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Italian the lazy way | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4100 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 9 of 53 23 December 2014 at 11:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Ciao tutti! Mi chiamo eyðimörk e sono una donna dalla Svezia ma abito alla Francia.
That's about as much as I can say about myself at this point, although I can also make up some nonsense sentences like "the dog is Father Christmas", "cats are sweet" and "the elephants eat nougat" courtesy of the slightly peculiar vocabulary taught by DuoLingo. Yesterday, I actually got some use out of the three cards featured in my latest post. While watching the backstage extra contents on my The Best Offer DVD (an English film written and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore) the director spoke briefly about "i capelli" of Geoffrey Rush. One of my new music cards for the day also had "i capelli". Who knew that hair was so essential to Italian? Today has been a crazy roller-coaster of a day and I've only really had a short moment to review some Buffy, but I was fascinated by this card:  It appears to show the word "want" in both first person present and first person imperfect, which strikes me as incredibly useful. A phrase that occurred several times and interested me as well is "in fretta" which appears to mean "quickly". In general, even though I haven't really gotten many minutes into the series, I'm seeing a fair amount of repetition. That's good! I was also fascinated by a very long and seemingly quite complex card that I understood almost word-by-word from two listens without even reading along: Xander imagining Cordelia talking to all her friends about her supposedly passionate affair with a pool-boy during the summer holidays. It's weird how sometimes very simple sentences are hard to understand, but something like that comes very naturally thanks to cognates. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4100 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 10 of 53 24 December 2014 at 8:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Se siete christiano/christiana: Buon Natale! Non sono christiana ma io so che molti sono.
The craziness of the past few days has died down a bit, so while waiting for our pretty traditional French holiday supper to finish I managed to get some DuoLingo and subs2srs in. DuoLingo is still fairly fun. I'm on level five (whatever that means) and I've worked through the Christmas words, the plurals, and the animals. Right now, I'm learning foods. It's not exactly the kind of things that I want to be learning, but I like that I'm learning articles and verb conjugation, and subs2srs is filling the gap nicely. My Buffy l'Ammazzavampiri cards are teaching me the things I really want to know. Aside from being able to tell people their hair looks nice, and that I don't blame myself for whatever ills befall Buffy (I blame Giles), I have recently been able to pick out various forms of "want" in context, and today of "can".  "Tu puoi…?" (Can you…?) Lily asks. "Non posso" (I cannot) Buffy replies. One might expect Buffy to be a pretty useless series for beginner language studies. One might expect a lot of cards mostly like this one, which might be less than useful for those of us who want to express ourselves in Italian to native Italians:  But there are a lot of interesting expressions in there. And not all about hair either. There is a lot of "I want", "I wish", "I can", "I come", "I go", and even a bit of "I blame" in there... things that you might not normally get to very quickly in a course. There are still certain characters I miss entire words with when they speak, though... but, hey, I'm on day four of learning, and two days were almost entirely lost to a major car emergency. I've spent maybe two hours total on Italian. Not bad for lazy learning, I'd say! Right now, I'm saving interesting-looking Italian food blogs for language learning through making food. I'll review the good ones when I've explored them closer. Same for the Roman history blogs I'm browsing (as I mentioned, I have a degree in Classical Archaeology, i.e. all things ancient Greek and Roman... I figure I might as well put it to use with Italian). Edited by eyðimörk on 24 December 2014 at 8:03pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5237 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 11 of 53 24 December 2014 at 9:02pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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è possibile questo è interessante per voi:
Ostia Antica Italy 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4100 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 12 of 53 24 December 2014 at 9:33pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Grazie, rdearman!
I've actually forgotten a lot of what I've learned about Ostia. As I mentioned, I kind of went out of my way to specialise in all things non-Italian (not even kidding; I did my BA thesis on the way the Greek kings of Afghanistan expressed dynastic continuity, and if it was in Latin I forgot it the day after the exam) but I did at one point have to do coursework on topics like Pompeii or the topography of the city of Rome (yes, seriously, as in: "there's a market square right here, and there's a temple here, and you'll be interested to note that this street slopes downwards towards the city wall, and all the brothels are just slightly off this main street here..."). Edited by eyðimörk on 24 December 2014 at 9:51pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4100 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 13 of 53 25 December 2014 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I spent an hour this morning playing around with Italian while responding to Christmas greetings online. I learned some more food items on DuoLingo and made good progress on my Buffy l'Ammazzavampiri cards. They're already getting a lot easier to listen to.
There have been a lot of awesome French cognates in the last few cards. I love stumbling across expressions like non valsa la pena which so clearly resembles the French ne vaut pas la peine (even more so if you know that the root of vaut is val-). Here's an example of a card that I understand perfectly word for word when reading it, and can at least get the gist of when listening:  Even "tea cosy" is a French cognate (coprateiera vs. couvre-théière). When it comes to my music deck, I've been noting that Italian has a slightly peculiar way of expressing possession in which the definite article remains and the possessive pronoun must correspond with the noun. It looks pretty straight forward, though: il mio tormento — le mie gioie — i miei dolori This evening, I had another look at my bookmarks and sampled Speak Italian With Your Mouth Full, a recorded MIT course that is available for free on YouTube. Much as I like the concept (learning Italian by cooking), I couldn't really get into the course. The language learning part was a bit slow for me, and the way the video was cut didn't make me feel very engaged. I suspect that if I want to learn with food, I'll have more luck with the food blogs that I have bookmarked. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4100 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 14 of 53 26 December 2014 at 9:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Spent half an hour this morning on reviewing subs2srs cards. I'm really pleased with how well I understand cards on their second day and how clearly all the words stand out. This is probably 10% me slowly getting used to the sounds of Italian and 90% the fact that standard Italian is beautifully enunciated.
The downside to getting this slightly overwhelming amount of imput, as a complete newbie, is that it's easy to miss the little things the first few times you see them. Take già for example. It's a tiny word in long sentences full of words that I don't know and conjugations which are still very new to me. It appeared to mean "already". Even so, I probably had time to see the word close to a dozen times (not all the same context) before realising that it has a very common French cognate: déjà. I'm sure someone with a more "intensive" learning style would have picked up on that much sooner. My strategy is all about the "fast and loose". I also spent 20 minutes on DuoLingo, learning possessives and a few question words. I have a feeling I will need to review those tomorrow. For some reason my mind tends to file question words simply as "this is a question word". Distinguishing between "who?" and "how many?" is apparently of less interest to it. Thankfully I have learnt them in French, which is to some help here. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4100 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 15 of 53 27 December 2014 at 2:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I did some subs2srs and some DuoLingo (I did need to repeat the question words) this morning.
I'm close-ish to having gone through all of the cards for the first episode at least once. Two more days, maybe. It won't be this quick after the holidays, though, since I'll be spending more time on French and Breton grammar (I've given myself 10 days off for the holidays). It's been a week since I first started playing around with Italian, so how about a show of what I've learned (or not learned, as it might be) this week? Feel free to correct me.* I'm really stretching myself here. I'm not even sure that attempt at a future tense resembles the future tense. It's one of those things I've picked up from Buffy l'Ammazzavampiri without paying much attention. Same with forse. Does it really mean "maybe" or is that just in certain contexts? Is filtro a word? * Except on the part where Il Gattopardo is the best book in the world. That's non-negotiable. Just kidding, that's just my roundabout way of expressing "my favourite" without knowing how to say "my favourite". 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 53 27 December 2014 at 4:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Heh. I've always felt that those are the best cards, because there's absolutely no way you're ever going to forget any of the other vocabulary on that card. Even better, when people ask you how you learned Italian, you can always say, "Oh, from Buffy. So if we ever encounter a vampire-worshiping cult, I'm all set!" The 400th time people ask you how you learned Italian, it's nice to have a joke or two. :-)
Yeah, in my experience, once subs2srs cards start to mature, they're sort of song lyrics from your childhood: They're really hard to forget.
The good news is that most of this sorts itself out nicely with more exposure, and you'll see all these cards again later. Oh, and I love the Buffy cards in Italian. Too much fun. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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