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The 1-year challenge: Italian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| staf250 Pentaglot Senior Member Belgium emmerick.be Joined 5695 days ago 352 posts - 414 votes  Speaks: French, Dutch*, Italian, English, German Studies: Arabic (Written) | Message 177 of 244 24 October 2009 at 10:32am | IP Logged | ||
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Quite good news, VERY good news indeed!
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| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5907 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 178 of 244 29 October 2009 at 7:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah, it's pretty cool when you start to actually GET things in a language most people you know don't speak and never will. It hit me today that very many people haven't the vaguest idea what e.g. "loro" and hundreds of similar things might be referring to. Obviously after a while these things become pretty basic to those of us that are learning the language - words like that are the least of my problems, and yet, 5 years ago I wouldn't have known what they meant. There are a great deal of words that I can't NOT understand when I read them, and that I could produce easily without having to think it over, and that's awesome. I'm hoping to get to that level of understanding with everything, knowing things as well and as naturally as I do words and concepts in my native language. It's a long process of course, but it's pretty obvious to me that it can be done. Also, from what I've seen so far, once I know words that well, it's not so hard to produce them, so the gap between active and passive isn't as ridiculously insurmountable-looking then as it is in the beginning. And come to think of it, almost daily or at least every week I encounter words in Norwegian that I'm not sure I would think of if I needed them, so not all Norwegian words I know are active. And that's fine. So in summary: This is totally going to work, isn't it. Woah. Cool... :-)
Well I'm a couple of months into reading Personalità confusa from the beginning (in blog archive months, not months spent reading). Fun to read, and very useful as extensive reading material. And it's reassuring to see that I can understand most of it now, the only obvious problem being vocabulary, but I'm rarely if ever stumped by verbal tenses. Reading lots has really helped give me something that at least resembles a natural understanding of what the tenses imply, so I'll continue with more of the same. Those sentence-mining guys, well I see their point, I've seen some absolutely brilliant examples of sentences that just made everything make sense somehow. Since I don't sentence-mine, I don't keep a record of them - maybe I should. The good news is I read enough to see plenty of these. Now that Italian has been allocated its little corner of my day, I want to try to use my time for actual study rather than just more random things, so even though I'll be reading when I have time, this will mostly mean wordlists, for the time being anyway. So today I did the first part of a new wordlist, even though I hadn't finished my previous one, which I reviewed a bit. I made sure I read through the whole text carefully, underlining every single word I wasn't sure about, and then some, so that anything I would consider putting in the wordlist stood out clearly from the rest. It's better to include a word one too many times than not at all. I ended up with 97 words and expressions (the nice thing about using sentence examples in wordlists is that you can include idioms easily), but ended up un-underlining several of them, because I realized I didn't need them there. I'm still a bit uncertain about whether I should include words that are eerily similar to their English equivalent (like imperatore, which came up today). One of several things might happen if I needed to use one of these words actively: 1) I remember the word just fine, and use it correctly; 2) I remember the word just fine but feel like my first instinct about it must be wrong and that using the word would make me one of those just-Italianify-the-English-word-and-hope-for-the-best people that I don't like, and then rephrase to avoid the word and looking like an idiot for Italian-ifying; or 3) I assume the correct Italian word is something else I never learned. I included imperatore, left out riso. We can all see this, right? Those people who would say rice-o? So not going to be that person. I'd rather embrace my ignorance and ask the other person what the correct word is. I'd rather be told that "yes, it's actually 'riso'..." then laugh about how obvious that was and how I should've just trusted myself and used it, rather than get that "oh honey no" reaction from an unsuspecting victim after Italian-ifying something I definitely shouldn't have. Current word count (see page 6): 3714 unique words, based on 17 texts. I decided I'll be posting here whenever I start a new wordlist, because I already know that the three things I respond to are basically 1) quantifiable tangible progress, 2) concrete believable threats of punishment or a stern talking-to, and 3) chocolate. And right now I need #1 to help me push myself to study rather than just read, watch and listen unquantifiably. Believe me, it makes a huge difference. So I could use the momentum of seeing a number go up. And my telling you that I'll be posting here every time I start a new wordlist will hopefully at some level make me actually do it, cause I expect y'all to mock me if I don't post in a while, so there you go, that fulfills the requirement for #2. I can sort out #3 privately... Liz PS: What's with the MICROTAG thing that's suddenly appeared above my posts throughout this log? Do not want. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5907 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 179 of 244 31 October 2009 at 8:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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Took one of my art books out of the shelf today, a presentation of a Leonardo da Vinci exhibit. I just love those guys. I already have some Michelangelo and da Vinci on my walls, and more to come. Once upon a time, after deciding I wasn't going to aim for a career in ancient languages and history after all, I considered majoring in art history to finish my degree - at that point I already knew I'd be starting something completely different after my BA, so it didn't matter what I did (long story), and art history sounded like fun. I ended up taking the easy way out and finishing my degree in history (with electives in three ancient languages, so not a total loss language-wise) and like so many other things, art history faded into obscurity becoming another one of those things that interests me but that I will never be able to devote any significant amount of time to. So studying Italian seems like a perfectly decent excuse to read up on the subject - it's in Italian, right, and I need to be reading something, right, so I might as well read about the things that interest me... Right? As long as it's in Italian, I can read whatever I want without having it take time away from other important things. And these texts are quite enjoyable to read, so it's a win on all fronts. The only downside is that it makes me want to raid an Italian bookstore next time I get the chance, buying anything that looks interesting enough for me to read it, anything I'd want to read that I don't normally make time for. Who knows, maybe that's not such a bad thing.
Liz 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5907 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 180 of 244 06 November 2009 at 5:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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Started another wordlist today. This one had a lot of new words in it, more than expected, so I had to write small to fit them all on one sheet of A5 paper. (I dropped some mostly-known words just to fit them all, because they were close enough to a word I would list that they would go in the sample sentence anyway, and that's enough.) Just goes to show that these are good texts to use, lots of variety, and fun vocabulary. The only downside is that I think the writer is American (settle down children and keep reading, that is not the essence of the downside), so it might be a translation, or it could be written by a non-native speaker. I hope I can trust it to be grammatically correct, but of course as always mistakes can happen - even native speakers make mistakes - and I'm mostly using it to find interesting vocabulary anyway, so this is not enough of a problem for me to do anything about it. It's certainly better than picking words out of a dictionary, at least this way I have context - pretty weird ones at that. And my understanding of grammar is less sabotage-prone now than it was a few months ago.
This was an old text, from September/October, so I'm a bit behind. That's ok though, I can catch up if I need to by doing more than one list per week, which seems to work out well. (Future problem: I might run out of texts from this source.) I've decided I'm ok with having two wordlists going at the same time - that way, I can hop around between wordlists and do whatever seems most interesting at the time. I know I'm at risk of boredom and burnout from doing wordlists, so I'm just trying to be careful that I keep things interesting, which means I avoid forcing myself to do anything I don't feel like doing at the time. I wish the "things work out best if you only ever do things that are fun" principle applied to every side of life... (Actually though, it does apply in surprisingly many contexts.) Anyway I've been copying the texts for each week into a Word document for safe keeping - I like using these, so if I want to use them in the future I need to save them, cause they take them down each week. I've been keeping track of what the word count would look like after taking all these new texts into account, and I like where it's going. Quite motivational, actually. If I just do these texts, my word count will be this-really-high-number. Granted, there are some words that technically shouldn't count, like personal names and so on, but like I've touched on before, taking them out of the equation would be more effort than it's worth (though doable, and possibly easier than I tend to think), and besides, a large number is more motivational than a small number. So there. That's my excuse. I have, however, considered going over the text to modify words with accents in them, because the word counter counts these as non-letters, so some words are cut short. It would probably take all of 5 minutes to do, and it would be interesting to see the difference. But I might just feel conflicted about whether I should stick to my current way of doing things, or go back over things to get a more accurate number, editing the numbers everywhere, and essentially making a mess of how the texts look. Ah well, a decision for another day. I have also been working on my other wordlists since my last post. I try to look things up three times, once while underlining the words I'll use, a second time while writing the first column, and then again while writing down the English translations. Then I leave it for a day or two before going over the translations and writing out the Italian word in the third column if I know the word without too much effort. If I leave it for a few days before doing this then depending on the text I might end up at 50% or 95%, but sometimes it feels like I'm actually better off if I don't get it straight away, because then I review the first two columns once or twice before trying again, so I see the word more times. I'll review them all a while after finishing them anyway, so it doesn't really bother me if I don't remember 100% of the words by the time I get to the third and final column the first time I do the list, especially since I'm not translating whole texts this time. At this stage this is mostly an aid for my reading and listening, it puts me in a much better position to understand things when I see them and makes for much smoother reading. As I learn more vocabulary things are going more and more in the direction of intensive reading (but a lot of it) where I look up everything, and understand things reasonably well most of the time. It's nice to see that words keep coming up that I've seen in wordlists, this is a much better way to reinforce them, and it's great to see the outcome of it. I'm much better prepared for real reading this way. It would've taken much longer to look things up as I go (or guess by context, which I've found to be far too error-prone for my liking), because I forget things that way and have to look them up again later, and more importantly I wouldn't have been able to read at the rate I'm doing now. So I think this helps my learning of new vocabulary from intensive and even extensive reading - knowing most of the words means I can focus on those new ones that I haven't seen before, rather than having 5 words in a sentence that I may or may not have seen before and have a sort of vague feeling about. It's much more enjoyable to read something if I've at least half-cemented the meaning of most of the words in my head, than looking at something relatively unfamiliar. I can actually enjoy the text in its own right that way, rather than using everything as an academic exercise. Having noted the general meaning of a word through wordlists means that when I read it in a sentence and recognise it, I can use that sentence as a way to tweak my understanding of the word in the correct way (so trying to understand its nuance) rather than trying to make sense of a chaotic mess of words I still don't know the general meaning of, so having a bit of background knowledge of a word lets me use the context more effectively. What can I say, I got tired of seeing words that I knew I'd seen before but didn't really understand, and the wordlists have really helped. They're not a replacement for reading of course, they just give me a better starting point. And I'm going to continue using actual texts for my wordlists - no dipping into dictionaries just yet, unless I decide I desperately need to plug some unfortunate gaps in my vocabulary. Strangely it seems that I've somehow ended up learning an awful lot of non-basic vocabulary, but I feel a lot less stable about basic stuff. I guess that's because I'm aiming to learn it all, and since I'm not an instant output oriented person I don't particularly mind what I learn first, so some things get left out. I don't necessarily mind. To this day I don't know the Italian word for fork... (One moment please...) ok then, forchetta, that's good to know. I probably would've recognised that if I'd seen it in context, it's just never come up except in Assimil, and I forgot some of the words in that handy little beginner's course that disappeared off the face of the earth when I started feeling ready to tackle real texts. I like this way of doing things - using a beginner's course for beginner's material, then leaving it behind as soon as possible. I don't feel like I need it anymore, except maybe for some clean-up and as a would-be-handy-if-properly-indexed grammar reference - they do explain some things quite well. As a side note, while reading I keep trying to get a sense of the slight difference between words that my dictionary tells me mean the exact same thing, if any such difference exists. Or at least try to find out when to use which variant. A while ago I was able to correctly estimate the difference in meaning between two words that the dictionary tells me have the same meaning - an Italian had confirmed that they were completely interchangeable, but I still felt like there was a difference in many of my sources, so I asked another Italian and he said that what I'd understood was accurate. Yay. So I keep trying to find nuances, whether there are any and what they imply, because I think there are a lot of aspects to different forms of expression that the natives just know without needing to think it over, but might not be so obvious to us Italian learners. Current word count (see page 6): 4015 unique words, based on 18 texts. This system of doing things is going to let me keep adding a few hundred words for each new text for another long while, so I'm going to carry on using them. Maybe I just like seeing a number go up, but it does work. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 06 November 2009 at 5:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mike789 Newbie United States Joined 6325 days ago 39 posts - 51 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 181 of 244 07 November 2009 at 12:00am | IP Logged | ||
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I was curious -- when you're reading or listening are you understanding the Italian without translating? And if so, was there a time where you suddenly realized "hey, I'm understanding this without having to translate back to a language I know" or was more a gradual thing where more and more of it made sense?
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| staf250 Pentaglot Senior Member Belgium emmerick.be Joined 5695 days ago 352 posts - 414 votes Speaks: French, Dutch*, Italian, English, German Studies: Arabic (Written) | Message 182 of 244 07 November 2009 at 12:23am | IP Logged | ||
This is a good question. I'll do a control of my reading and let you know. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6781 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 183 of 244 07 November 2009 at 12:37am | IP Logged | ||
I'd say it's pretty gradual. Before I started learning Italian all I would understand is a few words here and there that I had heard before. As I learned the basic grammar I was able to make sense of sentences quite suddenly (well, within a couple of months of intensive study-kind of sudden). That right there is a very big win. Currently I'm in the process of fleshing out my knowledge of the grammar, by which time I should be able to decode just about any sentence. Then looking up the unknown words is more like polish. Concerning the first question - it depends how well I know what I hear. If I've already internalized it and my understanding is implicit, then it just sort of "unfolds" before me, it's a sort of magical sensation. :) Otherwise, say, maybe it's a verb that I've heard but I don't know well, then I have to first reverse engineer the verb tense based on the grammar I know to find the meaning. If the sentence is complex I sometimes I have to translate it also. This obviously takes far longer, what I call explicit understanding. Edited by numerodix on 07 November 2009 at 12:41am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5907 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 184 of 244 07 November 2009 at 12:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's hard to say, because I can't really look back on a time when I did translate - I guess I use the translation of a word as a starting point for the Italian word, but I find that new words take on a life of their own in a way, such that I don't really keep the translation in the same file in my head, if that makes sense. These days when I listen to material that contains new words, I just hear the Italian words I know (without their translation coming to mind) and ones I don't know. There are things I know, and then there's the gaps... Gradually more and more things make sense, but in Italian only, and once I've established some sort of relationship with a word, even a basic one, it would be very unnatural to think about it in another language. I just register their meaning, the end, then move on.
Sometimes I don't understand the meaning of the word automatically and I might have to think about it for a bit - but I don't necessarily involve any thought processes relating to another language. And if I'm stuck I sometimes try to turn to a translation, but I'm really not very good at it - if I don't have a proper Italian-only understanding of the word then there's a good chance I won't remember the translation either (I surprise myself sometimes, and not in a good way, translation-wise) and if I understand the word, I don't need the translation... The translations I use in my wordlists is just to give me an idea of what the word means, as I get more exposure to it I can tweak my understanding of the word to hopefully understand the nuances of its meaning correctly based on context. I touched on this a while back but I really wish I didn't have to use a translation for these lists, it's a substandard way of working (for me) and I don't want to function in English while trying to speak Italian, I'm very much for independence in L2 and 'going monolingual' in my learning, but I don't currently know of any better way to do it for my wordlists. If anyone can think of a way, do tell... So I would say that no, I don't currently translate. If I know things I just grasp their meaning without trying, just like I would with a word I know in English or Norwegian, though my understanding of it might be at a more basic level with some words. It's about the same as if I learn a new word in any other language, even Norwegian. There's no translation going on there - just trying to grasp the meaning, on its own. Of course, my understanding of a word is a very small file before I see it in context a few times, then I gather more and more information about it, I'm not sure how but the translation disappears as soon as I can make sense of the word on its own, somehow. It doesn't usually take long. I should probably also note that I have a couple of different forms of synesthesia, and one of the results of that (at least I think that's the reason why it happens) is that my brain makes its own 'reality' of a word, that doesn't have to match the translation. It's hard to explain. Sometimes it has to do with the colours of the letters (yes I'm one of 'those people'), sometimes it's a mental image. When I learn a new word, whichever language it's in, it develops its own little existence, and that's what I take in when reading or listening. I don't know if others develop the same internal concepts for words. But it makes translation more problematic than helpful to me, like trying to link two separate concepts. Personally I don't believe in translation being fundamental to the learning process, it's a crutch at best, and one that should be thrown out the window as soon as possible for any word or concept. Grammatically it's barely even helpful at all, and I've studied so many languages by now that it doesn't really take any effort to avoid it. It's easier to just try to grasp new structures and words in their own environment than get my brain to try to figure them out on the basis of English - which wouldn't work anyway. I think that all started when I studied Hungarian, the most beautifully grammatically-untranslatable-into-English language I've studied so far. If you study it using translation or trying to understand it via the English route, it's messy. If you study it within its own boundaries, it's a very elegant language, and makes a lot of sense. So I try to avoid translating from day 1. A lot of the time it would be futile to involve any other language in understanding the gaps in my understanding while listening or reading, but other times I fail to realize that a word is incredibly similar to the equivalent in English - this happened when I learned the word incoraggiare, I didn't realize that it looked an awful lot like the English word encourage until I saw that as its main lexical meaning. All I could relate it to was coraggio... Liz 1 person has voted this message useful |
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