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The 1-year challenge: Italian

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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log Post Reply
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numerodix
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Netherlands
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Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French
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 Message 81 of 244
26 August 2009 at 1:53pm | IP Logged 
Lizzern wrote:
Just did a test to estimate my level of Italian according to that part-helpful-part-useless European framework thing. 30 questions, I got a few of them wrong partly because of vocabulary, I was unsure about a couple of them, and I answered one wrong where I knew the right answer (epic fail). It put me at B2. What the...? I don't think I'm a B2. Actually, I could well be - I have no idea if I'm a rookie B2er or if I'm still lounging around the shallow end of A2.


Test wrote:

16 out of 30 questions answered correctly! Your level is approximately Intermediate - A2-B1


LOL! I was guessing on lots of them. Only 5-10 were actually at a level I could comfortably understand.

Btw, do you happen to know how long a comprehensive test for this kind of thing would be?

Enjoy reading about your adventures :)
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Lizzern
Diglot
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Norway
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 Message 82 of 244
26 August 2009 at 11:37pm | IP Logged 
Hi numerodix, thanks for posting :-) About these kinds of tests - I would want a test that was more thorough than this one, kinda along the lines of TOEFL I guess. I took TOEFL in high school and found it quite useful/accurate at the time - I have fond memories of it constantly being referred to as 'tøffeltesten' ('the slipper test') by the Norwegians at my school :-) Anyway I would want it to test reading, listening and possibly writing, beyond the mere basics. I'm sure such tests exist and I'm sure many language schools have their own tests that adequately measure a student's understanding so they can be placed in the right class, I might look into these in more detail later and try to get my hands on one. But I suspect that by the time I get to the point where I would bother to take the time to go looking for a good way to test myself, I will already be at the point where I'm pretty much fluent, and then it won't matter so much anyway. But if anyone happens to know of one, then I'd definitely want to take it. Quantifiable progress and all that.

Did a wordlist for another text just now, this was a really good text to do at this point because 1) it had a lot of vocabulary that it'll be good to know, 2) there were a lot of words I probably wouldn't be expected to know but it'll be so cool that I know them if I ever do need them, and 3) when I first read this text a few weeks ago I didn't understand many of the idioms in the text but now I do because I've learned them here and there in my previous texts. Hooray. It seemed to flow pretty well.

Current word count: 2133 unique words, based on 11 texts. Well, at least the number is starting to look somewhat more appealing now. And I put just over 40 words in my wordlist today but the word count went up by almost 200 words, so there are still things I already know that haven't so far come up in a text that are gradually being incorporated into the word count, which is good. I wonder how long it will be until that changes and those two numbers are about the same... I secretly (ok scratch that) hope I'll make it to 5000 before that happens. For no particular reason other than it being a nice round number. It wouldn't really make any difference because a great deal of those words would be from my wordlists anyway, but still.

Time for me to try to get to bed at a reasonable time for once - I'm tired and it's been a weird day, so I'll just do the rest of what I had planned for today tomorrow instead. Tomorrow looks like it's going to be crazy busy, but oh well, I'll make it work somehow.

Liz

Edited by Lizzern on 26 August 2009 at 11:41pm

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ellasevia
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Germany
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 Message 83 of 244
27 August 2009 at 3:41am | IP Logged 
Hi Lizzern, my friend and I are very interested in trying your adapted text method and I couldn't remember whether or not you said how long each text was. So, how long are they on average?

By the way, I also did that test thing, and it said my knowledge is somewhere around B1, much higher than I expected. Perhaps B1 in passive understanding from other Romance languages but I doubt I'm that advanced actively...
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Lizzern
Diglot
Senior Member
Norway
Joined 5911 days ago

791 posts - 1053 votes 
Speaks: Norwegian*, English
Studies: Japanese

 
 Message 84 of 244
27 August 2009 at 11:00am | IP Logged 
Neat, it'll be nice to have some more people join my little experiment :-) You'll have to keep us all updated on how you go... And by all means tweak it to suit you, then I can steal ideas off of you and happiness will ensue for everybody. Any changes I make will - this much should be obvious by now - be detailed in full in this log...

The texts I use are usually about a page long in word, normal font size. I have some longer ones on my list that I haven't gotten round to yet, but the requirement is that I can fit it on a regular A4 in word without the text becoming too small, and of course that it looks like it has a decent amount of new vocabulary (but not too much).

For each text I use one A4 sheet cut into two equal A5 parts (A4 is about the same size as US letter paper, a little taller and narrower. A5 is half the size of A4), one for the wordlist and one for the translations. When I do my translations I split the text into 2 equal parts, so that I do one half of the text on one side of the sheet and the second half on the other side, writing small enough that I can fit both the translation and the original on one A5 sheet. It means I have to write small, so you might want to go with a normal-sized sheet of paper depending on your handwriting - but definitely split the text, cause you'll be using your day 2 translation when you write your day 4 L2 text and it is a royal pain in the backside to have to flip round to the opposite side to read your own L1 as you're writing your L2 (trust me on this one).

One thing I don't think I've mentioned anywhere that's worth doing if you're going to include examples in your first column in L2 is that if you use several words from the same phrase or sentence then you can put the relevant parts of the sentence on several lines (that align with your wordlist on the left) by indenting the parts of the sentence that go onto the next line (so that you can easily see that that's how they were written in the original). So if you have a sentence "Blah newword1 blah blah, blah newword2 blah blah newword3 blah." then what I do in my wordlist is split the sentence like so:

newword1   Blah newword1 blah blah,
newword2      blah newword2 blah blah
newword3      newword3 blah

Then you do your L1 wordlist in the next column, whenever you please, and then the 3rd translating back to L2. I tend to do the L1 list a few hours later on the same day, and then the L2 list on day 3. Things like articles should of course go on the same line as the word they belong to. I don't normally use more than a couple of words around each new word but sometimes that means that I can end up writing down whole sentences if you look at a few new words together. It might sound a bit odd but I'm sure you'll find some sentences where it makes sense to do that. If writing down whole phrases like this bothers you, you can always change the order of things, or look for examples from elsewhere.

Also be sure to write your L2 in a lighter pen than your L1 when you do the translations, then use your L1 pen to write over your L2 mistakes when you do your corrections.

Eh that's more than I intended to write. No surprises there then... Questions/comments/criticism/banalities, you know the drill - post!

Liz
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Lingua
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United States
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Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Dutch

 
 Message 85 of 244
27 August 2009 at 11:22am | IP Logged 
Lizzern wrote:

I know we have a couple of things in Norwegian that no foreigner could ever get away with using unless they were at native-level fluency (and sometimes not even then),

Liz


Har du noen eksempler? Bare nysgjerrig.
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Lizzern
Diglot
Senior Member
Norway
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791 posts - 1053 votes 
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Studies: Japanese

 
 Message 86 of 244
27 August 2009 at 12:22pm | IP Logged 
Alright I guess I'll write this in Norwegian, but it'll be this post only, feel free to reply to this in particular but if anyone wants to discuss any of this further then the Scandinavian or Norwegian thread might be more suitable. Just don't want this thing to get sidetracked, and in the wrong language :-)

Har aldri vært noe flink til å komme på eksempler, men har snakket en del med en venn av meg som lærer norsk og har holdt på i noen år, og vi har vel kommet innpå gjerne maks 10 slike ting, så det er ikke så mye at det er noe å uroe seg for. Skal heller si fra hvis jeg kommer på noen flere, men det eneste jeg kommer på nå er "om" i begynnelsen av et spørsmål. Dette er hovedsakelig noe vi gjør på dialekt, i noen dialekter mer enn andre. Da kommer ordene i vanlig rekkefølge etter det, så istedenfor å spørre "vet du...?" sier noen av oss gjerne heller "om du vet...?" Kan ikke se for meg at dette ville blitt særlig godt tatt imot hvis en utlending sa det, det er vel strengt tatt 'feil', men det er såpass vanlig nå at få vil reagere på at en nordmann sier det... Dessverre for dere er det gjerne sånn noen ganger, at vi kan ta oss langt flere friheter, fordi norsk egentlig er et stort rot hvor alle snakker slik de vil (noe vi absolutt benytter oss av).

Man skal også være mektig flink i norsk før man kan bruke slang så mye man vil, og generelt rølpe med språket slik nordmenn gjerne liker. Man kan være uhyre kreativ med norsk hvis man vet hva man gjør, og sånt syns vi er festlig, men man må opp på et visst nivå før man kan gjøre det uten at det skurrer for folk. Ikke så veldig kult, selvfølgelig, om utlendinger (eller nordmenn forsåvidt) sier noe som kunne vært veldig morsomt men er bare littegrann feil på grunn av noe nyansegreier, og så blir det ikke morsomt likevel.

Men for all del, det er hundre ganger bedre at folk prøver seg på å si noe urnorsk enn at de sier ting som "teknisk sett" istedenfor "strengt tatt", så det er bedre folk gjør feil på norsk enn at de herper språket fullstendig på grunnlag av morsmålet sitt.

Det er vel kanskje de færreste som bryr seg nå når vi er såpass vant til å høre så mange forskjellige dialekter og gebrokken norsk, nordmenn er egentlig lett imponert over folk som snakker bra norsk, men ekstremt lite lystne på å påpeke noenting som helst hvis folk sier ting feil. De fleste tenker at det ikke er så farlig, så ikke vær redd for å gjøre feil når du snakker med nordmenn. Det eneste man virkelig ikke bør gjøre er å uttrykke direkte at man ikke bryr seg om å snakke riktig. Da vil folk virkelig fatte interesse for alt en gjør galt :-)

Liz

Edited by Lizzern on 27 August 2009 at 12:27pm

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Lizzern
Diglot
Senior Member
Norway
Joined 5911 days ago

791 posts - 1053 votes 
Speaks: Norwegian*, English
Studies: Japanese

 
 Message 87 of 244
27 August 2009 at 9:48pm | IP Logged 
As expected, today has been a really busy day. Finished up the stuff in my wordlist that I didn't get around to yesterday, but not much else. So for all intents and purposes, in terms of Italian today just didn't happen. At all. Ah well, at least the wordlist stuff was useful enough. I might try to catch up over the weekend, which will be a little less crazy - we'll see how that goes...

Liz
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Lingua
Decaglot
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United States
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Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Dutch

 
 Message 88 of 244
27 August 2009 at 10:09pm | IP Logged 
Takk for svaret. Jeg skal ikke skrive mer her, da, som du skrev, en diskusjon på norsk egentlig burde finne sted i den norske tråden.


      

Edited by Lingua on 27 August 2009 at 10:10pm



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