat" of the rhythm is helpful. I'm starting to see the similarities to playing music.
From listening to my recordings I'm seeing a slight but noticeable improvement every day, so I'm on the right track! As always the hardest part is going to be implementing the new habits when I'm actually speaking with people. I should see some Italian friends this weekend so I'll have an opportunity to try. Another thing I've noticed is that there are certain combinations of sounds and words that I quite consistently get tongue-tied with or mess up. So I've started making a note of them as I come across them when reading aloud or self-talking so I can practise them. And a bit of writing practice is better than none: Ho deciso di continuare a leggere Gli amori difficili, e ho fatto bene: mentre il primo racconto è stato particolarmente difficile, quelli seguenti sono notevolmente più facili. Cioè, relativamente; non è mica un libro facile, e ci sono ancora un sacco di parole sconosciute, però ce la faccio! E i racconti sono belli, lo stile di scrittura è molto introspettivo e io, da persona introspettiva, riesco a immedesimarmi con i personaggi. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5200 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 95 of 138 11 August 2014 at 12:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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Stuff from the weekend... I went out for a walk one afternoon, and by chance bumped into a few Italian friends. My speaking was pretty bad. We made plans to meet up later, and before going out I did some of the pronunciation work I've been doing recently, and guess what, my Italian was much better after that warm-up. I'm happy that that strategy is so effective, but at the same time it would be nice if it weren't necessary! I just posted in the "hairy goals" thread saying that it'll probably take a few more years at my current rate before I can consistently speak Italian well without a warm-up!
I also discovered that the Italian warm-up was perhaps a bit too effective: I tried to speak some Spanish but my brain was firmly in Italian mode and I could barely get a word of Spanish out. I also briefly met a French woman who found out that I know French (I wasn't going to mention it but my friends insisted on telling her...) and asked the usual question of "what do you know how to say" - assuming that I just knew how to parrot a few stock phrases as opposed to having any sort of autonomy in the language. The usual bullshit; maybe I'm just looking too much into a harmless question asked to make conversation, but if so there are less presumptuous ways to phrase it. The first response that came to my head was "everything"... an exaggeration of course but it gets the point across. Next time it happens I might just say "Ok, well, I know a few phrases: 'Good morning', 'how are you?', 'the weather is nice today', and 'stop being so bloody condescending, how would you feel if I had that sort of attitude towards your English?'". I wrote a few pages ago that that sort of directness can actually earn their respect. I watched some stuff: El laberinto del fauno, the first halves of I maniaci and Si può fare (neither engaged me much), and Les sous-doués, a classic 80s comedy which I had been wanting to see for a while so I used my "do one thing a week in French" idea as an excuse for it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5200 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 96 of 138 15 August 2014 at 12:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Active/passive waves: not just for Assimil?
I've had an idea for managing multiple languages: having each one in either an active or a passive phase at any given time. This isn't really a strategy for learning more effectively, more just for managing time and energy (especially as active work is more difficult and demanding so there's only so much of it you can do in a day) and staying focused on fewer things at a time. And maybe doing cycles of gaining more passive knowledge then activating it makes sense. Overall it's just another step in my acceptance of the idea that I can't do everything. So for Italian at the moment: more pronunciation, more self-talk, more writing, more grammar, less film/TV, less reading... Yep, I'm waiting to be lynched by the "more input solves everything" mob. As for conversation, the amount isn't exactly in my control, and besides, it's the end rather than the means: all other work is basically work towards improving conversation. Obviously conversing is the main way to improve conversation, but I think "accessory work" on particular difficulties is an important complement to it and makes things easier for yourself; I hinted at this in my post about active skills in the Cheating and Consolidating thread (message 21). And Spanish is still in passive mode so I'm continuing with films and currently not worrying too much about speaking. Talking about films, I just saw El Cuerpo, a psychological thriller that I'd recommend: it manages to have lots of plot twists and flashbacks yet remain easy to follow unlike a lot of the genre. After a bit of discussion in James29's log, I'm becoming more convinced that something like FSI would be very helpful for me to make grammatical details like conjugations and agreement more automatic. They still don't exactly come naturally in Italian even though my theoretical knowledge is good, and Spanish isn't any less complicated in this regard. Whenever I do decide it's time for an active phase with Spanish, I'll give it a shot. And I'd also like to find something similar for Italian to clean things up. FSI Italian gets bad ratings, and the audio isn't available beyond the first few lessons, so I don't think it's an option. I'm considering something like Italian grammar drills, which is cheap, modern, and has decent reviews. I'm also still slowly working through Grammatica avanzata della lingua Italiana, which is helpful for the details, but I think I need something that drills the basics more. I think people sometimes overemphasise advanced stuff when more solid knowledge of the basics is more important. I've been seeing various posts about learning obscure vocabulary and reaching very high reading comprehension levels, which is impressive but for me and my goals it's hardly relevant since it's way beyond the point of diminishing returns for contribution to conversational ability. The Pareto Principle applies as always, and occasionally not understanding or being able to use a rare word is a fair price to pay for being more automatic and correct in everyday speech. Maybe it's a bit of a false dichotomy but my point is that time is limited and one has to prioritise, and it's easy to think that once you're past the beginner stage you don't need to worry about "the basics" any more and you should be working on more "advanced" things. I feel the similarities between Italian and Spanish are often overstated, making it sound like if you know one you can "just pick up" the other in a few months. So far my experience is similar to that of Italian after French: the similar language does help you learn the basics very quickly and understand/guess a reasonable amount, but it's still hard work. Plenty is similar, but plenty also isn't! I'm constantly pausing films to look up important words, I miss a lot of details without subtitles, and when I speak I feel constantly limited by a lack of vocabulary even despite being able to guess a lot from Italian. And this is just the beginner to early intermediate stage, which relatively speaking is the quick and easy part. Yet I can't complain as I know it would still be a hell of a lot harder without my Italian and French. And let's not exaggerate about my level; the "Spanish is easy if you know Italian" idea probably applies more to people who know Italian well! As usual I ended up writing far more than I intended to; ironic for a post about using time effectively. Anyway I think I need to cut down language time slightly for more relaxation, meditation, exercise... insomnia is still killing me and anything that might help it is more important than studying languages. No point in languages if I don't have the energy to go out and enjoy using them. Edited by garyb on 15 August 2014 at 1:16pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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