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The 1-year challenge: Italian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Quabazaa Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5601 days ago 414 posts - 543 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, German, French Studies: Japanese, Korean, Maori, Scottish Gaelic, Arabic (Levantine), Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (Written) | Message 225 of 244 10 December 2009 at 10:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello, just thought I would suggest Zucchero, perhaps his music is not so common, but he is on Youtube! My Italian friend loves him :)
It sounds like your Italian is going really well!! Brava! :) 2 persons have 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 226 of 244 10 December 2009 at 11:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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Loved the bit about "secondo me" :D I'm a little uneasy about things like that too, in fact recently I've noticed ever so slightly that my English idioms are starting to falter. Sometimes I even have Norwegian idioms Anglosized loading from memory yelp!
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| 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 227 of 244 10 December 2009 at 11:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm feeling this way about English a lot lately. It's my native language, so I feel I should be able to speak correctly, but suddenly (starting about this summer?) I have started to make all sorts of random and HUGE grammatical mistakes: past tense, past participles, conjugation, word order, prepositions, you name it. It's a rather embarrassing feeling, actually, but I do think I know what you mean. In a timed essay (last year) I even just wrote something in French because I couldn't remember the word in English. Oh well. Maybe I'll have to add English into my weekly study regiment.
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| 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 228 of 244 11 December 2009 at 12:05am | IP Logged | ||
Yeah that's what I've been thinking too. We spend a bunch of time on new languages, and meanwhile worry it may mess up what we already have. But somehow it would feel very odd to me to go back and work on English or Norwegian. But maybe I should. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| staf250 Pentaglot Senior Member Belgium emmerick.be Joined 5689 days ago 352 posts - 414 votes Speaks: French, Dutch*, Italian, English, German Studies: Arabic (Written) | Message 229 of 244 11 December 2009 at 11:10am | IP Logged | ||
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Zucchero: Il Volo !!!
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| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5901 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 230 of 244 11 December 2009 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks Quabazaa and Staf for your suggestions - actually, Zucchero was one of the few Italian singers I knew about before I started studying the language, but after seeing him parodied on Norwegian TV a few years ago I now find it incredibly hard to listen to any of his songs without cracking up! I guess I should pull myself together and sample some of his other stuff. But Senza una Donna - not with a straight face... :-)
About the whole loss of nativeness thing, I'm actually fine with it. I learned years ago that studying other languages (and, and living abroad - native fluency killer) would be at the expense of my Norwegian in some way, but hey, I'm learning to speak Italian (and have studied others) - that's a much bigger deal to me than occasionally sounding like a bumbling fool in my native language... And practically everyone in my life knows about my background and who my friends are, so it's not like it's a surprise to anyone that there's a strong 'foreign' influence in my life, on many levels, and that this might cause me to mess up every once in a while. In a way I've made it a personality trait, so I don't mind it anymore. I just have to make sure I don't end up saying the most profoundly awful things, like "ifølge meg". As long as I don't make the worst kind of mistakes, it's fine, and not a problem in itself. Philip, considering your age I reckon you have plenty of writing practice ahead of you that will be corrected, which is a great way of straightening out mistakes, whether in your native language or an L2. I wouldn't worry about it. But you're studying more languages than I've ever studied at any one time - my Hungarian/Ancient Greek/Biblical Hebrew combo pales in comparison to what you're doing, and I think the effect on the languages we focus on less will be greater the more other languages we're studying, even to the detriment of our native languages. Honestly, I don't know how you do it. Anyway, when you're used to studying other languages you'll also notice the cool things about your own language more, and it gets easier to commit things to memory when you learn something new. Sometimes I'll hear something in Norwegian that just sounds good, a fun way of phrasing something, and having lots of practice acquiring vocabulary means it takes less work to get myself to the point where I can use that word or expression myself. Also, I've found that many of the things that used to be passive only input when I had a stable accent (back in the stone age) have become active, so I've started mixing in parts of other dialects, much more easily than I did growing up. I bet some people think I sound awful, lol. Oh well! Can't please everyone, but I enjoy speaking this way, it lets me use the best parts of different dialects in ways you couldn't do if you were stuck in just one (dialect differences in Norway are a bit extreme). In other news, I've started reviewing my old wordlists by reading through the texts, and underlining the words I used in my wordlists. I didn't do that for the first 15 texts, but it seems like a good idea, so I'm doing it now. Man I put some dumb words in those first lists. Many of them seem so obvious now, but obviously they weren't back then, so I guess that means progress. Yay. It's fun to see that I can read most of these things relatively smoothly, though it's good to review some words of course - I certainly don't remember all of them. I might decide to go over the texts afterwards removing non-underlined words, to try out an idea someone posted about here somewhere - getting two random words in some way and then trying to use them in a sentence. Might be interesting to experiment with. 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 231 of 244 14 December 2009 at 5:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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These last few days have been strangely productive, considering - I've had the flu since the middle of last week (it might be from the swine flu vaccine or just a regular cold, bad but could be worse), so my brain won't seem to agree to anything beyond simple reading (and watching Chinese movies), so that's what I've been doing. Oh, and getting some new music from the inexhaustible fountain of awesome that is the Italian music scene. I'm surprised that I seem to like 80's music now. I had no idea the Italians were this good at making music. Even the lyrics are original and interesting more often than not... It's a little sad that this seems like a big deal to me, these days I pretty much avoid modern music altogether because most of it isn't worth listening to anyway, so to me it's somehow noteworthy that it's even possible to find one good song after another.
And it's a strange thought that to most people around me if would be really weird to listen to music in another language. It's just a part of my life now and has been for years, so I seem to have lost the ability to hear foreign language sounds as a mono- or bilingual person does before they've had significant exposure to a range of different languages. I know some people don't like the idea, but they're missing out! The way I see it, this is one of the main benefits of language learning or just an international outlook in general. There's just so much going on outside the borders of our own languages and cultures. Anyway, the reading has been going well, I can definitely notice the difference after studying more vocabulary. It all seems to flow better, and of course the more I read the more my wordlist words come up in what I'm reading, which is a great way to review vocabulary, and in turn makes my reading better. I might do some formal review in some form sometime, but I really love being able to review words by seeing them come up in texts, and so far that seems to be working well, so I think it makes more sense to prioritise more reading and occasionally flipping through old wordlists, then hopefully that'll take care of things - certainly seems to work. After a 10-day wait, my iphone is finally up and running, yay. Still learning how to use it. It already has all my music and general junk on it, but I still prefer the nano over the iphone for music. At least this way I'll always have my music and audiobooks with me, even if it's a little clunky to use. I had a quick look around for free Italian apps but haven't downloaded any yet (though I got several others on unrelated subjects, including a Louvre thing, very cool), I wasn't blown away in general, but that was at first glance only, so I'm sure there's stuff available that would be interesting. I got WordReference though - nice. In unrelated news, I seem to have accidentally rekindled my love for Hungarian over the last few days. Bad idea! Sigh. Hungarian was the first language I really studied (who knows where the interest came from originally) so in some ways it still feels special to me, and in some ways I want it back. But I doubt if I'll ever take it up again. I've had the feeling for a while that Italian might be the end of language learning for me, so I would need to be very convinced it's worthwhile before starting another one or reviving any of the languages I've studied in the past. My days of serial study are certainly over, and in retrospect were almost entirely useless. Maybe that's why I'm not see myself taking on another one. Regardless of what some people say, imo time can be wasted even if you technically learned something, and if I could go back in time and un-spend that time and change things, I would. Even if studying another language would be fun, that's just not enough, especially since I'm now at the point of boredom about the notion of stopping at a level below fluency (that is, basically native level) and want to go all the way if I'm going to study a language, like with Italian. Maybe that's why I'm sticking with just one - I want to learn one really well for once. I'm not sure how that one language ended up being Italian, but I'm very happy about that decision - I'm interested enough to put in the effort and I just plain adore Italian, it really resonates with me for some reason. I can't quite explain it. After watching Hero yesterday, however, I'm once again interested in studying Chinese characters sometime, if only for the calligraphy. But I might keep that as a short-term project, maybe over the summer, knowing I'm not interested enough at this stage to study Chinese to fluency. I won't prioritize it over Italian though. I might at some point try to learn a bit of napoletano just for fun, passively only though. It would be fun to understand a bit more of the lyrics in those songs on my ipod, listening practice helps and every once in a while I'll figure out something new about it, but it would be nice to have a closer look and get the basics down. I really love the sound of it, for some reason. Liz 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| staf250 Pentaglot Senior Member Belgium emmerick.be Joined 5689 days ago 352 posts - 414 votes Speaks: French, Dutch*, Italian, English, German Studies: Arabic (Written) | Message 232 of 244 14 December 2009 at 7:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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As a little present I've prepared a goody. I'm very positive, maybe fanatic, about a recent Italian book I've
finished reading. Now with help of the scanner I've the text of only the 20th chapter on the computer. As a text file of course, yet polished up to avoid any possible fault. The title has been mentioned by me in some recent comments of the Italian thread. I'm admiring the skill of Paolo Giordano, the autor, to describe actions going on in a couple of rooms, between two persons (Talking chapter 20). I did not have the possibility to discuss the book with an other admirer. A female student, actually a lady, who goes to Italian classes with my eldest daughter, wrote me :Oh, it's a book like "Io non ho paura". I have another opinion. I find it more a classic (Greek) tragedy. There is no happy end. It is a masterpiece the way it is written. I did put in the word counter to find out that chapter 20, "L'altra Stanza", contains 2726 words from which 1024 unique ones. It's up to you, when interested, to give me an email-address by PM. I could send you my text, the two word counts, alphabetical and by frequency, and aside some 150 words that I've looked up in the dictionary. Not all the work is done. I want to know if this writing can please or even ravish you. But feel free to say no, thanks! Staf Edited by staf250 on 15 December 2009 at 5:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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