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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5851 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 121 of 244 06 September 2009 at 11:53am | IP Logged | |||||
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@Alejandro, thanks for the comment :-) I've been using some texts from Personalità confusa, and yeah, newspaper stuff. Incidentally the kinda boring last one came from a newspaper. Personalità confusa has been quite useful (not to mention fun to read), he uses quite a wide vocabulary - if you count the words on the front page there are over 2000 unique words there (I may have used one or two of them, but no, the IKEA-related text I was referring to is not the one on the front page). When I start doing texts again I'll probably go straight to the things that interest me most, in Wikipedia or elsewhere, I have some books I'm interested in reading, so I'll probably be less random about the whole thing next time.
Alrighty then, going off topic now, so if you're only reading this for the Italian stuff, now is your time to go and do something else, because it's not going to come up much in the rest of this post. Seriously, go. @Philip, You sound like you're doing awesome in all your languages, so it's less likely that you'll realize what I did, which is that I could either become really good at one language at a time or I could remain mediocre in all of them for a very very long time, and that for that reason alone it makes sense to do one at a time - and if I want to do another then another then another after that, then that's fine, but I need to get to a good level in each before I move onto the next one. I'm 23 now and this is my first time focusing on one language exclusively for any length of time... I still want to learn all my other ones (though that doesn't necessarily mean I will, circumstances can and look like they might change in such a way that time will be more of an issue than it is now) but when I started Italian I decided that from then on I would to stick with just one until I reach a good level. It's possible I might decide to do two languages at the same time, but the 'get good at this before moving on' requirement still applies. But I like your idea about starting all of them and seeing which ones I'm most interested in, and it's something I've considered doing. Your list looks about right. It would be European Portuguese. I actually already have some books... Had concrete plans about learning it a while back (pre-Italian) but it kinda never happened, and then Italian went and stole the show. Hungarian and Estonian - I don't know why I have such an appreciation for the Finno-Ugric group, but I love their sound, I love their different-ness, and I love their grammar (that is, Hungarian grammar, I've never actually studied Estonian), grammatically Hungarian does some wild things that would've never occurred to me at all as even remote possibilities, but there you have it, that's how they do things and it's awesome. With Greek and Hebrew there's the added issue of ancient vs modern. I took courses in ancient Greek and biblical Hebrew (and Latin as well) as electives for my first university degree, and some stuff seriously gets lost in translation with the texts we've studied, so I enjoyed getting a bit more of the full picture of what was happening. It would be worthwhile to get to that point again. An Israeli I know told me that it would be better to go for modern Hebrew because I would mostly be able to understand those texts anyway, and I believe him of course, but (almost) all I've done so far has been biblical Hebrew, so that's where the latent groundwork lies. The tendency for me these days is to want to go for languages I could use, so I would probably end up with modern Hebrew, cross my fingers that it would let me revive what I already knew and read the same texts, while still leaving the door to practical use of the language wide open. Both Hebrew and Hungarian are languages that I just have an irrational love for, I don't know why, and sometimes I can look at them and wonder what it is about them that I find so appealing, but I just can't help it. They're adorable to me. Same with Estonian. And Portuguese... As far as Greek goes: I've studied both modern and ancient Greek to upper beginner/intermediate-ish level and have had some use for both. No doubt Greek would be the most sensible language to learn based on usefulness, but I don't love Greek like I do Hungarian and Hebrew - it's the same thing as with Spanish, I merely like it, a lot, but I'm prone to getting tired of it. Anyway with Greek there's the pretty major distinction between 'what my friends speak' and 'the stuff in the ancient books' and ideally I would like to know both. Mutual intelligibility isn't particularly high - I was at Delphi with some native Greek friends once and one of them said she couldn't understand the text and asked if I could read it - unfortunately I had forgotten a lot of it by then and couldn't help, but it was a little weird to hear a native speaker say that, for some reason I just figured they would be able to understand it just fine. Obviously they understand a lot, but not everything. I might try the pros and cons thing, but since I seem to be very much irrational when it comes to what languages I study, I'm not sure if my brain would really care what the pros and cons are, lol. But so far it looks like modern Greek is the obvious choice, possibly with ancient Greek alongside, and to avoid getting bored of Greek in the long run (it's happened before) it should probably be supplemented by something I have a deeper interest in. Which would be any of the other 4... :-) Liz Edited by Lizzern on 06 September 2009 at 11:59am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5851 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 122 of 244 07 September 2009 at 12:26am | IP Logged | |||||
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Not the best day in terms of Italian, but got a lot of other things done, which was good (and more important). Did a translation and had a look at the other remaining wordlist, but that's about it. I'm hoping to finish the last text by Wednesday, which should be doable, especially because I have tomorrow off. Oh, I did read a couple of things though, here and there. An awful lot of it was either in text speak (I can never remember what that's called but it has a name I'm sure) or IN CAPITAL LETTERS because some people apparently missed the part about how in the online setting that actually means shouting. Useful though I guess, and saw some new ways of putting sentences together that I hadn't seen before, so that was kinda interesting.
Short post today - weird, I know, but it does happen. Liz 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| densou Senior Member Italy foto.webalice.it/denRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6074 days ago 120 posts - 121 votes Speaks: Italian* | Message 123 of 244 07 September 2009 at 12:59am | IP Logged | |||||
Red, White and Green seem to be her true love, so I'd suggest to pick up magyar then Mexican Spanish (or how it's called, dunno) :P 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6084 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 124 of 244 07 September 2009 at 1:47am | IP Logged | |||||
Haha, that's clever. ;) Edited by ellasevia on 07 September 2009 at 11:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5851 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 125 of 244 07 September 2009 at 11:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I could tweak that theory to work in support of Greek, Finnish and Estonian together :-) Or maybe I should take up Farsi next, hmm? Let's not go there. Someone on this forum described Farsi as cute, as in two kittens and a bunny playing cute, and I'm inclined to agree, but as much as I love both kittens and bunnies... Maybe in my late 40s, how about that.
Well now. Today has mostly been spent on other tasks and getting sidetracked from those other tasks by some really cool neuroscience articles. (Not a hint of sarcasm there. Seriously.) Some days are going to turn out like that, fact of life. And that's ok. I did read some cultural notes in the Guardian phrasebooks I got this summer, and had a peek at some of the vocabulary and conversations. An interesting read if you happen to have them. If you ever find yourself in the situation of needing to bribe your Tuscan neighbour into kindly removing his rooster from under your bedroom window by offering him and his family copious amounts of wine, this has everything you need. Last experiments with the wordlists for now: With my last text I'm going to do the English > Italian wordlist on the same day as the translation into English. (That'll be tomorrow.) Who knows, maybe that'll work better. Going to try it out, if for no other reason than wanting to shorten my work with this text by a day. With my second-to-last text, well I just finished the 2nd translation on the same day as doing the English > Italian wordlist. And then did the corrections. So I guess that text is done then... I got the chance to test out some assumptions/generalizations about spelling no-nos when I could only half-remember how a word was spelled, which was kinda fun, and useful to see whether I was right or wrong. (In some cases I got it wrong - which is the most useful thing of all.) Other than that, feminine words that end in -e in the singular and in -i in the plural still trip me up more often than not. The singular looks like a plural and the plural looks masculine! I'll get it consistently right eventually... Other aspects of grammar are working themselves out nicely, and other mistakes, well at least I can spot them before I write them down the first time, which is a step in the right direction from writing them down wrong and then correcting them. The nice thing about all these issues, though, is that I'm getting these things right more and more often, so me commenting on them doesn't mean I make mistakes all the time. Less than before, certainly - I still make mistakes and I haven't translated a single text back without needing to make several corrections, but things are moving in the right direction. I remembered a lot of the text though - so spacing it out more is A Good Thing. I'll keep that in mind for when I start up again, but I'll finish up my last text in 2 days instead of 4. Partly because the Norwegian parliamentary elections are just around the corner and I need to decide who to vote for, so I'm all politic'ed out at the moment, and a little put off by the line of argument I unfortunately ended up tackling in my very last text. Bummer. Staf sent me a poem though so I might do that afterwards, just to finish this round with something positive :-) Grazie Staf! Also realized that I need to hear every word in my head before I know it properly, not good enough to just look at the spelling. The best thing is to say it out loud while looking at it (I do this looking at the word as a whole, not individual letters), with the meaning in mind (visualising it if possible), that way the correct association seems to arise naturally. It feels like I'm missing part of the picture if I only read/write it without hearing/saying it, or the other way around, even though the spelling is delightfully regular. This doesn't mean I have issues transferring a word from one to the other, not at all - it just means that to own the word completely without having doubts about its form I need both kinds of input. I don't know why that is, it's quite easy to go from one to the other, but it helps to get a feel for the word in both ways and it's much less likely that I'll forget it if I do it that way. Again with the napoletano - Liz you need to STOP. Stop before you hurt yourself. One last thing - loving the Italian-Medicalese connections. And Italian is so much more fun than Latin anyway, so I'm calling that a win on both fronts. Yay. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 07 September 2009 at 11:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5851 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 126 of 244 08 September 2009 at 4:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This morning I got the crazy/stupid idea to have a look at frequency lists and trying to match these up with my current word list to see what I might be missing. A combination of curiosity and temporary insanity, I suppose. Like everything we do, stupid or otherwise, "it seemed like a good idea at the time". Anyway, in short - too much work. Soooo not worth it. I did it for a 1000-word list, by copying all my texts into the counter, having them counted, then copying them back into the input box twice so they would all appear twice (my counter makes a list of unique words and the number of occurences for each one), then pasting in the frequency list, so that any words that were in the frequency list but not in any of my texts would appear once. Then took the list of one-time occurences and sorted them alphabetically and deleted obvious duplicates, among other things combining verb forms and their derivatives into one, same with singulars and plurals of course, and removing English words, names, and place names. Then alphabetized my text-based wordlist and went over my shortlist of possible new words removing the words that were in both lists in some form. That left me with 38 words, most of which I already know well. The rest was either military vocabulary or words that didn't exist (how does that work, frequency list people? hmm?). So nothing new came of it. Win, I guess? But I didn't expect to find anything too dramatic in a 1000-word list, I'm already past that point.
The 1000-word list didn't take long at all, but I quickly realized that doing the same thing for a 5000-word list would just be a ridiculous waste of my time. I may decide to do what I did for the 1000-word list with a longer frequency list at some point in the future, if I get really, really bored. But since it's extremely unlikely that I'll ever get that bored in my lifetime, I'm just going to leave it at that and not do anything more about it, and just accept my number as it is. The only conclusion from all this is that a whole heck of a lot of words repeat themselves in non-lexeme frequency lists. Stop the press... Anyway, I think I can measure my vocabulary knowledge reasonably well based on understanding of texts and whatnot. I still have a long way to go and a lot of vocabulary to learn, I know that much. I also know that I already know a lot, and have a good basis for the miles ahead. Also got my idioms dictionaries today and they all look good in their own way. I'm glad they're not all the same style. I should be pretty well covered at this point, the WordReference forum is a good reference too and relevant threads show up in regular dictionary searches below the dictionary entry (which frequently contains important idioms anyway) so I've been doing some serious lurking since I got started with Italian. I think the dictionary is a work in progress too, it's already quite good (though missing a not insignificant number of words despite its high number of entries) so if they're planning to keep improving it then it's going to morph into a spectacularly good resource, but in many ways it already is. Anyway, idioms dictionaries, several of them make very extensive use of example sentences, which would be fun to use for wordlists. So I might do that... Later. Now I'm off to be tortured at the hands of a person in scrubs. Hopefully I can squeeze in some actual study later before an evening-long meeting, if so then you'll probably hear about it here I guess. Have a good day everyone. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 08 September 2009 at 4:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5851 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 127 of 244 09 September 2009 at 11:41am | IP Logged | |||||
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So I did half of the translation of my last text yesterday, but then realized I was bored with it. And since it's a requirement that it has to be fun all the time, I stopped. Just finished the rest of the translation this morning, didn't have a problem with it today but that might just be because I'm well-rested and only had to do half of it. I am now past boredom and onto amusement, because the writer actually went and contradicted himself beautifully in the conclusion of his letter. I'm quite sure he hasn't realized it yet.
Anyway when I wrote my translation there were a couple of words that I understood just fine but wanted to look up because, in keeping with tradition, I missed them when I wrote my wordlist. I don't know how I still manage to do that... Also did the English > Italian wordlist today, like I said I would, to see what happens if I do them on the same day. Recall was, not surprisingly, fairly unproblematic - which is nice, but overall unhelpful, so I'll keep that in mind for later, that I should definitely do them on different days. Anyway, I've kind of changed my mind about taking a break from texts. I'm not going to do them as intensively, but might do one a week while I focus on other things, just to stock up on some new vocabulary in a more concrete way. So I've decided to go with... drumroll please... horoscopes! Weekly horoscopes. I found a link to them and thought I'd have a look, see what a horoscope might look like in Italian and how much I could understand. I tried adding this week's horoscopes to my current word count and it added almost 400 words - good ones, even, some duplicates of course and some names, but other than that, it looks like a promising amount of new words to look into further. And there are new ones every week, so it all works out. I'm going to use them for three reasons: 1) Because I'm semi-interested in horoscopes as a source of entertainment and something people seem to value (the psychology of this is interesting), though I wouldn't go to them for advice myself. But I somehow ended up signing up for a daily one a loooong time ago (I think they were giving away free stuff?) and then couldn't change my registration, so they just keep on flowing in, every day. So I leave them until the end of the day to see if they fit how my day has been. Sometimes, they do. But most of the time they're way off, and that amuses me, so I keep reading them. 2) Because I like the drawings. For some reason I have a certain fondness for starsign illustrations when they are well done, and these are kinda cute. 3) Because I like the astrologer's writing style: "Ti consiglio di frequentare posti come questo nelle prossime settimane, posti dove regna la diversità, dove le categorie non sono ben definite, dove la varietà non è solo il sale della vita ma il suo piatto principale." (Emphasis mine.) This sort of talk tickles me in all the right ways, so I'll carry on reading them. I'm not sure if I'll do a full on roundabout translation for each week, there's a lot of text, so I might just do wordlists with sample sentences. I do think it would be good to experiment with just doing wordlists, it would certainly take less time than doing translations. Also, if I happen to find something I like, over at Personalità confusa or elsewhere, I might do something about it, either the complete 5-day thing or just a wordlist. Don't know if I'll translate text 15 back today or if I'll leave it until tomorrow. It would be nice to get it overwith, to be honest, but I might leave it for tomorrow, so that it doesn't become something negative - can't have that. Once I'm done with it though, I guess I'll need to have a closer look at what else I'm going to be doing over the next few weeks... I have too many ideas and too little time, so I'll need to prioritize, but there are lots of options and I guess some of them are better than others, so we'll see what I end up going with first. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 09 September 2009 at 1:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5851 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 128 of 244 10 September 2009 at 9:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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...And we're done! Done with that weird text, and done with my first round of intensive (ish) text study (those 15 texts just flew right by). I did a little happy dance after I finished writing the translation. OK, not really. But I had some chocolate to celebrate... Which is pretty much the same thing anyway.
I think I've pretty much said everything I wanted to say about how I've gone about things so far, so no need to repeat it all here. I'm still quite sure I want to try to avoid using English translations in my wordlists in the future. The jury is still out on hyperliteral translations, but I think they're worth it in some cases and that sometimes the benefit of using them to reinforce the correct way of expression in Italian outweighs the risk of giving too much away. Overall doing translations into Italian is a very worthwhile thing to do, and does a great job at pointing out my mistakes. I just wish I didn't have to write the English translation first - though it helps to do so, it also means I remember the text better when it comes to writing the Italian text, but I think I can work around that by leaving more time between each part of the process. Now what? Like I mentioned one of these days, I'll continue with at least one text a week, though I probably won't do a full round of 'roundtrip translation' - too much text, so I might just do wordlists. Il Signore degli Anelli and La Divina Commedia are on their way from Italy. I already have Hamlet saved, and will download some more Shakespeare ebooks when I have time to read them. My opera arias book came in the mail today, and looks kinda fun. I'll use these for reading, not for actual study, so looking up the words I need to but other than that just trying to enjoy them throughout, even if I only get the gist of what's going on. Quantity over quality, because I need to read a lot to reinforce things I already know as well as points of grammar, instead of getting bogged down in details of what I still don't understand and need to look up. I should also start using my grammar books for what they're for - though only when I feel like it, because grammar books are generally the dullest thing in the world, and I should only ever read them in bits and pieces here and there when there are specific points I'm curious about. Anything else would bore me, and I just can't allow any association between Italian and boredom. To this day one of my grammar books has only been used as a clipboard type thing, it's even getting a little rough around the corners and looks like it's been used... The other grammar book, well I don't even know where it is at the moment. I think it might be in that pile of books on top of that stack of medical journals... I wonder why I even bought that, but at least it was cheap. And it's time to get back in the swing of things with Assimil! It's been a victim of utter neglect for months now, but I'm sure that reviewing the material would be useful at this point. I'm just going to do the active phase without reading any of the notes I think, but I might change my mind, or just read the notes or review lessons later on, I'm not sure yet. But at this point I'm keen to get through the whole active phase by typing it up like I've been doing so far, so that I have the whole course on my computer and can incorporate it into the word count. I'm curious to see how much it will add to the count - hopefully it won't be that much. I absolutely love my idioms dictionaries and might use some of these for wordlists, or just continue with what I've been doing with them so far: reading-skimming-perusing-laughing and (hopefully) absorbing some of that colourful idiomatic goodness. They're great for reference, and have already cleared up a few things that I've been wondering about forever. I might also try to patch up some of the holes in my vocabulary that might become a problem. If I can fix the most important gaps then that would mean I'm a lot less likely to make an idiot of myself at some point in the future, which would be a good thing to avoid. Hopefully Assimil will help me do that, I know there are things I've forgotten that would definitely be good to know. Another big part of what I need to be focusing on in the coming weeks (and months) is output, both written and spoken. Not the easiest thing for me. I know some people just talk and write uninhibitedly but at this point I'm just not that person (though I wish I was). Whenever I try to write something that other people are going to read I find myself doubting whether I'm right about things I actually know, things I've known for months, things I'm sure about - sometimes pretty basic things. As soon as I try to use them I feel unsure about them for some reason, like I'll end up misusing them or making a mistake in something I should know. Like I don't know how to say even the simplest things. But I need to start outputting before I become one of those people who knows every rule in the book but can't order a cup of coffee (or a chocolate gelato calory bomb). I just feel like there are still so many things I don't know, which is true (though there are of course plenty of things I know how to say, even if I doubt my ability to say them), and I hate speaking like a toddler. Has to be done, but that doesn't mean it's easy. For the spoken side of things I might try shadowing or something similar, as someone on this forum other than the professor recently posted about his/her good results with the technique, so I'll experiment with different techniques. Somebody else on the forum mentioned a two-word game where you use some sort of technique (flashcards or double sets of wordlists) to give you two random words to create a sentence from, which sounds like an interesting thing to try out at least. And I guess I should stop speaking to the Italians I have on Skype in English... I also obviously need to review the wordlists I've done for my 15 texts, still undecided about the specifics of how I'll go about reviewing, but I'll figure something out. I thought about just going over my English lists and measuring how much I could produce now before reviewing anything, and though it would be interesting to see the outcome of that, it would probably be a stupid thing to do, and mostly discouraging. I am quite aware of the fact that without reviewing you forget things, so measuring anything in the forgetting stage is quite pointless and unhelpful. So I'll do some reviewing and then check my recall later, if I still feel the need. I'm sure it'll be useful to revise things. So I guess those are just my current ideas about what I want to do, I obviously won't have time for everything but I'm thinking it'll be a good thing to have some variation and do different things every day, so that nothing gets stale and I can learn from different angles. I'll start with the new stuff tomorrow, will focus on uni work for the rest of the evening, which should be fun :-) Liz Edited by Lizzern on 10 September 2009 at 10:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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