I thought this was supposed to be fun (Language Learning Log) Language Learning Forum

I thought this was supposed to be fun
Tags: Michel Thomas \| Pimsleur \| Italian
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numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6785 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 9 of 182 07 September 2009 at 4:50pm \| IP Logged
	Time for an update. I've begun working through the textbook and I don't like this format at all. It's a classic textbook: first a text, then some grammar rules and then various exercises, fill in the blanks, turn a statement into a question etc. I feel like I've done these to death in school and I didn't enjoy it then either. For one thing, there's not a whole lot of thinking happening when I go through the exercises, it's too easy. Or too arbitrary. The grammar instruction is just examples without explaining any rules or methods. All in all quite badly set up. I've done 2/25 lessons so far and I think I'm gonna stick with it for now, because it's one of the few resources I have. On the translation front, the jury is still out. I've done dictation on 8 Assimil units, translated 3 into English, 1 back into Italian. I feel like I'm getting some practice with the language doing the dictation part, but I'm not sure the translation is such a big payoff. The first one I did I could remember the dialog too well, so I decided to put in longer breaks between phases (that's why I'm so far ahead with dictations). The dialogs, however, are quite useful in Assimil, and grammatically varied which I appreciate. On the vocabulary side, things are slow. I'm still using Anki everyday to do my dosage, but some words keep coming back and I can't get a handle on them. I wonder if there's much point to this at all. I've also started to read a bit Italian in the wild as it were, that is conversational texts, and I'm still very lacking in understanding. For what it's worth, all exposure to Italian, be it Assimil or my not-so-favorite textbook is still good for a little vocabulary assimilation. I've ordered a grammar book and I'm hoping that will help me decode more sentences. 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6785 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 10 of 182 11 September 2009 at 12:26am \| IP Logged
	I'm a little perplexed about the whole grammar thing. I have a grammar book now and don't really know what to do with it. I can look stuff up in it, which is great, and it has explanations in English. But I'm not really dying to make up a bunch of conjugation drills, I don't have much faith in that. 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6785 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 11 of 182 11 September 2009 at 8:41pm \| IP Logged
	Well, I guess I did today what I said I wouldn't do, namely a grammar study session. I thought I should attack the most debilitating holes in my grammar, so I went with pronouns. Went over the chapter in the grammar book very carefully (the first few sections of it that is) and basically the end result it.. I feel I understand what I already understood (io, tu etc), understand a bit better the reflexive ones (mi, ti, si,..) and still rather puzzled by the direct<->indirect objects ones (lo, la; gli, le). So it seems I didn't get much out of it :/ There was an exercise at the end where you have to figure out if it's direct or indirect and I didn't do great on that one. Which is just the thing I've been having trouble with from the beginning. What's worse it seems that it basically comes down to knowing the individual verbs, whether it goes "telefonare a" and then you know it's "gli telefono" or it's a direct object verb -> "lo chiamo". Not particularly encouraging. 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6785 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 12 of 182 13 September 2009 at 11:39pm \| IP Logged
	So I've been doing the roundtrip Assimil for a while now, and pretty much the way I intended to do it. Except that I put in longer breaks between units so I have more time to forget. It's strange how much paper I'm using all of a sudden. The head is now on lesson 16 (dictation done) and the tail is on lesson 8 (dictation, ->English, ->Italian all done). I have to say I don't really feel how much I'm getting out of this, there is no specific tangible metric. But I do feel that I'm getting more and more exposure to Italian all things considered. The thing is though, that I still often remember the original formulation when I'm translating back into Italian. And when I don't I just tend to get it wrong if it's not something I know well. I'm not sure this is really the best way to practice writing, because there's no training in formulating sentences here, it's trying recall the specific words in what is largely a hyperliteral translation. But then if I were to write something from scratch I have no way of getting a correction, so that's not much better. I know there are some "social networking" sites where members do corrections for each other but I suspect a lot of the time you're just sitting there waiting because there's more stuff to review than people want to do. (On Livemocha I would get less than half my stuff reviewed despite doing reviews myself whenever prompted for it.) I'm still running Pimsleur sort of in the background, I'm on 48/90 so just past half way. It's not too bad these days; the lessons are harder and sometimes the sentences are even too long, so when I'm listening to the tape I forget exactly what I had come up with myself. This is where Michel Thomas was better, because he didn't fret about it always having to be a full, meaningful sentence. These days the metathinking is returning. I'm asking myself what my strategy should be and what kind of timetable I should be shooting for. I'm having some encouraging moments now and then, like for instance today I was reading something on gazzetta.it and the language felt more common to me than the last time I tried this maybe 2 weeks ago. I didn't have to work so hard to understand it, the sentences unfolded with less effort. Grammar handicaps by urgency: 1. The imperative tense. 2. The subjunctive tense (il congiuntivo) 3. Prepositions. This is really annoying, because I can't write a sentence correctly. Ultimately though, I think this will work itself out naturally with enough exposure to the language. Some patterns are very pervasive (eg. andare a + verb-infinitive), but I just don't have them ingrained yet. 4. Personal pronouns. (Yes, still.) No particular idea about how to fix this at the moment. 5. Passato remoto. I was assured this would almost never come up, but turns out it does, quite a bit. I know a lot of people around here say grammar is not something to focus on, but I'm not sure I agree. Personally I don't enjoy practicing phrases in Pimsleur and not knowing what I'm saying. (This is why, incidentally, Pimsleur is a nice grammar practice for what I have learned from other sources.) It's too fluffy that way. And I think -- harder to remember a phrase when you don't know precisely what it is. Hours to date: 92 (this is a somewhat rough estimate though) Edited by numerodix on 13 September 2009 at 11:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6785 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 13 of 182 15 September 2009 at 10:19pm \| IP Logged
	I've had a change of heart again (yes, big surprise). I don't dislike the textbook anymore. I've been trying figure out how to learn grammar recently. I have a reference grammar with examples and exercises, which is comprehensive. I've tried doing grammar study sessions with it, copying over grammar and doing the exercises. But I didn't feel like I was getting very much out of it; after all it's a reference, not a piece of didactic material. It was too much information, too complicated, I wasn't taking it in. So I went back to the textbook and looked at it closely. It has 25 units, where each unit has one topic or a couple of topics. They are presented quite effectively and the order is sensible. The exercises are a bit lacking, but maybe I can come up with something supplementary for them. So I've started doing the lessons again, but this time I spend more time on them and I do them slower. The exercises I do the hardcore way, like my Polish teacher always insisted on (and I resented). Namely copy the whole sentence, not just fill in the blank. This way I think more about the sentence and about the verb or preposition that I'm choosing. This is good anyway, because I'm still at a stage where writing Italian is good practice. I'm thinking of doing the textbook lessons maybe one in two or three days. And keep doing Assimil in between. I might have to come up with some repetition schedule so that I can go over a lesson again when I need to study it more closely. I'm not sure how yet. Perhaps use the reference grammar after each lesson to do extra study. At the moment I have to say that I'm enjoying myself quite a bit. Even doing grammar exercises. The fact is that I'm making progress and it's visible. And the language doesn't fill me with angst the way that French used to do. I even got an impulse last night to order more textbooks. The one I have is called "Corso elementare ed intermedio", so I ordered the one called "medio" and even the "superiore" lol. They charge me no less than 10 yuro for shipping and the books are not very expensive (12 yuro) so I figured if I'm going to buy them all eventually I might as well do it right now. Italian is going well so far and if I'm going to try and learn as much as possible I might as well tackle these textbooks in sequence. If I do that I should be in pretty good shape to use the language anywhere I please. I'm still using Pimsleur also, to fill any dead time that I have. Before bed, on the way to the supermarket, taking a walk. I'm on lesson 23 of unit 2. That too is practice for grammar and the content of the lessons at this point is a lot more interesting than it was at the start, you have fairly common colloquial conversations. 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6785 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 14 of 182 17 September 2009 at 4:08pm \| IP Logged
	Well, I just finished Pimsleur II. I'm giving myself a pat on the back -- I'd never thought I'd be able to sit through so many hours of this. If that's all I did I'd never last, but thanks to other materials it's not just an exercise in repetition and recall, I can practice my grammar with it. On that score, personal pronouns are progressing little by little. I think I'm pretty solid on lei vs la/le, but that still leaves sorting out the direct from the indirect object verbs meh. Pimsleur III opens with the nasty glielo business and I hope it exposes it well enough for me to acquire. When it comes to ci and ne I'm starting to get comfortable with those too, remembering to put them in at the beginning of a phrase. Then there is prepositions, and they've begun building the circuits in my brain for those. Nowadays when I hear della I pause and think to myself "strada -> la. di la strada = della strada". Naturally, it continues to be painful trying to guess when to use which because they all share many meanings (a, da, di, in), but I have faith it will come together at some point. It was a tremendous boon to me to discover that nel is an application of in, because I have a pretty good idea of when nel appears. In other news, I've started ogling Mandarin a bit lately. I don't really have a proper interest in the language (yet?), but I've listened to some dialogs and I loooves the pronunciation. It seems to me mostly an exercise in different variants of sounds related to s and c. Which we have in abundance in Polish, therefore I think I could pull it off :D I believe today marks 1 month since I started off with Italian. :) Edited by numerodix on 17 September 2009 at 4:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6785 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 15 of 182 17 September 2009 at 11:58pm \| IP Logged
	I'm squirming a little in my seat. I do these grammar units and I can't say that I'm mastering them exactly, despite putting a lot of time into writing out lots of text, filling in missing words and so on. Take prepositions -- I just don't know how they are applied in many cases and sometimes I don't even know the meaning of the utterance because it's a foreign expression to me. So obviously I can't possibly get those right at the moment. So then what to do? Rely on Assimil, do more audio courses with simple content after Pimsleur to practice grammar? I feel like I need something to reinforce grammar with.. in order to learn more grammar.. in order to be able to reach a stage where I can read and write somewhat freely. Should I have another textbook maybe, to complement? But then the order of topics wouldn't be the same and I'd have to try to match it up with the order I'm doing them in, not sure that would be brilliant either :/ The thing is I'm starting to itch a bit for trying to write stuff. But I don't want to register on a forum at this point, cause if it were me I wouldn't want to read posts by someone who sounds like a toddler. It's too early for that. So what can I do? Well, I've looked around some of the "social" sites and there are those that set you up with a person learning the opposite language. I tried this and it was really uncomfortable. I mean I can formulate a few sentences, but they're not going to be "production quality" and getting half the words corrected is both bad for morale and it's too much to take on. In the unlikely event that anyone is reading this, your advice is much appreciated! Edited by numerodix on 18 September 2009 at 12:30am 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6785 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 16 of 182 20 September 2009 at 10:34pm \| IP Logged
	Finished chapter 4 in the textbook. That means I know all there is to know about passato prossimo cough. Actually, I think there are some nasty cases roaming that I can't explain still (as in avere + participle that changes with gender/plural -- that is _not_ supposed to happen!). All in due time I'm sure. I'm through 4 of 25 chapters of textbook, but they get longer as I go along. I skimmed that FSI report that said you should be able to get fluent in Italian within 600 hours. I think it might take me another 200 to finish the textbook. Well that still leaves almost 300: plenty of time to learn more and to practice plenty. I'm really glad I decided to keep track of hours, it helps to know what I have done so far. The last few days of Italian have been serene on the mind, not much second guessing myself. But I have developed the beginnings of a writing cramp. (That's why god gave us keyboards etc) In about three weeks I've done more handwriting than probably over the last decade. 1 person has voted this message useful

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numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6785 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 9 of 182 07 September 2009 at 4:50pm \| IP Logged
	Time for an update. I've begun working through the textbook and I don't like this format at all. It's a classic textbook: first a text, then some grammar rules and then various exercises, fill in the blanks, turn a statement into a question etc. I feel like I've done these to death in school and I didn't enjoy it then either. For one thing, there's not a whole lot of thinking happening when I go through the exercises, it's too easy. Or too arbitrary. The grammar instruction is just examples without explaining any rules or methods. All in all quite badly set up. I've done 2/25 lessons so far and I think I'm gonna stick with it for now, because it's one of the few resources I have. On the translation front, the jury is still out. I've done dictation on 8 Assimil units, translated 3 into English, 1 back into Italian. I feel like I'm getting some practice with the language doing the dictation part, but I'm not sure the translation is such a big payoff. The first one I did I could remember the dialog too well, so I decided to put in longer breaks between phases (that's why I'm so far ahead with dictations). The dialogs, however, are quite useful in Assimil, and grammatically varied which I appreciate. On the vocabulary side, things are slow. I'm still using Anki everyday to do my dosage, but some words keep coming back and I can't get a handle on them. I wonder if there's much point to this at all. I've also started to read a bit Italian in the wild as it were, that is conversational texts, and I'm still very lacking in understanding. For what it's worth, all exposure to Italian, be it Assimil or my not-so-favorite textbook is still good for a little vocabulary assimilation. I've ordered a grammar book and I'm hoping that will help me decode more sentences. 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6785 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 10 of 182 11 September 2009 at 12:26am \| IP Logged
	I'm a little perplexed about the whole grammar thing. I have a grammar book now and don't really know what to do with it. I can look stuff up in it, which is great, and it has explanations in English. But I'm not really dying to make up a bunch of conjugation drills, I don't have much faith in that. 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6785 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 11 of 182 11 September 2009 at 8:41pm \| IP Logged
	Well, I guess I did today what I said I wouldn't do, namely a grammar study session. I thought I should attack the most debilitating holes in my grammar, so I went with pronouns. Went over the chapter in the grammar book very carefully (the first few sections of it that is) and basically the end result it.. I feel I understand what I already understood (io, tu etc), understand a bit better the reflexive ones (mi, ti, si,..) and still rather puzzled by the direct<->indirect objects ones (lo, la; gli, le). So it seems I didn't get much out of it :/ There was an exercise at the end where you have to figure out if it's direct or indirect and I didn't do great on that one. Which is just the thing I've been having trouble with from the beginning. What's worse it seems that it basically comes down to knowing the individual verbs, whether it goes "telefonare a" and then you know it's "gli telefono" or it's a direct object verb -> "lo chiamo". Not particularly encouraging. 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6785 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 12 of 182 13 September 2009 at 11:39pm \| IP Logged
	So I've been doing the roundtrip Assimil for a while now, and pretty much the way I intended to do it. Except that I put in longer breaks between units so I have more time to forget. It's strange how much paper I'm using all of a sudden. The head is now on lesson 16 (dictation done) and the tail is on lesson 8 (dictation, ->English, ->Italian all done). I have to say I don't really feel how much I'm getting out of this, there is no specific tangible metric. But I do feel that I'm getting more and more exposure to Italian all things considered. The thing is though, that I still often remember the original formulation when I'm translating back into Italian. And when I don't I just tend to get it wrong if it's not something I know well. I'm not sure this is really the best way to practice writing, because there's no training in formulating sentences here, it's trying recall the specific words in what is largely a hyperliteral translation. But then if I were to write something from scratch I have no way of getting a correction, so that's not much better. I know there are some "social networking" sites where members do corrections for each other but I suspect a lot of the time you're just sitting there waiting because there's more stuff to review than people want to do. (On Livemocha I would get less than half my stuff reviewed despite doing reviews myself whenever prompted for it.) I'm still running Pimsleur sort of in the background, I'm on 48/90 so just past half way. It's not too bad these days; the lessons are harder and sometimes the sentences are even too long, so when I'm listening to the tape I forget exactly what I had come up with myself. This is where Michel Thomas was better, because he didn't fret about it always having to be a full, meaningful sentence. These days the metathinking is returning. I'm asking myself what my strategy should be and what kind of timetable I should be shooting for. I'm having some encouraging moments now and then, like for instance today I was reading something on gazzetta.it and the language felt more common to me than the last time I tried this maybe 2 weeks ago. I didn't have to work so hard to understand it, the sentences unfolded with less effort. Grammar handicaps by urgency: 1. The imperative tense. 2. The subjunctive tense (il congiuntivo) 3. Prepositions. This is really annoying, because I can't write a sentence correctly. Ultimately though, I think this will work itself out naturally with enough exposure to the language. Some patterns are very pervasive (eg. andare a + verb-infinitive), but I just don't have them ingrained yet. 4. Personal pronouns. (Yes, still.) No particular idea about how to fix this at the moment. 5. Passato remoto. I was assured this would almost never come up, but turns out it does, quite a bit. I know a lot of people around here say grammar is not something to focus on, but I'm not sure I agree. Personally I don't enjoy practicing phrases in Pimsleur and not knowing what I'm saying. (This is why, incidentally, Pimsleur is a nice grammar practice for what I have learned from other sources.) It's too fluffy that way. And I think -- harder to remember a phrase when you don't know precisely what it is. Hours to date: 92 (this is a somewhat rough estimate though) Edited by numerodix on 13 September 2009 at 11:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6785 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 13 of 182 15 September 2009 at 10:19pm \| IP Logged
	I've had a change of heart again (yes, big surprise). I don't dislike the textbook anymore. I've been trying figure out how to learn grammar recently. I have a reference grammar with examples and exercises, which is comprehensive. I've tried doing grammar study sessions with it, copying over grammar and doing the exercises. But I didn't feel like I was getting very much out of it; after all it's a reference, not a piece of didactic material. It was too much information, too complicated, I wasn't taking it in. So I went back to the textbook and looked at it closely. It has 25 units, where each unit has one topic or a couple of topics. They are presented quite effectively and the order is sensible. The exercises are a bit lacking, but maybe I can come up with something supplementary for them. So I've started doing the lessons again, but this time I spend more time on them and I do them slower. The exercises I do the hardcore way, like my Polish teacher always insisted on (and I resented). Namely copy the whole sentence, not just fill in the blank. This way I think more about the sentence and about the verb or preposition that I'm choosing. This is good anyway, because I'm still at a stage where writing Italian is good practice. I'm thinking of doing the textbook lessons maybe one in two or three days. And keep doing Assimil in between. I might have to come up with some repetition schedule so that I can go over a lesson again when I need to study it more closely. I'm not sure how yet. Perhaps use the reference grammar after each lesson to do extra study. At the moment I have to say that I'm enjoying myself quite a bit. Even doing grammar exercises. The fact is that I'm making progress and it's visible. And the language doesn't fill me with angst the way that French used to do. I even got an impulse last night to order more textbooks. The one I have is called "Corso elementare ed intermedio", so I ordered the one called "medio" and even the "superiore" lol. They charge me no less than 10 yuro for shipping and the books are not very expensive (12 yuro) so I figured if I'm going to buy them all eventually I might as well do it right now. Italian is going well so far and if I'm going to try and learn as much as possible I might as well tackle these textbooks in sequence. If I do that I should be in pretty good shape to use the language anywhere I please. I'm still using Pimsleur also, to fill any dead time that I have. Before bed, on the way to the supermarket, taking a walk. I'm on lesson 23 of unit 2. That too is practice for grammar and the content of the lessons at this point is a lot more interesting than it was at the start, you have fairly common colloquial conversations. 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6785 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 14 of 182 17 September 2009 at 4:08pm \| IP Logged
	Well, I just finished Pimsleur II. I'm giving myself a pat on the back -- I'd never thought I'd be able to sit through so many hours of this. If that's all I did I'd never last, but thanks to other materials it's not just an exercise in repetition and recall, I can practice my grammar with it. On that score, personal pronouns are progressing little by little. I think I'm pretty solid on lei vs la/le, but that still leaves sorting out the direct from the indirect object verbs meh. Pimsleur III opens with the nasty glielo business and I hope it exposes it well enough for me to acquire. When it comes to ci and ne I'm starting to get comfortable with those too, remembering to put them in at the beginning of a phrase. Then there is prepositions, and they've begun building the circuits in my brain for those. Nowadays when I hear della I pause and think to myself "strada -> la. di la strada = della strada". Naturally, it continues to be painful trying to guess when to use which because they all share many meanings (a, da, di, in), but I have faith it will come together at some point. It was a tremendous boon to me to discover that nel is an application of in, because I have a pretty good idea of when nel appears. In other news, I've started ogling Mandarin a bit lately. I don't really have a proper interest in the language (yet?), but I've listened to some dialogs and I loooves the pronunciation. It seems to me mostly an exercise in different variants of sounds related to s and c. Which we have in abundance in Polish, therefore I think I could pull it off :D I believe today marks 1 month since I started off with Italian. :) Edited by numerodix on 17 September 2009 at 4:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6785 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 15 of 182 17 September 2009 at 11:58pm \| IP Logged
	I'm squirming a little in my seat. I do these grammar units and I can't say that I'm mastering them exactly, despite putting a lot of time into writing out lots of text, filling in missing words and so on. Take prepositions -- I just don't know how they are applied in many cases and sometimes I don't even know the meaning of the utterance because it's a foreign expression to me. So obviously I can't possibly get those right at the moment. So then what to do? Rely on Assimil, do more audio courses with simple content after Pimsleur to practice grammar? I feel like I need something to reinforce grammar with.. in order to learn more grammar.. in order to be able to reach a stage where I can read and write somewhat freely. Should I have another textbook maybe, to complement? But then the order of topics wouldn't be the same and I'd have to try to match it up with the order I'm doing them in, not sure that would be brilliant either :/ The thing is I'm starting to itch a bit for trying to write stuff. But I don't want to register on a forum at this point, cause if it were me I wouldn't want to read posts by someone who sounds like a toddler. It's too early for that. So what can I do? Well, I've looked around some of the "social" sites and there are those that set you up with a person learning the opposite language. I tried this and it was really uncomfortable. I mean I can formulate a few sentences, but they're not going to be "production quality" and getting half the words corrected is both bad for morale and it's too much to take on. In the unlikely event that anyone is reading this, your advice is much appreciated! Edited by numerodix on 18 September 2009 at 12:30am 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6785 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 16 of 182 20 September 2009 at 10:34pm \| IP Logged
	Finished chapter 4 in the textbook. That means I know all there is to know about passato prossimo cough. Actually, I think there are some nasty cases roaming that I can't explain still (as in avere + participle that changes with gender/plural -- that is _not_ supposed to happen!). All in due time I'm sure. I'm through 4 of 25 chapters of textbook, but they get longer as I go along. I skimmed that FSI report that said you should be able to get fluent in Italian within 600 hours. I think it might take me another 200 to finish the textbook. Well that still leaves almost 300: plenty of time to learn more and to practice plenty. I'm really glad I decided to keep track of hours, it helps to know what I have done so far. The last few days of Italian have been serene on the mind, not much second guessing myself. But I have developed the beginnings of a writing cramp. (That's why god gave us keyboards etc) In about three weeks I've done more handwriting than probably over the last decade. 1 person has voted this message useful