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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 113 of 244 03 September 2009 at 9:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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:-)
Started my second to last text (for now) today, there were some interesting new words and idioms there, and more went in my wordlist than I expected considering how well I could understand the gist of the text - but still nowhere near as many words as you'd think from looking at the increase in my word count. Interesting text anyway. Also translated the oldest remaining text into Italian and did the corrections - I don't usually do this on the same day but wanted to get it done. Some new structures that were interesting to have a closer look at, I made some unfortunate spelling mistakes (doh!), and the rest of the mistakes were things that I couldn't have known from the translation. The good thing is I didn't remember them from reading the text a few days ago. And I got some of those things right too, based on the non-literal translation, so there's light at the end of the tunnel. In general things are going better, it's been great practice. Current word count (see page 6): 2792 unique words, based on 14 texts. I've considered going over an alphabetised list after I'm done with my 15 texts and removing obvious duplicates, names and so on, but the list is 61 pages long in Word, and I have other much more important things I'd rather spend that time on, so I'm not gonna go ahead with it. It's not that important to me to have an accurate number, and it's not going to get used for anything, so I'll just leave the number as it is, knowing that it's not a precise measurement at all but at least a useful indication of where I'm at. It's likely that I know the equivalent number of words from elsewhere, they just haven't been counted, so I'm not too fussed about it. But at least I know that if I had the time and the will, I could get a more accurate number from compiling lists in this way and correcting the list afterwards. It's possible it wouldn't even take that long, I just can't be jacked. I have some minor wordlist work for another text that I should get around to today, it's day 3 for that text so it's not like it would take long to just go over the list and see if I can produce the words in Italian, but the rest of the day is looking rather busy so if I can't get around to it today then I'll leave it for tomorrow. Liz 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5926 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 114 of 244 04 September 2009 at 6:16am | IP Logged | ||
It looks like you're making great progress with Italian. I've been reading the posts I missed from the last few weeks and I'm almost tempted to change my study plan for next year and learn Italian rather than German. I probably won't change my plan though, as I have to finally say no to wanderlust. That just means I'll tentatively plan to learn Italian in 2011. Edited by mick33 on 23 September 2009 at 8:57pm 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 115 of 244 04 September 2009 at 3:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks for the comment Mick, I'm sure you'll find a way to make things work for Sami if you decide you want to go ahead with learning it. Your profile says you're studying Swedish, so you should be able to learn Sami through Swedish once you know it well enough to understand what's going on. There are probably Swedish base teaching materials available online (I don't know the situation in the north of Sweden but I think it's spoken in some places). I know there's stuff available online in Norwegian, which any Swedish speaker will have a decent grasp of - written Norwegian is rarely a problem for Swedes, there are often literal equivalents of idioms in the different languages, and false friends are rare. (Though there are some fun ones - I once heard a Swede refer to it as 'frekt' (sp?) = rude that the medical students in my year will get to see the completion of our new hospital by the time we graduate. What he meant to say was 'cool'...)
Essay time, maccas, so get your popcorn ready and sit back - or go do something more entertaining... Either way, this is your cue. In news vaguely related to Italian (sort of! give me a second, I'm getting there), I only recently discovered the discussion on synesthesia (thread here, Wikipedia article here), which was bumped the other day. So that's what it's called...! The discussion, and the experiences shared by other people, really helped put words to why some things work the way they do for me, I've always had a hard time describing it so it's good to hear it described by others too, even though I don't experience the exact same things as certain people do and certainly not in such clear detail. From looking at the Wikipedia article I guess I have a few different kinds, for different things. I remember telling someone what the calendar year looks like to me and getting kind of a weird look back, so I never really tried to talk to people about it much. (As an example of what I mean, as one of the only things I can actually describe: The year is a round flat disk with an unclear centre, the visual bends in certain ways at certain points, and the weeks around the date we're currently at enlarge to a degree, each month has a different colour which changes as you move through it, and weekends differ from weekdays and the days are separated from each other by a clear line that is thicker around important dates and between any two months.) For completeness, and to at least have a good go at not repeating myself, here's what I wrote: "I'm glad this got bumped, the synesthesia discussion was an interesting read. I thought I was the only one. I have it too, to a degree, though it's not as clear as it is for some people here, and the visual image of the concept is mixed with the associations I make with the word itself. I couldn't possibly describe what things look like to me, but they do have a certain look, even abstract concepts do, and things like "If I were you", which was brought up earlier in the thread as something you can't easily visualise, is something that has a clear representation in my mind, which I couldn't put into words to explain to other people. Every word will come to have its own representation, which is why I don't need to connect it to something in another language to really know it, I just need to get familiar with it enough that the meaning connects to the word properly, and then it sticks. But it has nothing to do with the letters that make up the word, I see it as one unit, that has a visual 'reality' to it that I can use in my mind. The more I use a language the less it comes up when I speak/read it, but it's always an underlying feeling. I'm not aware of using it all that much for language learning (though come to think of it, I probably should, I just hadn't made the connection) but I use it a lot in my studies, though maybe not overtly so. But it was really interesting to read about people's experiences with this, some of you guys are spectacularly gifted." I think this takes part of the blame for why I sometimes have a hard time establishing a proper connection between words in different languages and translating even between languages I speak well, because to me they're like different realities that happen to have an equivalent in writing or in the spoken language, not one concept that's the same but expressed in different ways from one language to the next. I'm not sure that makes sense, but even if the meaning is identical then nevertheless each word can work differently in my mind. Some people I know consider me to be a walking dictionary of English, but I don't usually do well at defining what this and that means, even if I know the precise meaning. A house expressed in one language is different than the same house labelled in another, and sometimes, though not in basic examples like houses, I find it hard to connect one to the other, because I have different associations with each one. It can be any combination of an image, a sound or a phrase, a movement, a size, a feeling, a person, anything, and it's usually quite vague. Unfortunately I can rarely describe exactly what something 'is' to me, I just know it and it's just there for no reason. Sometimes I can develop these internal representations of quite detailed concepts, and frequently find that I can remember exactly what a person said (my combined perception of it), but I have no idea what words they used, or even what language they were speaking at the time (though other times I can remember whole conversations perfectly, with every detail of vocabulary and pitch). I can't control any of it. I've mentioned earlier in this log that using an English (or, if necessary, Norwegian) translation for the middle column really doesn't feel that natural to me, and that I wish I could somehow imprint the 'feeling' of the Italian word on the page and use that instead of the translation. Unfortunately for me, I tend to miss words not because I don't have any associations for the Italian word, but because by using translations I end up trying to produce the Italian based on an entirely different concept that I perceive as something else because it's not the same thing in English as it is in Italian. There doesn't have to be any connection between two closely related or identical words in two different languages, sometimes even if they have a near-identical structure. I suppose it explains why I'm so L2-oriented and prefer to learn things in isolation in L2 rather than connecting it to something in L1 - the connections don't necessarily work out right anyway, even if they're sensible enough. So I want to try to figure out a way that I can use this ability/curse/whatever in my studies to learn things better, to hopefully counteract the translation problem entirely. I've been using sample sentences in all my wordlists so far, so one option is to continue with that but instead of writing out a translation, actually leaving the word I'm learning blank to see if the associations from the rest of the sentence can help me bring out the word that was left blank (though obviously still looking things up to get a feel for the meaning in the first place, to create the right Italian-only connection between the meaning and its representation). It might work because of how I can sometimes have a combined perception of a phrase without necessarily paying attention to the details. I suppose I could try hyperliteral translations with filling in the blanks, but I might risk bringing in wrong associations then too. I don't know if any of this matters enough that I need to do something about it, it's just kind of a fun thing to experiment with to see how it works, and to see if I can find a more efficient way of teaching myself by trying this out. I'll continue with 'the old way' with the texts I've already started, and work something out for later. Thoughts, anyone? Feel free to post with any comments :-) Liz Edited by Lizzern on 04 September 2009 at 7:05pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5926 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 116 of 244 04 September 2009 at 9:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'll definitely look more into learning Saami through Swedish and/or Norwegian. Now, about synesthesia and also forming connectins between ideas or concepts and words, this is very interesting; I don't think I have synesthesia, and I never knew that it had anything to do with words but I did read something about a teenage boy who could associate musical notes with different colors. I can make a few connections between words and ideas when thinking in Afrikaans without always instantly thinking "Now what would that be in English?" though I still can't write or say much, which is a little embarassing given the amount of time I've been learning Afrikaans. Spanish causes me a few problems; I don't really want to translate every thought from English into Spanish or vice versa before reading, writing or speaking Spanish but my brain unconsciously translates words anyway, very annoying! I don't know enough Swedish to write or say anthing that isn't gibberish yet but I do see some similarities with Afrikaans based on how words are spelled, and Finnish is slow going because of the lack of Indo-European vocabulary but I can make a few simple connections between ideas and words I just need to get a better grasp of the case endings the one case I always remember is inessiivi (ssa/ssä) which would be fine except that partitiivi (a/ä,ta/tä) is far more useful and more common. For wordlists what I once did for Afrikaans was write the middle column in Spanish (I still use Iversen's original 3-column method) just as a test to see if my goal of learning similar things in each language was actually working well, something I will definitely do again now that I know more Spanish words just so I can hopefully stop unconsciously translating English to Spanish.
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| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5911 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 117 of 244 04 September 2009 at 11:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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I honestly didn't realize at all that the concept-word connection that I naturally do, isn't something that everyone does by default. (I hope people reading this know that I don't think of myself as 'better' than anybody because of all this. Not at all. Just so that's clear...) Looking back I've probably given some useless advice on this forum, because I just assume everyone else connects one and the other in some way that doesn't bring in L1. Not necessarily my way of course, the odds that anyone makes the exact same kind of association with the same word is probably slim to none, but I just figured we all have our own ways of doing this, forming some sort of structure or image in our minds that encapsulates the meaning of the word we're learning. If I have to translate anything, it just shows me that I'm at an extremely basic level of understanding of the word I'm dealing with, so basic that I don't really have any perception of it at all yet - in that situation I need to bring myself to the level where I have a strong enough perception of the word that I can leave behind the translation that forms the basis of my understanding of it.
Got some wordlist work done today, but that's about it. Kind of in a slump right now as far as Italian goes, because I've been tired these last few days and generally not feeling well, so the level of everything just naturally drops. Not necessarily a bad thing, overall, because I do need to rest more these days for some reason. I'm hoping to bring myself back to my previous level of momentum over the weekend, I'll start my last text tomorrow so by the middle of next week I'll start reviewing, as well as doing a few other things that have really only been in the pre-planning stages so far. More on that later. But for now I'll say that at this point there are 3 things I need in Italian: Dante, Tolkien, Shakespeare. Yes, I know that only one of those wrote in Italian (and is probably beyond my level anyways haha FAIL), and that anything I can get by the other two will be a translation. But I'm not a bigtime reader like some people, and I don't care much for fiction, but these three interest me, so it's better to read the Italian translations of stuff I care to read than to start looking for random stuff that I wouldn't even read in English if I had any choice in the matter. Now I know many of you must be thinking about all the great literature I'm missing out on, and I'm sure there are a great deal of talented Italian writers that would be worth reading for people who are so inclined. But the thing is, I've tried to care about those things, I've tried to read the books in other languages that people love so much, and I just can't find it in me to care. I don't know why, but that's how it is. Random: I miss Greek. Just a little, but still. I'll probably go back to it after Italian, it would be quite useful to me, and I wasn't that far from knowing enough to be actively conversational anyway. It's a shame that I've let so many languages drop from intermediate-ish to next to nothing - I blame wanderlust and lack of time (and in some cases, inclination) to keep up with the languages I've already studied. I might try to revive a couple of them after I'm 'done' with Italian. Whatever that means... 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 118 of 244 05 September 2009 at 10:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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Finished text 13 today (translation and final corrections), and found that there are still words I miss when I do my wordlist (how do I still manage to do that? every time?), and I misspelled some words that I actually remembered correctly but then overintellectualised and wrote down wrong. Hoorah. In terms of doing corrections, it helps to write over the whole word even if I was only one letter off, to practice writing it out correctly (on the assumption that the act of writing it helps me remember) and so that the correct way of writing things is clearly seen after I'm done from just a quick glance at the page. I'm not too concerned about what I did wrong and knowing what that was if I go over this again later, what's important is that I get them right from continuing to have a good go at it and having mistakes corrected, and I don't want to inadvertently reinforce a mistake by seeing it again (though I doubt there's much of a risk of that happening).
2 texts to go, then. It seems I'm chronically behind schedule these days, so I'm not where I need to be with my second-to-last text, which I did the wordlist for 2 days ago. Oh well - I don't really feel ill anymore so I might try for a burst of productivity (for Italian as well as other things that need to be done) tomorrow so that I get these things done and can move on to something else. Time for a bit of a change, I think... I guess September isn't going to be vocabulary month after all. I might do something else and then get back into the vocabulary-intensive stuff again in November or something, but first there are other things I need/want to do. I'm probably not gonna do that many texts in a row again, and I certainly couldn't do them at this rate all the time without reaching some sort of burnout scenario. It's only one of many techniques and not one I would want to use exclusively for any length of time. I've been reading and listening to other things while I've been working with these texts of course (but somehow the text-related stuff gets reported on more) but I'm looking forward to shifting my focus away from text work for a bit. Anyway, I did the wordlist for my last text today. This will be the last roundabout translation I do for a while. I wanted to finish on a high note, but I left the most complicated text for last and it turns out I don't actually care about the content anymore, at least not enough for repeat reading (you do obviously end up seeing the same content several times when doing translations like this). The text had some interesting words in it, but overall it wasn't all that interesting - I should've read it more carefully the first time, because at first glance it looked like it would at the very least be educational (and the topic, in general, does interest me), but on closer reading... Meh. Not least because I profoundly disagree with the point the writer was making. Anyway, unimportant at this point - I'll finish the text to learn the vocabulary, thankfully it's not as long as it looked. It actually had a few words that were not in WordReference, Oxford Paravia, or De Mauro, which was surprising - so in case any of you were wondering, Wiktionary is absolutely stellar in these cases and sometimes finds things that aren't in any of my other ones. It probably means these words aren't that important, but I included them anyway, hopefully they'll stick in my passive vocabulary at least, after a bit more reviewing. So what have I been reading about anyway, you ask? Looking back, there's more of a pattern here than I thought, and some of my text choices (a random selection of the ones that were available and seemed most appropriate length-wise) really line up well with some of my interests. To give you a few highlights, in no particular order, my texts have touched on: crowded trains, IKEA, ancient history, the Da Vinci Code, swine flu, thesis-writing, ridiculously rich people, holidays and how to justify not going anywhere, Italian district politics, movies, oddly named food items, Greek gods, uncooperative hardware, Dante, and ways to slack off for an entire day. Good times, I have to say. Current word count (see page 6): 3048 unique words, based on 15 texts. Yet again, there weren't as many new words as you'd think from looking at the difference in my word count. Rather surprisingly, the number of new words has been quite stable throughout the process, I've added maybe 40 new words per text on average, but never more than around 60, which is a good number, and I didn't even really do anything to calculate it out, except occasionally line them up according to how much each text on the list would add to the word count. I guess when I start doing texts again I'll continue to try to find ones that add about 200 new words to the word count, that seems to be the magic number that gives me 40 new wordlist items... Go figure. The next step will be to add Assimil to the count, which I'll probably finish before I start doing more of my own texts. I wonder how big a difference it will make to my word count. Random: Man I love Portuguese. And Hebrew, and Hungarian. All three of them have been beautifully mean to me over the last few days, and now I'm as undecided as ever about what I'll do after Italian. If any of you have been following my epic confusion win, detailed here and there in this log - do you see my problem here? How am I ever going to decide? I have 5+ languages fighting for supremacy at this point, it's a good thing I don't have to make any firm decisions yet, but as you can see, there's definitely a reason why I used to be a bigtime language-hopper, and why I wish I had time for more than just a couple. (Alas...) I've thought about maybe doing a revival log once I've reached a good level with Italian, and just trying to bring some of my 'dead' languages (doubly so in some cases. har har) back to life. Maybe Greek (modern and ancient) to begin with, and I don't know what else. But we'll deal with that problem when we get there. And I am now referring to myself in the plural, so I'm gonna take that as a sign that it's time for me to stop writing. Buonanotte a tutti. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 05 September 2009 at 10:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| AlejandroMendoz Newbie Canada Joined 5627 days ago 24 posts - 24 votes Studies: French, English* | Message 119 of 244 05 September 2009 at 11:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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So, these texts are just random articles from Newspapers and Wikipedia, correct?
PS. Great Thread you got going here. 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 120 of 244 06 September 2009 at 2:07am | IP Logged | ||
Hey Liz, I do, in fact, see your problem. In fact, I have the same problem. Which is why I am currently studying so many languages. I would really love to do with one of my languages what you're doing with Italian, that is, focus on it alone for at least a year and it alone, but I can't for some reason. Anyways, to solve your problem, my suggestion is that you compile a list of the top 3-5 languages you are considering for after Italian. I think you said these are Greek, Estonian, Portuguese (BTW, are you thinking of learning European or Brazilian Portuguese), Hungarian, and Hebrew. So, I have two suggestions for once you have done that. My first suggestion is to begin studying them all, and see which one(s) stand out to you particularly as ones you want to continue with. Continue with those and then come back to the rest later on. Second suggestion: make a list of pros and cons for each language. Like things you enjoy (or just good things in general) and dislike about each, and see which language seems to have the most pros and least cons. Okay, there are now more than two suggestions. Third suggestion: Randomly, or nearly randomly... Games like ini-mini-myni-mo work nicely. Or you could hold a poll on this forum: Which language should Lizzern learn after Italian? A. Greek B. Estonian C. Portuguese D. Hungarian E. Hebrew Anyways, good luck. All of them sound pretty cool. You should tell me about Estonian, Hungarian, and Hebrew; I really don't know very much about them. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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