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The 1-year challenge: Italian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5901 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 97 of 244 30 August 2009 at 11:46pm | IP Logged |
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An unspectacular day of doing exactly what I had planned for the day, no more, no less. Things went about as well as expected.
Incidentally, shortest post thus far. Buonanotte. Liz 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6134 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 98 of 244 31 August 2009 at 12:05am | IP Logged |
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I have a question for you, Liz, about your "standards." I was wondering what exactly you would consider the various levels of proficiency on this forum to be. So, what do you consider to be beginner, intermediate, basic fluency, and advanced fluency (native fluency is obvious)? When do you suspect that you will advance from intermediate level to basic fluency in Italian? Just curious. Because everyone has different standards, and you seem to have interesting and high ones, so just wanting to know what exactly they were. :)
I intend to be up to my standard of basic fluency in Italian by this December. Eek! Only three full months left! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5901 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 99 of 244 31 August 2009 at 2:25pm | IP Logged |
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100 posts - woah...
Yeah, my standards seem to differ from the general consensus about how these terms should be used. I wouldn't really use those 4. I'm not particularly comfortable with how the word 'fluent' is thrown around, because I feel like it implies (or should imply) a degree of perfection in terms of accuracy and nuance. I always hesitate for a moment before answering 'yes' if someone asks me if I'm fluent in English, so yeah, high standards - unreasonably so, perhaps. (I've had numerous picky/honest native speakers of English tell me I can totally call myself fluent, and I frequently get comments from Americans about how my accent sounds native. An American friend of mine was telling me this summer that "I just can't get over how American you sound"... Fluent? Uhh, maybe...) 'Basic fluency' sounds like a bit of a contradiction to me, because the way I see things, a person who's 'fluent' is already quite advanced. There are a lot of people who have a degree of fluidity in speech and a decent vocabulary (and a certain comfort in using the language) who call themselves fluent, even if mistakes still abound, but I don't quite agree with that (I would never tell them off for it though). I'm one of the few people here who makes the distinction between fluent and 'fluid' (for want of a better word) where I would use the former for a strong command of a language in every aspect and the latter for ease and naturalness of expression (without necessarily being grammatically flawless). I guess I would say that we reach the lower end of the intermediate range when we're quite comfortable with Assimil-level grammar and the most important vocabulary (though still prone to non-nails-on-a-chalkboard mistakes) and could maneuver around a country using only that language without our insides curling up in terror whenever we enter a store or if someone starts a conversation with us. Then there's a pretty long stretch from there and up to advanced fluency, at which point we should be able to comfortably function in any possible weird spoken situation and have detailed discussions or write about any topic as long as we're familiar with the field, with the same degree of fluency in speech as your average university student (of the smart and dedicated kind). I would include speed in this - I wouldn't admit to advanced fluency in any language if I couldn't have discussions of this kind without linguistic limitations slowing me down. There's no need to speak fast for the sake of it, that's not what I mean, but at advanced fluency both speech and understanding (of written and spoken material) should be beyond considerations for language, it should just come on its own as well as our native language does. I suppose I'd put native-level fluency as the almost-unreachable level at the very top of advanced fluency, where we're completely indistinguishable from a native speaker, on any level, including idioms and linguistic nuance. I probably won't change Italian from intermediate to basic or advanced fluency until my 1 year is over (because that would move it from 'Studies' to 'Speaks'), we'll see how I feel about it then, but I should be at advanced fluency by then so I'll probably skip basic fluency altogether. In other news, just corrected a text and I definitely think it's a good idea to leave things for a few days before doing the translation back to Italian. I'll arrange to do that when I do more texts later, but for now I would like to get these last few texts done as soon as possible so I can get around to some reviewing. I guess there's a time consideration in all of this, I'd rather do things in 5 days and then have more time to review and other things, than spread things out too much and then only get around to a few texts in a certain time frame. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 31 August 2009 at 2:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6134 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 100 of 244 31 August 2009 at 2:53pm | IP Logged |
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That's very interesting. It definitely differs from my personal definitions a bit, but I expected it to.
I also have the problem of saying if I "speak" X language, or if I'm fluent or not. People come up to me and ask me all the time (really aggravating, actually) how many languages I speak. There is no real simple answer to that. My response usually is something along the lines of "Well, it depends. How well?" The person is usually surprised that I don't immediately respond with a concrete number or start ranting off a list of the languages. It's just not that simple. Most people at my school would consider themselves as speaking a language if they are at a low intermediate level, which I just don't agree with. So I ask them by their standards, which seems to work for them unless, of course, they don't really have standard and say they don't know. Anyways, I'm not sure how proficient and to what level Assimil takes you, (never having tried it myself) but my idea of and intermediate level is one where the learner has a moderately-sized vocabulary (a couple thousand words, perhaps?) and a general knowledge of most or all aspects of the grammar, and you can hold conversation and converse, but your range limited and you likely make mistakes when speaking still. "Basic fluency" has eliminated many of the mistakes of the intermediate level and you have a larger vocabulary by a few thousand words more. You have a good knowledge of all aspects of the language, but still may be a little shaky on some. Advanced fluency for me implies that one has sufficiently mastered the language to truly say that you can speak it fluently. You have a firm grounding in the grammar of the language and can produce it quickly upon command without strain and with very minimal errors. You have a large vocabulary of a several thousand more words than in basic fluency. You can converse about pretty much anything and not make errors. Native fluency is just what it sounds like--you're at a native level. Looking back over my definitions, I'm thinking I might have been a little hasty to move my Greek up to basic fluency level. I know that I'm definitely above intermediate, but not truly to basic fluency. I wish there was something on this site for in between those two, like "advanced," or perhaps the "fluid" that you suggested. Anyways, I would consider myself the following... English - native language Spanish - advanced fluency French - basic fluency Portuguese - basic fluency Greek - "advanced/fluid" Italian - intermediate German - beginner (or beginner-intermediate?) Japanese - beginner Oh, and beginner level to me is really basic words and phrases, a small knowledge of some parts of grammar, etc. I also am on day five of my French story roundtrip-translation. I shall compare my translation and the original later today and see how successful I was. I definitely agree though, that it feels too literal sometimes translating to English, and that I did remember some of the phrasing in French... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5901 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 101 of 244 31 August 2009 at 3:27pm | IP Logged |
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Yeah I have the same problems when talking to people sometimes, it's hard to know what people mean. But I tend to just answer according to what I expect their standards to be, and I imagine there are few Norwegians who wouldn't call me fluent in English, so I just go with 'yes'. Not least because it would come across as insulting and falsely modest to insist otherwise (and untrue according to their standards). I don't particularly like getting the same question from native speakers. When people ask me about Spanish they don't normally mean the same level of fluency they know I must have in English (if they know my background), so they just ask me if I 'speak' it, and I tend to answer that I'm functional but rusty. I don't really mention the "give me a week and I'd be talking" languages at all, the ones that I lost at some point because I stopped studying them, because I don't know what to say.
Incidentally the word we use in Norwegian for fluency in a language is more commonly used about liquids, so there goes my fluent-fluid distinction... Maybe that's why I make the distinction in the first place, who knows. (Because I can, maccas!) Makes sense to me anyway, that fluidity doesn't have to equal fluency. Assimil basically takes you to the level you went on to describe in the same sentence where you said you'd never tried it. So thumbs up. Maybe a little less on the vocabulary side of things though, and definitely lacking a great deal of important idioms (they can only teach so much in such a small book). By your standards I should be updating to basic fluency soon :-) Woop. But I'm not going to. Harsh self-assessments all the way. I don't think our definitions are that different though, just that I don't like the whole 'basic fluency' thing because of my rather strict set of standards for what I'd call fluency, and my 'beginner' lasts longer than yours - it hasn't been long since I upgraded Italian from beginner to intermediate, and I wasn't sure if I was right to do so. About the translations, you don't have to make them literal, I started doing that as a syntax aid and a time- saver, so if you want to write a poetic translation that captures the meaning in the normal English mode of expression then by all means. I'm still kinda undecided about the whole thing and what I do varies from sentence to sentence, but at this point I tend to write things in proper English so that I don't give myself any help. Random: After some exposure to Greek and Hungarian over the past couple of days I'm kinda in love with those again too. SIGH. So that's how long the Spanish/Catalan idea lasted. Good thing I have a good long while to decide which one I want to do next - before I decided to go with Italian only it was kind of a chronic problem that I would hop from one language to the next, so I'll pick one or two when I feel like my Italian is at the level I want it, but I still have no idea what those languages will be. So I guess this log will also partly be used for weighing my options against one another and make a decision... Liz 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6775 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 102 of 244 31 August 2009 at 4:25pm | IP Logged |
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To butt into your conversation a bit, I can make sense of the label fluent but I don't really know how to determine basic or intermediate. And that's because I remember how I felt with English - at some point I wasn't making any more grammar mistakes and my vocabulary and knowledge of the language was up to par for most intents and purposes. So fluency I think has some kind of clearer threshold.
Now intermediate, what does that mean? You can speak, but you're not confident and you fear mistakes? Well that describes a lot of immigrants I've met in Norway and it's some kind of tangible metric, but many people are careless about language and never actually iron out those wrinkles. So that would put them in intermediate mode for life. More importantly, how do you section off "intermediacy" on the bottom end? It's all very unclear. "Congrats, you've just become intermediate!" But then there's basic. Is basic the same as beginner? Are you basic once you've begun? Is a person who goes to France and can find his way around with a lot of understanding from the patient locals a beginner? If so, I am. The problem in both cases is breadth. You can do some language course and learn some small chunk of language, but you're sorely lacking elsewhere. That's why "fluent" makes sense, because it means decent depth across the board. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5901 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 103 of 244 31 August 2009 at 8:00pm | IP Logged |
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I guess 'basic' would be the equivalent of how my uncle once described the current state of his German and what the result would be if he had to use it in, say, a store: "Darf ich en-sånn-ein (one-of-those) haben...?" I wouldn't use 'basic' for anything myself, as it says meaninglessly little about actual knowledge of the language - any tourist could pick up that stuff, or at least function at some level, using even the worst of phrasebooks.
Lots of people hit a permanent plateau and never make it past intermediate. They're functional enough, so there's no apparent reason for them to go any further with it or fix the mistakes (sometimes quite basic ones) they're still making. Very common these days... Anyway, I'm done with all the texts I'd been neglecting, and I'm only a day behind schedule overall. So at least that's out of the way (not that it really matters). Recall wasn't spectacular for some of them, but I think this was a really good thing - it let me see that I might be better off leaving a bit of time between each text so that I let myself forget anything that I'm going to forget and then catch the words at just the point of leaving, refreshing my memory at a time that's conducive for learning (hopefully). There's little use in reviewing something you're currently sure about, better to leave it aside for a little while sometimes I guess, and then look at it again. I think it might still take a bit of experimenting to find the best way to do it, I'm still not entirely convinced it's counterproductive in any way to finish a text in 5 consecutive days, it could be that studying and reviewing things in that time frame helps cement things in my mind further than several scattered attempts would, but I'll be flexible about it, and I can at least know that it's not a big deal if I miss a day. Started a new text today, some fun new idioms and lots of food-related vocabulary, which suits me just fine and is probably a good thing at this point - just got the cookbooks I ordered in the mail last week, and I want to know what things are called. (Disappointed though - one of the books looks like the kind where they tell you it takes 30 minutes to cook whatever but they don't include the 3 hours you need to spend trekking around town looking for all the ingredients - if they even sell those things in my city at all - and the other doesn't have any pictures. Criminal!) Longest text so far, so I thought for sure that there would be a lot of new vocabulary for me to learn and was at one point wondering if I would need more than one sheet of paper for the wordlist, writing extra small and all that, and in the end I ended up only using one side... Win, I guess, since the text was a page and a half in Word (my other texts have been about a page) and I didn't have much trouble with vocabulary, except obviously the stuff I didn't know that went in my wordlist. So far I've been able to fit both translations onto one sheet of A5 paper, but I'm not even gonna try with this one - I already have to write small to fit my shorter texts onto one sheet of paper. Actually, I would probably be more comfortable using an A4 (normal-sized) sheet for one text, sometimes when I write small I miss things and it's not particularly kind to my eyes, so depending on how long my texts are in the future I might switch to A4 and just fold it up when it goes in my stack (in its proper place among all the other neatly numbered texts - what do you mean obsessive?). I'm not going to do texts that require more than an A5 sheet for the wordlist though - that would be too many words for me to learn in one go. Current word count (see page 6): 2556 unique words, based on 13 texts. Again, that's well over 200 new words added to the word count, but I didn't use anywhere near that many in my wordlist, so it's still incorporating words I already knew, or new forms of words that have come up in my previous texts. Later on, if I feel like it, I might go through an alphabetized list and take out the most obvious duplicates and names and so on, which would give me a more accurate estimate, but I'm not sure it matters. Maybe later. It might be more time-consuming than it's worth - not that it would really take all that long, but I can think of many other things that are more important that I could be doing instead, which is always a consideration :-) Second random note of the day: Estonian is so, so beautiful. How am I ever going to decide? Liz Edited by Lizzern on 31 August 2009 at 8:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5901 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 104 of 244 01 September 2009 at 11:56pm | IP Logged |
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Weird day, not as productive as I'd hoped/planned. I'm halfway through one of the two translations I planned to do today - but I'll stop here, kinda tired. After a bit of experimenting I think I've found a good balance of literal vs not-so-literal translations when I write things in English. Oh, and I like having more space to write, this is the longest text I've done so far and the first to go onto two A5 sheets, but it's much more comfortable to do that than having to write small just to fit it all.
When I do my translations it seems to help if I keep the Italian word at the front of my mind as I write the English equivalent, I've been doing that to a certain degree anyway of course but tried to do it in a different way today, I'll need to try that out more but not sure if I want to divide my attention too much. The other day I had the rather pleasant experience of seeing a word in one context in a text and then idiomatically used with a different (and entirely obvious) meaning in a new song I found later on the same day :-) Some days I swear it's like the universe wants me to learn Italian and I'm merely being a good girl and following orders. I've started looking up known words sometimes, ones where I'm sure of their main lexical meaning, to look for idioms I might be able to pick up or any other possible meanings they may have that I'm not aware of yet. I guess this is the closest I'm going to get to picking words out of a dictionary at this point - though I may start doing that eventually, possibly starting with my visual dictionary, which has been sitting on my shelf mostly unused since I got home. Speaking of mostly unused, I should probably start reading up on grammar points I'm still not sure about. I mean, actually reading in a grammar book, when they come up, one thing at a time, when I'm actually curious about how things are (that means no lists of things to look up later - never ever works). I bought a couple of cheap ones a while back, but so far the smallest one has only been opened a couple of times (shortly after that I made some fire-related threats against its life in this very log) and the other has been used as a hard enough surface for the sheets of paper I use for my wordlists so I can write on them properly while sitting in my sofa (it's just the right size). It has served me well. But who knows, maybe there's something in there that could be of use as well. Maybe. I kinda don't feel like it though, so I might just use them for reference in case I get really desperate. I'm so not a grammar book person, and I'm not sure I see any reason to change that now. Lastly I thought I'd mention that I kinda get the impression that people reading this think I know more than I do, so I'm just going to restate what I said in my 4-month evaluation post just over a week ago: "I hope this log doesn't look like a long chain of good news - make no mistake, I still royally suck at Italian. For real." Just so that's clear. I'm obviously working towards not sucking, but my current level really, really isn't impressive at all. Just so that none of you go around having grand expectations of what I can do... Liz Edited by Lizzern on 01 September 2009 at 11:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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