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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 161 of 244 28 September 2009 at 9:02pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Just music. I mentioned this a while back but it would get really repetitive if I were to mention music every time, so I don't usually comment on it. I can quit whenever I want.
Skimmed through some Assimil lessons today - gosh I have a lot of active phase lessons left to do. It'll be good for me to review these things, even though a lot of the grammar is unproblematic by now. Can't hurt to be reminded, right? And I've forgotten some words, ones that haven't shown up in the things I've been reading, so sometimes I'm just lost when I try to produce them when I haven't seem them in months. Also read a bit about regionalisms and Italian proverbs, and watched a video on Youtube about proverbs in Ticinese (!), which was interesting. Honestly, I never knew people spoke anything other than standard Italian in the areas where it turns out there are a bunch of dialects I can't understand on the basis of Italian. Fun! I like learning about (or even actually learning) languages the average Norwegian will never know about and the different kinds of people within a population that might look homogeneous from the outside, listening to music by artists that I never would've heard of in a mono- og even bilingual life, and so on. Blame it on the Catalans I suppose, but I'm fascinated by that sort of thing, the cultural sides of a country that foreigners never hear about. Probably won't have time for any more Italian today, but oh well. Ended up falling asleep for an impromptu and way too long nap in the middle of the day, and this is my punishment. Liz 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 162 of 244 29 September 2009 at 11:01pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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A bit of listening practice today, and some scattered reading. A bit of Dante (including some of the footnotes, boring but packed with useful info I'm sure), a bit of Personalità confusa (what can I say, it makes me laugh), a couple of other things here and there, always something to read on Wikipedia, but - danger - you also run the risk of getting sidetracked by something pretty and shiny and before you know it you're browsing through the Spitzer gallery at Caltech and looking around the internet for telescope prices. (Damage done.)
Anywho, I don't see much of the passato remoto these days (yes I had to look it up to know that that's what it's called in linguistese), or I didn't until I started reading more actual books, but today I saw the same form of the same verb twice in totally unrelated sources, and I've never seen that particular variant before. Weird - and also totally cool that there are actual words in Italian that end in -iai. (The word was lasciai. And yes, I know about the whole pronunciation thing, but still, maccas, still.) Pure class, Italian, as usual - well done. Yes, I have a certain fondness for elegantly executed vowel clusters. Also saw the word ïo in La Divina Commedia. Why don't we do that sort of thing more? Why? On another note, I need to dig out my paper dictionary, which has been sitting on my shelf for a while since I discovered how much easier it is to use WordReference when I do wordlists - and even when WordRef fails me I still have two other online dictionaries to turn to, and Wiki-whatever if all else fails. And all that works fine, but I can't use WordRef for English-Italian because the site takes forever to store your preferences, and I finally got it to remember that I'm not after English-Spanish, so there's no way I'm changing it now, that would slow down everything else. That's it from me for today - not the most productive day for Italian, but oh well. 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 163 of 244 29 September 2009 at 11:52pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Woh woh, two others? Hand them over, please.
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| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5901 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 164 of 244 30 September 2009 at 12:13am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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De Mauro Paravia
Oxford Paravia Both fab. If I don't find a word in WordReference I'll usually find it in one of these - sometimes they're more useful, even, but I tend to check WordRef first, because of its searchable conjugator and examples (including many idioms), and because it gives you a dropdown menu of words that match what you're searching for as you type it in. But these two are great to have as backup. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 30 September 2009 at 12:14am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Lumulo Triglot Newbie CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6346 days ago 27 posts - 32 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, Italian Studies: Mandarin | Message 165 of 244 30 September 2009 at 9:31pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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"I found this thing on Youtube where they basically put two celebrities in a car and
let them drive from Rome to Milan, taping everything of course, then editing the highlights into a more or less interesting 30-45 minute TV show." Would it be too much trouble for you to post the link to one of those videos? I tried typing in numerous variations of "due celebrità in macchina", "persone famose in macchina", ecc., but found nothing that matched your description. Aggiungo il sito http://www.garzantilinguistica.it/ all'elenco di dizionari online. La tua diligenza nel dettagliare ogni aspetto dei tuoi studi linguistici e il tuo modo di condire i tuoi post con particolari divertenti mi lasciano a bocca aperta. Continua così, per favore! Benjameno Edited by Lumulo on 30 September 2009 at 9:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Leopejo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6101 days ago 675 posts - 724 votes Speaks: Italian*, Finnish*, English Studies: French, Russian | Message 166 of 244 30 September 2009 at 9:36pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Just put "Milano Roma" on your Youtube search. Thanks Lizzern for your explanation to my question. Edited by Leopejo on 30 September 2009 at 9:37pm 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 167 of 244 30 September 2009 at 11:08pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Grazie Lumulo :-) The program was called Milano-Roma, so like Leopejo said, just search for that. I wonder if there's some upside-down logic to how the show is called Milano-Roma even though they started in Rome and drove to Milan.
It might not come across from just the last posts in this log, but I have Serious Issues with sticking to just one language, so I try not to look at things in other languages too much - I don't have time to like them enough to want to study them, no matter how pretty they are, because then the wanderlust hits me... But sometimes I'm a bad girl and do something to remind myself how much I like certain other languages, napoletano included. But at least I can still enjoy the songs, even if I don't understand much :-) Watched a Youtube video called Italy vs Europe today - hilarious. Italians clap on planes still - I love it! People here stopped doing that ages ago, at this point we basically only do it if we were at some point nervous that the landing might not work out so well (i.e. "well done, pilots, for not crashing the plane"). With the exception of the occasional inexperienced traveller who claps (lame), nobody really does anything. But it would be fun if everyone did it :-) Also read some passages from La Divina Commedia out loud. I still sound quite flat, and my Rs need work (again), but overall it's not too bad, and it certainly could be worse. I can hear what it's supposed to sound like perfectly in my head (one of the benefits of lots and lots of input), my tongue doesn't always cooperate to produce it accurately but I'll get it right with practice. This is one area where it's nice to know that I've 'done it before', so to speak - I don't sound Norwegian when I speak English, so if I could do it once just from exposure and practice then I can do it again with Italian. And people are always going to know I'm not Italian (yay genetics), so me having an accent is never going to surprise anyone. I'm obviously aiming for perfect accent-free pronunciation, which will probably happen on its own over time. Actually, from reading around this forum a while ago I got the impression that being accent-free isn't a goal for everyone - I fail to understand why, but it's definitely a goal and an expectation for me. It might take time, but I will still consider my speech to be essentially flawed if I have an accent. The same thing goes for grammatical errors, using the wrong register, and so on. And 'flawed' just isn't good enough, for me, in this case. I might be inclined to feel differently if it was a language I was less keen on perfecting, like I would settle for conversational and mostly accurate in Hungarian ('conversational' still being quite a high standard for me) and would be ok with having an accent, but I feel differently about Italian somehow. In general though, I don't worry about accents too much, I'm one of those people who sounds neutral in every language I've studied, I don't sound Norwegian - so I don't mind. If I had that oh-so-Norwegian nails-on-a-chalkboard accent when speaking I would never be able to just accept it and stop trying to improve, but since I don't, then whatever. It'll take care of itself. And until it does, at the very least I can know that my current accent doesn't inhibit understanding, and can only get better from here. Also listened to the audiobook of La Divina Commedia while reading along, focusing on stress rules this time, because I never actually studied the rules - I don't actually know if there are strict rules, even, and if so, if they've written them down anywhere in my grammar books. (Nope, still haven't really opened those.) I just try to pick up those things while listening. But sometimes it's hard to know when I see words in writing that I can't check. I've already more or less figured out some of the general tendencies from listening for stress in my input anyway, and I think that's the best way to go, although I might look up the rules for confirmation sometime. It's much easier to remember from hearing it though - when I started I found it very unnatural to stress 'essere' on the first syllable because of Spanish, but after hearing it over and over it just stuck. Same thing with a bunch of other words, after hearing them a few times there's just no other way they could be pronounced. It's unlikely that I'm going to hear every word I ever learn from my sources of audio input, but it probably won't pose too much of a problem if I can learn enough about how it all works to be able to use things correctly. So basically, yeah, I'm not too concerned about correct pronunciation at this stage. If after reading the previous sentence, you thought, "who are you, and what have you done to Liz?" - gold star. This is weird. But I'm much more worried about grammatical correctness and vocabulary at this stage, because I know that if I can get those things right people will have no problems understanding me. Much more of an issue than whether or not I'm a little off here and there in terms of pronunciation... I have a long way to go until I can speak as correctly as I want though. Sigh. Liz 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Leopejo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6101 days ago 675 posts - 724 votes Speaks: Italian*, Finnish*, English Studies: French, Russian | Message 168 of 244 01 October 2009 at 9:27am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Your blog and your methods are interesting! I guess I should read the 21 pages of messages there are.
IIRC, the show started with the proper Milan to Rome direction, but maybe in the following seasons they switched it. According to Italian Wikipedia, "In una puntata rimasta celebre, andata in onda nel febbraio del 1998, Dario Fo seppe di aver vinto il Premio Nobel per la Letteratura mentre era in viaggio con Ambra Angiolini, da un gruppo di amici che li accostarono in autostrada sotto lo sguardo delle telecamere"
What about Neapolitan singers who sing in Italian? ;-)
I have actually never experienced that in Italy, only on that video and in the words of a fellow Italian on the Italian language thread (come and post there!). Instead, it happened to me a couple of times... in a country neighbouring Norway.
This is what strikes me most on your blog. Not your typical language learning method! Italians have to study the Commedia for three years at school (one each for Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) - and not surprisingly most hate it (as I did at school - now I like it mostly because it relates to my places). Its language *is* quite difficult, and every edition has a verse-by-verse translation into modern prose - alongside plenty of comments and explanations. You see fully that it's 700 years old. But you also see how important the Commedia and Dante were for the Italian language.
As long as it's not the primary goal! (though I'm biased, I have no accent-free languages, not even native ones). Just remember that accents (if not dialects anymore) are very strong in Italy. Neapolitans do speak in Italian (in place of/alongside their dialect), but usually with a heavy accent. Even Tuscan, from which the official language comes, has an accent.
No rules that I know of, for unknown words, especially nouns. A stress on the last syllable is always indicated by an accent mar. Stress on the fourth-to-last syllable occurs in some verb forms: (loro) abitano (they live). But no rule for choosing between second-to-last and third-to-last syllable. Italian grammar books (for Italian schoolchildren) just remark the importance of stress with examples like àncora vs. ancòra (anchor, still/yet). This said, verb conjugations follow regular stress rules and the only doubt about stress placement could be the infinitive form of an -ere verb: lèggere vs. potère - oh, and leggère also exists as an adjective. Edited by Leopejo on 01 October 2009 at 9:28am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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