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The 1-year challenge: Italian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6726 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes  Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 217 of 244 03 December 2009 at 1:26pm | IP Logged |
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Well I can tell you what I like, but I'm sure it's stuff any Italian knows about.
Eros Ramazzotti Laura Pausini Luca Dirisio Nek Paolo Meneguzzi Tiziano Ferro Zero Assoluto All of it is pretty pop/rock/top20 kind of stuff. Edited by numerodix on 03 December 2009 at 1:27pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5852 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 218 of 244 04 December 2009 at 12:23am | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the suggestions, I'll be sure to check those out! Had heard of several of them of course, but not all of them. Interesting... I'd heard of Zero Assoluto before but somehow convinced myself it was probably some sort of 'best of' album by Renato Zero, it would've been quite a suitable album title. (On that note, he chose that as his stage name because people used to call him a zero. Then went on to become one of the most successful singers in Italy. I love it when that sort of thing happens...)
If any of you have other suggestions, keep them coming :-) Finally did another wordlist today - gosh, it's been several weeks since my last one. About time I did another one. I'm really loving all the new vocabulary, most of these words are very relevant and definitely ones I know that I'd want to know at some point. I used about 80 new words in the list this time, which seems to be the average amount of new-ish words I get out of these texts (which is perfect really, because that many words will fit snugly onto a sheet of A5, and I can handle that amount of new words, and at the same time it's enough to justify going to the trouble of using that text). It looks like the amount of new words might start to drop soon, but not just yet - I still have 8 texts lined up that will add 200 or more words to my word count, so hopefully there will be a decent amount of new words from each of those texts. And new texts keep coming up each week, so I still have plenty of texts to work with. I'm hoping that someday soon - hopefully by the 9-month mark - I'll have to struggle to find texts with enough new vocabulary, that I'll be able to read just about any text I'd be interested in reading without encountering too much unfamiliar vocabulary, and that listening will be simple because the words are all there. I've already practiced listening skills enough that the main problem is vocabulary, even if the speaker is slurring or chewing gum or surrounded by background noise, it doesn't matter - that stuff doesn't really impede understanding anymore. Vocabulary is what needs most attention at this stage. I can understand the gist of most things, and every word in a variety of different situations, but I obviously want to go beyond that and understand everything, no matter what it happens to be about, at least on the language side of things. I wonder when I'm going to get to a text with less than 50 new words - I think that's my limit for when I'll start looking around for other higher-yield material. (Not sure where I'd look, but let's save that problem for another day.) Some of the words I've been including in my lists are ones that are similar in structure and quite obvious ones but I want to make sure I'm able to produce them too, so I'm putting them in my lists even though I can understand them fine before looking them up. That does mean I include more new words than I need to in my lists (though I'm not below 50 actual new words yet) but I'd rather include a word one too many times than feel like I'm not sure if I've learned the correct Italian word. I don't want to be in a situation where I think I know the word but suspect I might just be making it up, making me 'one of those people' if I actually use it incorrectly. This is one of my main pet peeves when it comes to languages - those people who just construct things based on their own language, things they've never seen, in an attempt to express what they want in their L2 - often with an utterly cringeworthy outcome. I'd much rather express ignorance about a word and have whoever I'm speaking to provide the word for me. Then if it turns out I actually knew the word correctly, that's fine - avoiding butchering the language with anglicism is more important than having a go at it and hoping for the best, imo. But anyway, so far these texts are perfect, and I'm quite happy with the learning rate at this point. And I can see the results of it while reading or listening - vocabulary keeps coming up that I've recently learned, which is not only great for reinforcing what I've studied in wordlists, but also confirms that what I'm learning is sensible and relevant vocabulary. And, of course, it actually lets me understand what I'm reading or hearing! Nice feeling, so it's very worthwhile to me to do these wordlists, even though I never would've thought I'd end up doing them. They do help, and they're not as hateworthy as they were back when we were made to do them in a different way back in junior high. Current word count (see page 6): 4491 unique words, based on 20 texts. I'm so glad I started doing this. The numbers looked really lame just when I started, but at this point it's actually quite motivational. I know it's slightly higher than it should be because of names and whatnot, but it doesn't matter. It helps me keep going with the wordlists and is a good reminder that yes, I am actually learning significant amounts of vocabulary by doing this. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 04 December 2009 at 1:33am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| staf250 Pentaglot Senior Member Belgium emmerick.be Joined 5640 days ago 352 posts - 414 votes Speaks: French, Dutch*, Italian, English, German Studies: Arabic (Written) | Message 219 of 244 04 December 2009 at 7:11am | IP Logged |
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Speaking of singers and songwriters; my friend Paolo is a fan of Renato Zero. The link
"ilsilenziodeisogni.splinder.com". Some songs of Toto Cutugno are marvellous, only ... many Italians hate this guy. On my iPod you'll find those Italian songs: I Maschi by Gianna Nannini Ti amo e anche Gente di mare by Umberto Tozzi Come Prima by Massimo Ranieri Non ho l'età per amarti by Gigliola Cinquetti L'Italiano by Toto Cutugno Viva la mamma by Edoardo Bennato Via con me by Paolo Conte Sereno è by Drupi A far l'amore comincia tu by Rafaella Carra Also a song from Zucchero, from Eros Ramazzotti and Con te partirò by Andrea Boccelli. Dolce Paola by Salvatore Adamo, dedicated to Paola, she was an Italian princess, and is now our queen. The almost last one here, Adamo is the Belgian Italian wo sold the most discs ever, more than any other Belgian artist. Cade la Neve is marvellous, but he sings a lot in French, German and Japanese too... He is about 70 like me :) Edited by staf250 on 05 December 2009 at 2:09pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5852 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 220 of 244 04 December 2009 at 5:27pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks Staf! Any songs in particular? The one and only song of his I've heard of is Insieme (surprise!), and I could never really decide whether I loved it or hated it. I used to spend a few hours with my grandparents after school during the first years of primary school and they had tapes of 1988 and 1990-1993 - I mean, how else are you going to get a child to shut up and sit still for hours at a time, right? Anyway, my primary school self thought there were plenty of good songs in 1990, so I think I was a bit bummed that Italy won.
Some people still love Insieme and call it underrated (can a song really be underrated if it wins Eurovision?), while others call it overrated and are corrected by people saying "What do you mean, overrated? Nobody likes him." I'm undecided still, but at least I can understand the lyrics now (yay). I guess I feel the same way about it as I do about Made in Spain from 1988 - oh the memories, and it's way cool that I can understand it now, but the only reason I'm ever going to listen to this stuff is to reminisce about my childhood. (Though I still totally covet the black and white dress. The one with the tutu. Some childhood quirks you just never grow out of.) If you're confused by the previous paragraphs, you're probably not European. Have a look at some vintage Eurovision videos on Youtube, it used to be totally cute before it turned into the freakshow it is now (late 90s onwards). Or maybe I just liked it cause I was in the right age group at the time. I forced myself to watch it this year to avoid offending my mum, and we won. Anyway, lots of cheesy music in the main European languages (and many of the smaller ones - people had to sing in one of the official languages of their country until 1997-ish, which was part of the original charm of the whole contest for me) and the whole thing is unintentionally hilarious more often than you thought possible, downright painful to watch just as often. I'm deeply sorry for some of the things you'll find. Enjoy. I'm not really sure why I've never looked into Renato Zero's music before, I've known about him for months, even suspected I'd like his music - I've seen him cover a few songs and he's obviously talented. I can be stupid that way, avoiding things I'll probably like. Anyway, what I've heard so far looks promising... Thanks again for the suggestions guys :-) Liz Edited by Lizzern on 04 December 2009 at 5:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| staf250 Pentaglot Senior Member Belgium emmerick.be Joined 5640 days ago 352 posts - 414 votes Speaks: French, Dutch*, Italian, English, German Studies: Arabic (Written) | Message 221 of 244 04 December 2009 at 9:55pm | IP Logged |
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Non ho potuto fare a meno di andare lì http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8256ETqf1E per godermi di nuovo
questa bella canzone. Toto mi sembra giovane. È stato nel ?? non lo so. ;) I could not wait to surf to the song on YouTube. Wanted to enjoy again the nice song. Toto Cutugno seems to be young. It was in the year ??? I don't know. ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5852 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 222 of 244 06 December 2009 at 10:31pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the updated list in your previous post Staf, nice. Still undecided about the song, but the video is a bit odd, lol - the live version is better. A very typical Eurovision song anyhow, which used to be charming a few decades ago, but this year I literally couldn't make it through the whole thing without resorting to the mute button on more than one occasion. A bit sad, to be honest.
Anyway, I find I usually prefer live versions - maybe that's why I like Youtube so much, concerts tend to be better. In my opinion people aren't really good if they don't sound good live, if they need to be polished to sound alright then meh, don't care. I don't mind studio versions and many of them are very good songs, but the truly talented singers and bands are fabulous live. Over the last few months I've found a few cover versions that I like, many of them live performances. Maybe it's just me, but this seems like a much more common thing in Italy than elsewhere. I've thought about being more consistent about looking for the original version to see if I like it, but I tend to like the covers better... I should probably actually go over the songs I know I like that happen to be covers and not just find out who sang them originally, but also have a look at what else those guys have done. All this makes me wonder how much music I'm missing out on in other languages. I've had a reasonable amount of interesting music in pretty much all the languages I've studied (with the possible exception of Spanish, if you can believe that), and it really helps. But I guess it's like everything else - you can't possibly keep track of everything you could possibly read that you would find interesting, or everything you could possibly watch that you would find funny, so I'm fine with shutting myself off from some things - time, as always, is a limiting factor. Still kind of a shame though. I'm not sure what happened to my weekend in terms of Italian, but I haven't gotten that much studying done. In general I've been watching some interviews, and also reading the news, mostly reading up on the murder trial in Perugia (both Knox and Sollecito were found guilty), as well as the cultural aspects of it. Apparently there have been some real issues. I'm quite used to reading the comments below many of the news stories I read, I find that everyone including the extremists contribute to showing the scope of how the public feels about the situation, and there are quite some differences between reportage in the two countries and how people feel about the whole thing. As with anything in the news though, some opinions are just downright alarming - it seems there are no limits these days to how far people will go based on very little input, and the general amount of hatred spewed all over comment fields worldwide. Not particularly reassuring on any level. Other than that, more Personalità confusa, though I'm not even done with 2003 yet. I know some people record the amount of words they've read in their logs, maybe I should do something similar, as I could easily quantify how much I've read. It might even be good to have another number going up. Hmm... Fun to read anyhow. Liz 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5852 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 223 of 244 08 December 2009 at 11:13pm | IP Logged |
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So I've thought about the whole word count idea a little more and it sounds like a good idea. So why not... I won't really talk much about it here but I'll be including only some of the texts I read, including extensive reading, so this doesn't mean I know or understand everything I read. It's just another way to quantify things, because I like the motivation of seeing a number go up. Granted I already have a word count to keep track of, but that doesn't say anything about extensive reading, and it can tend to go stale every so often if I don't do a full wordlist for a while. This way I can include and quantify the things that might take me five minutes to read, but still contribute to my learning in their own way. I won't include everything, so the number will always be much lower than it should be, but I'm ok with that - this way I don't have to try to estimate the number of words in books and so on, but can include things here and there that I've read more or less carefully, just for my own sake really. So.
Total words read so far: 88 450. For now this is based on a few of the things I've been reading over the last weeks/months/don't remember, that I can measure easily, so it's not like I'm starting from zero. (Probably better that way.) But the number is far lower than how much I've actually read - cause I'm only counting some texts. In other news, I'm thinking I might have a go at studying Chinese for a short while after Italian, nothing really serious, just a short stint to learn some of the characters and indulge in my theoretical love for calligraphy, and learn enough that I can recognise some words here and there in Chinese movies, rather than being met with a complete wall of something I can only identify as very Chinese-sounding. I'm not really that keen on Chinese but enough to study it for a short while, we'll see if it becomes a more long-term project (though I very much doubt it) but it would be fun to have the basics down at least, in some way. I'm not going to touch it until after I'm done with the Italian project on April 23rd - which will probably continue in the same form beyond that date anyway - but I might spend some time on Mandarin next summer. It's still just an idea I'm toying with, so I'm not sure what will actually come of it - we'll see. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 10 December 2009 at 6:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5852 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 224 of 244 10 December 2009 at 10:19pm | IP Logged |
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Well I've been looking into your suggestions for Italian music, and in particular I fell in love with "I Maschi" by Gianna Nannini, suggested by Staf. Why don't more people laugh when they sing? Makes me laugh too, every time. Also, it's another reminder that good things actually did happen in the 80's (but the clothes, my god the clothes - WHY). Kinda fun that we have such easy access to old music these days, growing up without Youtube and Spotify you just couldn't really find out these things even existed without buying CDs or cassette tapes (yes I'm old enough to remember those), I like being able to sample things before buying them, and I've discovered so much good stuff through the Related Videos thing on Youtube it's silly, there's so much I would never have found out about because nobody I know has even heard of most of the people currently on my ipod - one of the main benefits of the internet, as far as I'm concerned.
I'm still not done with my previous wordlist, and haven't started another one yet either. I've been busy, and ill, and then busy again, and so on, so I haven't gotten much work done. And yet, I managed to get myself involved in a long discussion on the forum. I really shouldn't do that. (Time issues, Liz - come on...) As it turns out, we weren't even all talking about the same thing, and anyway, a lot of the time it can be better to just not get involved at all. One thing about this forum is that though it can obviously provide a lot of very helpful information, you also don't need to look far for a good dose of discouragement either. I'm lucky that I've known very few people in my life who have taken it upon themselves to tell another person "you're not good enough to do this", so I'm really not very fond of the attitude that says something is impossible by default, or for whatever reason really. And you'd think I would've learned by now to choose discussions to join a little more carefully, some things just never lead anywhere different, and that can be clear before even posting. Anyway, I've decided I might as well add the other start-to-finish thing I read (LOTR) to my extensive reading word count (still not including random reading though). It might be cheating to add stuff I read weeks ago but I do plan on making it through the trilogy by the end of my 1 year of study, so I might as well add the whole thing - after all, I have actually read all this, and it would feel somewhat incomplete if I were to include 'most but not all of LOTR' in the count when the other thing I'm counting will have every word counted. I can't stand incompleteness. I probably won't post reading updates all that often, just every so often when I've added a significant amount (so not at the end of every chapter or anything!). Again, it's partly for motivation reasons. And also, if I'm reading a 3-part novel that's countable enough, why not. It makes sense to count it all. So to estimate the number of words I've read in LOTR, I counted the number of words on a page, and then counted the number of words in one line on another page and multiplied it out, and with both methods I got well over 400 words per page, so I'll keep that as my estimate. That's rounding down a bit, but some pages, like the start of each chapter, are shorter, so it all works out well enough. I'll round the overall number up or down to the nearest 50 when I post here and just keep track of the real number elsewhere, since it looks kinda weird if you add a round estimate and a precise number together. Total words read so far: 150 450. See, I'm glad I didn't start counting right from the beginning - this is a much more likeable number. Nice. Going by this number, it looks like I'll make it to at least 1 million (probably quite a lot higher) by the time I finish reading both - which I'm hoping to do by April 23rd. Apparently some people see that as som magic number in language learning, but I'm not really doing it for that reason. In other news, I've started to sometimes feel the need to use Italian words in Norwegian, the other day I was trying to explain something fairly straightforward in front of a group (including a teacher) at uni, and the only verb that came to mind was in Italian, which obviously wouldn't work, so my brain tried to search for the equivalent in Norwegian but ended up with the English translation instead (even though the Norwegian equivalent looks relatively similar to the Italian word). Strange feeling. Probably a good sign though. And other times things just come to mind in Italian that I wish we had and used in the same way in other languages because I've seen them so many times that I can appreciate their use a bit more - and I want to use them when they're suitable. On more than one occasion I've had to bite my lip to stop myself from saying "ifølge meg" (for "secondo me"), which if you speak Norwegian you'll recognise as a total freakshow of a word combination if used as widely as "secondo me". Ah well, at least it's encouraging that things come to mind actively without any effort needed and that my knowledge of Italian isn't entirely passive (the production component of my wordlists has probably helped). But in some ways I still feel like I would stumble on basic things, because I don't tend to read or hear those things very much. I've had input on a LOT of different topics, but not much on the basic touristy stuff. I guess I might plug those holes later, so that they're unproblematic before the next time I go to Italy. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 10 December 2009 at 10:28pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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