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The 1-year challenge: Italian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5911 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 73 of 244 22 August 2009 at 9:58pm | IP Logged |
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Finished up a couple of texts today, the two short ones that I started at the same time a few days ago. I made noticeably fewer mistakes with these, the ones I did make were mostly to do with prepositions, so that still needs work. It'll probably sort itself out though, as I do more texts and try it out more and more. The good news is that after correcting myself I can see why the right usage makes sense, it just doesn't necessarily come to me that easily when I'm writing. There's light at the end of the tunnel though, as some of the mistakes I used to make have been sorted already. I just need more practice and self-correcting and I'll sort it out.
Worked on wordlists for the other two texts I have going at the moment, one of which I started this morning. Nothing really noteworthy about either text, but I'm learning some fun vocabulary that isn't the sort of thing that comes up all the time but that I'm sure I will someday need to know and be happy I learned. One thing I've noticed is that sometimes I don't go with my first feeling about something - instead I end up with something else than what I originally wanted to write because I think things through and make the wrong decision in the end, when I was right to begin with. It's probably a good sign that the right way is what comes to me first, but not fun that I end up making mistakes because my brain thinks it knows better and overcomplicates things I already know. On a random note, sometimes words pop up in Italian that are similar to Latin words I've previously learned in medical school, and vice versa. For obvious reasons, but kinda fun anyway. I don't always realize it - sometimes all I get is a vague "hey, that looks kinda familiar..." type feeling - but when I do realize, I think to myself that I really should get into etymology more. And revive my Latin. Hardly a priority at this point, but I might take it up again later. Another thing that tends to happen these days when I do my wordlists or translations is that I might know and understand the word I'm dealing with perfectly well in Italian but can't immediately come up with the English translation, even though I know both words just fine in their own right. I've always been awful at making these connections between different languages, even with words I have complete command of in both languages, so I guess this is just me carrying on as usual. Sometimes I wish I could imprint my understanding of the word on the page in the middle column instead of writing the translation (which, let's face it, can't always be completely accurate anyway) but unfortunately it doesn't quite work like that. I'll take it as a good sign, though, because it probably means that I'm learning these concepts in their own right in Italian in a completely L2 isolated environment as opposed to learning things via a translation, and this is something I want to achieve anyway - being able to think and function and understand in Italian without involving any other language in the process, just like a native speaker would. It's still very much a work in progress but I'm already there with some words and concepts and gradually working out the others. If I want to get to native-level fluency (which is the ultimate goal here) then I need to learn this, so I'm glad to see steps in that direction actually happening, though I do think it's good for me to carry on using a bilingual dictionary to help things, to solidify the meaning of words more than just leaving them as vague concepts in my head. But... I need a monolingual dictionary! I might adapt my method later to exclude any use of translations, using only Italian as part of my learning, but not just yet. Current word count: 1763 unique words, based on 9 texts. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 24 August 2009 at 5:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5911 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 74 of 244 23 August 2009 at 11:48am | IP Logged |
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Well boys and girls, whoever you are - we've reached the 4-month mark. Or at least I think we have, I'm not really sure exactly what day I started, but the 23rd was the closest estimate I could come up with at the time. I have the most warped memory issues when it comes to time and sizes of things, so even though I made that estimate just one week after I started, I still don't know if it's correct, but it's the best estimate I've got and I want an exact date and that's the best I can do.
What was I talking about? Ah yes. I've been studying Italian for 4 months, and I'm one third of the way through my year of intensive Italian study. Time for a bit of an assessment of where things are at. First thoughts: OH HOLY COW I-only-have-8-months-left this-is-never-going-to-work we're-all-going-to-die I-want-my-mummy. Actually though, 4 months ago my knowledge of Italian was, for all intents and purposes, limited to ciao (in its goodbye form only), bella, pizza, etc. - the usual stuff that everyone knows - and educated guesses based on Spanish and Catalan. I'm lightyears from perfection still, but at least I can say I've made steady progress, no doubt about that - I know a whole heck of a lot more Italian now than I did just a short while ago, which is... Well really just COOL. The main thing that's in the way at this point is vocabulary, I already have many of the basic things down but at this point all I really see is gaps, gaps, and more gaps. I've made some positive changes to my study techniques though (detailed ad nauseam over the last few pages of this log) that have helped speed things up quite a lot. I'm rarely genuinely stumped by grammar when reading or listening, but I know that there are many things that need a lot more work before I own them completely, as opposed to simply grasping their meaning in the overall sense while passively taking them in. There are more than a handful of things that I can grasp naturally and without straining, including unfiltered spoken Italian, even some of the faster things. I can understand almost all of some parts of my input, significantly less of others, ridiculously little of yet others - I am nowhere near 100% understanding overall. Producing my own output is another story, but not something I'm inclined to worry about at this point, as I haven't quite started working on it too intensively yet. My pronunciation could be worse, and to some degree I can think in Italian and formulate mostly-correct sentences, though actual speech at normal speed would be trickier. I've already internalised many of the structures that I need, though, and if my life depended on it I could at least have a decent chance at saving myself. I hope this log doesn't look like a long chain of good news - make no mistake, I still royally suck at Italian. For real. Less so than a few weeks or months ago, but nevertheless. But it's OK - really, it is. I wish I could classify my current knowledge in some way so that a month from now or 3 months from now or at the end of April I could see how far I've come, but lacking such a system, all I can say is this: I'm still just a toddler stumbling through things, and very happy indeed that I have several months left before I need to evaluate myself against my overall goal. I knew this was going to take time and that I wasn't going to get to a really high level in such a short time, but I'm optimistic about things and happy with what I've done so far - and excited to do and achieve much more in the coming months. That's all I have for now, and now I want comments from all you lurkers - I can see you, you know - thoughts on where to go from here? Liz Edited by Lizzern on 23 August 2009 at 11:57am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6144 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 75 of 244 23 August 2009 at 6:25pm | IP Logged |
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Wow, I have finally finished reading the entire log (or so far). I think this is inspirational and it has really made me re-examine my definitions of fluency and other levels.
Your word list technique seems very useful, and I might try it. I use a vocabulary program called BYKI (Before You Know It) by Transparent Language that does something similar. You enter your word list and it takes you through various stages of recognizing and recalling the word. Review It - you just look over the words Recognize It - it gives you L2 and you have to think/say L1 and then say whether you were correct Know It - it gives you L2 and you have to type in L1 and it grades you Produce It - reverse of Recognize It Own It - reverse of Know It I generally skip levels "review it" (because I have just entered the words, so I have reviewed them already) and "recognize it" because I prefer "know it" because I can get in the habit of clicking "yes" for every word (even if I didn't recognize it) if I have gotten a bunch right in a row. If that makes any sense. Anyways, I love watching your progress and using your tips for my own Italian studies. I started to study Italian around December 11th, 2008 and my goal then was to achieve basic fluency within six months. I realized a couple months afterward that I was just too busy to reach that goal, so I have made it a 1-year challenge to get to at least basic fluency within a year. For 2010, my goal will be advanced or native fluency. My problem with gauging my progress is that when I started studying in December, I could passively understand almost everything already, mainly because of my Spanish. I just have to make all of that active, increase vocabulary substantially, and master all grammatical structures and I think I'm at a basic fluency level. But I only have four months left... So, good luck with your studies! --ellasevia P.S. I definitely think that your next language should be Greek...that or Portuguese. Both amazing languages in my opinion, two of my favorites. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5911 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 76 of 244 24 August 2009 at 5:13pm | IP Logged |
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Hi there you, thanks for your comment - nice to know people are reading! And comments are always good, some days it's like talking to a wall in here. All the best with your Italian! Native-level fluency is going to be awesome, isn't it? I can still barely get my head around the notion that we can totally do that.
Thanks for the tip about Byki, I've tried it a couple of times and I like the concept, in a sense, except I'm not much of a flashcard fan - the way I'm doing things now things are constantly surrounded by a context, and the texts I'm using are fun to work with. Who knows, I might change my mind about flashcards sometime, but for now flashcards and I live in a happy state of mutual avoidance :-) It's interesting to kinda have my ideas confirmed though, they seem to have put some thought into the process from complete unfamiliarity to owning a word, doing it this way really seems to work well, from what I've seen so far. I'm sure my method could be improved though, just need to find the way. Yeah the next language I start will probably be Greek (possibly accompanied by something else, like the gorgeous Estonian), since it's one of the languages I actually have some use for - a fellow language nerd friend of mine says I'm "turning normal" now that I'm sticking with one language for a significant amount of time and aiming for usefulness and all that. (Re-)learning Greek would make an awful lot of sense - it's not the language I love the most (though I do have a certain, shall we say, care for it) but if I can muster the enthusiasm again, which I once had and then lost when I was still in upper beginner/lower intermediate level with it, then I'll give it a good go. It would be just stellar to be at least conversational, and I know that some people I know are a little bummed that I didn't continue with it once I'd started, so at the very least it'll gain me brownie points. But there's no room for Greek in my life just yet - until the end of April it's all about Italian! Did corrections for a text today and I'm still doing stupid stuff, like forgetting to connect things with apostrophes when I should. Oh hooray for good old habits from Spanish. I'm bound to stop doing it eventually, right? Anyway, I like how there are noticeably fewer corrections I need to make these days. But maybe later to review I might redo one of the texts from before, translating into Italian without reviewing anything first, to test my vocabulary recall and whether I'm getting things right grammatically because I remember how the sentence goes or whether I actually know things. It really helps to correct myself like I do when I'm 'done' with a text, going over my own mistakes, every awful little detail, to see how well or how badly I did, and what kinds of things are still problematic and might just slip by unnoticed in any other context. I'm trying to make my translations a little less literal at this point, so I don't end up learning less because I help myself too much in the way I write the translation. I'll keep doing it the literal way with some things, like articles among other things - for now anyway, we'll see if I continue to feel like it helps. With some vocabulary I don't really mind if I can't produce them myself and won't give myself a hard time about it at all - one example from a recent text is calligraphy vocabulary (!). If I ever take up calligraphy, which I may well do when the time machine is finally invented and I have time to follow up on everything that interests me, then I'll be sure to learn this stuff, but for now I'm OK with a decent level of recognition and maybe a vague attempt at production - it doesn't have to be perfect when it's clearly specialised vocabulary. It is really rather unfortunate that I have removed myself so far from Norwegian that it's impossible for me to approach a new language from a Norwegian perspective, because sometimes that would make more sense. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I'm necessarily stuck in an English-speaking way of thinking by any means, but if I do make mistakes based on previous languages it's more likely to be English, or even Spanish and Catalan, sooner than Norwegian. It's not really that surprising, since English became the default language of my world several years ago, and I sometimes catch myself making English mistakes in Norwegian, but still, sometimes I wish it wasn't so, particularly when Italian comments have their neat little equivalent in Norwegian but not in English. Happened today, two words in the same sentence that have an almost identical equivalent in Norwegian, that look about the same and mean about the same thing. I didn't do it today, because I want to see if I can produce the Italian from the English translation, which gives less away, but it's not always easy to know with these words. In addition to my text work yesterday (translations and whatnot) I also listened to some Assimil lessons after a long while away from the course, and it all seemed so... I don't know, slow? Unusually clear? I'm used to listening to more organic sources these days - and sometimes quite messy ones - so I was pleased to find that these old things that used to be not particularly easy for me are now almost a little strange to listen to because it's all so... Slow. I'm still going to wrap things up with the active phase though, because there are still things I can learn from it, reviewing will be helpful, and also because I want to include the course in my word count, so I'll need to go through the whole thing, typing it up the way I did with the active phase lessons I went over way back when. It's nice to see the difference in the level I'm at now compared to when I last did any Assimil, it's been a while and I'm glad to see there's a noticeable difference - but that doesn't mean it's easy peasy. It makes a lot more sense now though. Actually wrote up some active phase lessons too while I was at it, I feel like I should do this for review and for the other reasons above but quite honestly I prefer using my own texts. Compared to the organic stuff I've been using this is just too scripted for me. I prefer the messy route, cause the stuff I've been using is more fun than Assimil itself. Sorry Assimil, you know I love you, and for anyone reading this wondering if you should get Assimil - you totally should, I would recommend it without hesitation for anyone starting out, but once you're up on your own feet and walking (ok crawling) then use your own materials. I'll still wrap up the course but I doubt if I'll use it much more after that, it will have served its purpose by then. I'm hoping to finish it within the next couple of weeks, but no rush really. Anyway I can't decide whether I'm hoping that by the time I finish it that it will add next to nothing to my word count (meaning I will have dealt with the same vocabulary elsewhere) or if it would be kinda fun to add it and watch my word count jump up by a few hundred words. Current word count: 1947 unique words, based on 10 texts. Just did the first part of the wordlist for this text, will get the rest of it done sometime this evening. I have the texts that remain all planned out in a sensible-ish order (added another one yesterday though) so that I can keep starting a new one every 2 days. We'll see how crazy everything else gets, but fingers crossed, and maybe, just maybe, I might have time to get up to a good speed with the rest of Assimil, but right now there's just so much else going on that Assimil is hardly a priority. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 24 August 2009 at 11:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5911 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 77 of 244 25 August 2009 at 5:54pm | IP Logged |
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Translated another text into Italian today, and it turns out that yes, as I suspected, I am doing this partly from memory alone. Both a good thing and very uncool at the same time - remembering phrases or parts of sentences that I can be fairly sure are correct could be quite useful, but I want to be able to produce them accurately too, not just cough them up because I picked them up from some random text (though I would of course rather do that than mess up entirely). I do understand the grammar of them, but this way I can't be 100% sure I would be able to come up with the correct way of saying things on my own without doing any work beforehand, and if I didn't remember these phrases. I'm not really sure what to do about it, whether I should leave more days between each thing I go, or change things around in some other way to stop me from writing based on memory too much. If anyone has any thoughts on how to fix it, please do share :-)
Going to translate a different text into English today, one with a not insignificant amount of unfamiliar (but very cool) vocabulary. That's OK though, I usually find that it takes me until day 4 to really remember all the vocabulary reasonably well, which is part of the reasoning behind why I'm spreading this whole thing out over several days. It lets me see things several times and review them, as well as using a progression from unfamiliarity to production that so far has worked quite well. My recall of what I've done so far wouldn't be perfect if I tested it because I haven't reviewed my older texts yet, but I'll deal with that soon - I'll probably review after I finish text 15 (the last of the ones I have on my list so far). But so far I'm happy with my level of recall, and confident that with some reviewing (which I knew would be necessary anyway) most things will stick. Probably not everything, but I'd be surprised if my recall wasn't at least passable after doing this. More on that later, I guess, once I know the outcome of all this in the long run. The word count's looking a tad less awful than before though. But the more texts I do the more I'm reminded that the whole system is inherently imperfect - not that it matters all that much, but there are some issues with it. It's obviously going to include a lot of words that strictly speaking shouldn't be there, like names and place names. Not much that could be done about it without more work than it's worth. The most major problem with it is that it counts every word as one item, it doesn't separate things into lexemes, so every form of a verb I encounter will be counted once, your average adjective might be counted as 4 different words if I see them all, and so on. Sei (you are) and sei (6) will be counted as one word. Numbers, especially large ones, usually show up as such, and not in their complete form, and so the counter won't include any of those. It's realistically possible that I could do 100 texts without ever encountering words like 'voi', but not knowing these would be ridiculous. Idioms will inevitably be taken apart into their individual components and lumped together with the rest of the occurences of the same word, but the unrealistically high number of words because of the lexeme issue might make up for this problem, it's possible they might balance each other out (but I'll never know if they do). Hopefully everything that shouldn't be there will more or less make up for everything that isn't - it's not like the number is really going to be used for anything than my own progress measurement, so I don't mind its flaws as long as I know about them. It helps keep me going with the texts, so it's definitely worthwhile. I'm hoping the flaws will matter gradually less, because as I go on I will encounter gradually more complex things, the kinds of verbs you might only see a couple of times even if you do a ridiculous number of texts, and maybe only in one or a few different forms. Then gradually the words that come up all the time will already be accounted for, and the new stuff will matter more and account for a greater amount of the new vocabulary that adds to the total. Eventually the amount of new words a text adds to the word count will be more or less equal to the number of words I use in my wordlist for that text, and from that point onwards it will have more meaning to carry on doing it. If I had the inclination, I could devise a system that would deal with all the problems with this, but it doesn't matter. Right now I'm mostly using it for motivation purposes anyway, I need to SEE change to count it as such - you'd be surprised how big a difference it makes, for someone like me who's motivated by tangible results. If the results of something I do can't be measured and clearly seen, there's no guarantee I'll be willing to work for them, even if the expected outcome sounds appealing (I'm weird that way), so my current system serves me well, no matter how flawed it is, because at least it gives me an indication of where I'm at, and I can see improvement in terms that aren't as wishy-washy as 'better than before'. In terms of the actual numbers, it seems banal and disappointing at first, and is, but I'll carry on doing it until it becomes meaningful. A while back I read a thread on this forum that linked people to a test to estimate their vocabulary in English and I had mine estimated at just over 13 000 (is that high or low? hmm), so I guess that's a nice not-particularly-round and rather arbitrary number to aim for with my Italian as well. I'm not concerned with numbers though, if fluency depended on number of words then yes I would be, but it's only a tool to use as part of getting to where I want to be and seeing some changes in one aspect of my learning. In terms of vocabulary I'm more concerned with some major rather basic vocabulary gaps that I'm starting to see, things that simply haven't come up so far. I'm sure there are plenty of common nouns and verbs I haven't encountered yet, I can think of a few, so I think I have some cleaning up to do. Or I might just leave these things for later when I've had more chances to see them in my texts, and just hope I don't embarrass myself while I wait for them to come up. Many of the words that are missing are ones that are pretty basic but don't necessarily show up at the top of frequency lists, but ones you'd feel silly not knowing. But I'm OK with the gaping holes for now, as long as they're eventually filled in, though I might have a look for the most ridiculous ones and just fix it manually. Well that's enough essay-writing for today I think... Ciao :-) Liz 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5911 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 78 of 244 26 August 2009 at 12:28am | IP Logged |
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OK I'm just going to put this in writing here, so I can't take it back afterwards: After Italian I'm going to undo the years of neglect my Spanish and Catalan have been subjected to, and revive them both to get back to a comfortable level and improve them from there. (I would currently be functional in both if I needed to - though I would want a few days of review before using either, as I'm a bit rusty and now almost completely Italianified...)
Not talking about some epic quest for native fluency as with Italian, they just need some dusting off. Still undecided about what this means for Greek and/or Estonian, but I've managed 3 very different languages before and can do it again if I need/want to. To be continued. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 26 August 2009 at 12:45am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Dodo Tetraglot Newbie Italy Joined 5572 days ago 1 posts - 2 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Mandarin | Message 79 of 244 26 August 2009 at 12:45am | IP Logged |
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Hi,
I just read some pages of your interesting Italian experience. I like learning new languages, but also I like trying to solve problems in my mother tongue (Italian; region: Emilia-Romagna). If you have any doubts (of phonetical, grammatical, semantical, or etymological nature) you would like to submit to an Italian speaking person, please feel free to ask me (hopfully I'll be able to answer). In any way, I think It is challenging trying to solve problems to foreigners in your own language, because it helps getting deeper into it. Edited by Dodo on 26 August 2009 at 2:42am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5911 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 80 of 244 26 August 2009 at 1:29pm | IP Logged |
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Thank you Dodo, I appreciate it :-) I'm sure some rather lengthy Italian rants (littered with mistakes more likely than not) will be making a guest appearance here soon, so I would really appreciate any corrections, from you or anyone else reading this. And I agree with you that teaching others can give us a deeper understanding of our own language, I've definitely found that to be the case when teaching Norwegian.
Just did a test to estimate my level of Italian according to that part-helpful-part-useless European framework thing. 30 questions, I got a few of them wrong partly because of vocabulary, I was unsure about a couple of them, and I answered one wrong where I knew the right answer (epic fail). It put me at B2. What the...? I don't think I'm a B2. Actually, I could well be - I have no idea if I'm a rookie B2er or if I'm still lounging around the shallow end of A2. Which brings me back to my point about uselessness. Maybe I just suck at evaluating myself... Anyway, the test didn't really test all that much, some basic parts of grammar and some genders and whatnot, so whatever. It would be interesting to see what result I would get from a more advanced assessment test. If anyone knows of any such test (a free one that is, since I'm a dirt poor student mooching off the government), give me a shout. Just did corrections for another text, don't really feel up to anything more than that just yet as I'm still recovering from having my world turned upside down this morning from a lecture in which biochemistry was both inspiring and downright fun. Just when you think you have life all figured out, it goes and rearranges itself to prove you wrong... Anyway the text went well I suppose, but there are still some issues with prepositions to sort out, and the same problems with forgetting to join words with an apostrophe when I'm supposed to. I seem to have stopped messing up with 'gli', I would always tend to forget to use it and just write 'i' instead, so I'll take this as a sign that doing texts like this is actually going to allow me to sort out these issues if I just continue doing it. If a few more texts doesn't take care of the apostrophe problem then I'll have to think of something more drastic to do to fix it - I don't know what that would be, but I've already sorted it out with some things so hopefully it's only a matter of time and more practice before I can do it right every time. I'll start another text today, I have 5 texts left that I haven't started yet and one that I will translate into Italian tomorrow, so fingers crossed we'll see some progress by the time I'm done with text 15. After being scolded by several people yesterday over my writing-from-memory comment in my main post yesterday, I take it back. Officially, anyway. I still see a problem with it, but oh well. Anywho, I'm also back to slightly less literal translations, cause I can do them faster now. I was never any good at doing fast translations, not even between Norwegian and English, but now that I can do it without slowing myself down I'd rather try to trip myself up and see if I can produce the intended meaning in its proper form rather than helping myself to see things. I figure that can be just as beneficial at this point, as long as it doesn't take too long. I'm still leaving the things that are trickier to translate, and I've started using a couple of words in Norwegian here and there. My slang-and-swearwords book arrived in the mail today and it's already cleared up a few things, not really swearwords as such (though if you should ever need a user manual, this is the one) but just exclamations that I've been wondering about. It has some really interesting cultural notes too, like how an Italian founded the Slow Food movement in response to the rise of fast food chains internationally. I'll probably dig out my old plastic post-it things to put on the pages that are most useful (and least offensive) and then just have a look if I encounter something idiomatic - though I really should get a separate idioms dictionary for that. Recommendations? Lastly, could somebody please clarify for me whether someone in my situation should ever use 'col' (con + il)? I know we have a couple of things in Norwegian that no foreigner could ever get away with using unless they were at native-level fluency (and sometimes not even then), so is this one of those things that I should just acknowledge and then avoid using myself? Liz Edited by Lizzern on 26 August 2009 at 1:47pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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