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The 1-year challenge: Italian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6725 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes  Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 129 of 244 11 September 2009 at 10:24pm | IP Logged |
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Liz, I have to ask.. you've been at this for some time now, so how do you feel about expressing yourself in Italian? I understand you're well experienced in language learning on the whole, so when is it time to start talking/writing do you think?
It seems to me a very sensitive point because it has to be very awkward and embarrassing to take your first steps in a language, knowing that probably every sentence is full of mistakes because you don't have any practice yet. Do you just let it all hang out and go with it or what? Btw, I'm here now if you wanna lay down some knowledge on me. 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 130 of 244 12 September 2009 at 10:28am | IP Logged |
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Numerodix, I'm finding this quite a tricky issue myself and it's not at all easy to make the transition from learning passively and only practicing actively in private, to actually speaking and writing to other people, knowing I'll still make a ton of mistakes. Output from day 1 wouldn't have been a good idea for me, I've seen that much, I want to have a decent understanding of the language first, but I think I could and should have started around the 3-month mark (I actually wrote something in Italian in this log around that time) because at that point at least I had a more or less OK grasp of the basics. But now there's a bit of a threshold for it, which isn't helpful, and is something I need to deal with at this point. It's not easy (for me) to show mistakes in front of others, but I figure everybody expects me to suck anyway, so it doesn't matter as much to people as I think it does :-) Thankfully Italians are very matter-of-factly about people's mistakes, and just point them out without making a big deal out of the whole thing or making you feel like an idiot about it, which is good.
I'm not helped by the fact that I've previously studied several languages that I never intended to use actively (Latin, biblical Hebrew, ancient Greek), so there's always a danger of me defaulting back to considering a language as something I'm learning just to be able to read. I know it's practically blasphemy to a lot of people here, but I could passively learn a whole language - even a modern one - without ever speaking a word of it to another person, without the lack of interaction detracting from my interest at all. Different aims, I suppose - I know a lot of people don't see the point in learning another language if you're not going to speak it to actual people. I do have quite a strong interest in several languages that you would never have to speak, so I'm quite comfortable with the notion of learning a language for its own sake, because of the literature, or whatever tickles you - though of course I would love the opportunity to go back in time and speak to people in their own language. (If anyone happens to have a time machine lying around, PM me. Even if it's one-way.) I'm not going to let myself do the passive thing with Italian though. One of my reasons for studying Italian in the first place is wanting to read Dante in the original language, but I'm not going to make it another language I don't use, so I need to practice my way through that period of time when I'm inevitably going to suck at it, until I can get better. In terms of the choice of what my next language is going to be... I think I have a problem here. I've been a bad girl, you see. I have been careless and have violated my strict 'no Ancient Egyptian' policy, and now I'm in trouble. That is to say, in love. AGAIN. But wait, it gets worse - I also read up on Sumerian, Akkadian and Phoenician, and now I'm curious about those too. AGAIN. Problem. But it would actually probably be more rewarding for me personally than, say, Portuguese or Hungarian, because my interest in these ancient languages has more substance to it than just love of language in general and an interest in certain modern languages. It would be awesome to work with these languages more consistently than I've done in the past and actually learn more than I did back then, but I really haven't decided whether I'll go ahead with it - at this point, though, everything (except Latin) is back in the maybe pile. Yesterday wasn't the most productive day for Italian. I had a closer look at my idioms dictionaries - interesting stuff. There's actually less overlap than I thought, and many of them cover ways of using certain words that wouldn't really show up in clear way in a regular dictionary. Besides that, in terms of Italian I didn't get much done yesterday, in large part because of a splintering headache, and because I had uni work to do, but also because I got sidetracked reading about ancient languages... It happens. Numerodix, I was going to suggest you (and Philip) start a log, glad to see you put one up - though I have to object to the title :-) Will make a guest appearance soon... Liz Edited by Lizzern on 12 September 2009 at 10:31am 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 131 of 244 13 September 2009 at 7:26pm | IP Logged |
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Guess what? I have decided, upon your request, to start my own log. Now we can follow each other's progress instead of me just following yours! We'll see how it goes... Edited by ellasevia on 13 September 2009 at 8:20pm 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 132 of 244 13 September 2009 at 11:27pm | IP Logged |
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Good stuff Philip, will be great to read how you go about learning, so that I can shamelessly steal ideas off of you. Bwahaha. I just still can't believe you're a YEAR older than my little brother. ONE year! Just thinking about how many languages you know already... It boggles the mind. If you keep going at this rate, when you grow up you will actually become Iversen.
Well I've been somewhat more productive with Italian over the last two days - I blame that last text for my little mini-slump here (you see, this is why you shouldn't do things you don't enjoy) - but things are still kinda slow-going, partly because I haven't been feeling well and was out of commission for hours today. Also had uni stuff and various other things to do. I've done 4 active phase Assimil lessons so far after starting up again, I might do one or two more tonight. It's quite useful I suppose, but one of the main problems I have with Assimil is that though their translations generally work fine in the passive phase when you're trying to figure out the Italian text, it's frequently impossible to reproduce the Italian correctly based on the translation alone. They cut things out, move things around, use other words than what you expect, and so on - it gets quite messy at times. Right now I'm experimenting with reading the English translation and trying to remember that and then typing up my best shot at an Italian translation, partly because there is simply no comfortable way of typing up the lessons while holding the book open in front of the computer. But producing an accurate translation every time... Well, it just can't be done. Not a chance. And it will never cease to amaze me that spelling mistakes that Word would easily pick up on, somehow find their way into the final version of a language course. Anyway, I still make the occasional Spanish-based mistake when I write Italian, which is bound to happen I suppose. Nothing that would inhibit understanding, so it's not a big deal, I'll just try to weed those things out as I go. But I didn't expect to find myself doing that, especially since it's been almost a year since I've written or spoken any Spanish (though I do still read it frequently-ish). I guess the whole immersion thing, and Spanish and Catalan together being my first romance languages, means I'll always have that as a basis, even though I would totally make Italian-based mistakes if I had to speak Spanish today. I do still feel like I have to let Spanish die a little if I want to keep track of Italian without mixing. That's OK, since I don't actually need to use Spanish actively, but I might want to revive it later when there is less of a risk of mixing them. Besides doing Assimil lessons again, I've also been flipping through my idiom dictionaries a lot, mostly looking up familiar words to see what kinds of bizarre uses they have for for them. One of my books is sorted by the most significant word in any expression, which is helpful. Others are organised differently. I like having several approaches and a good index in several of my books, so that I can look at things from different angles and have a good shot at finding what I'm looking for if I ever get stuck. Have also fit in some listening practice, again focusing on the individual sounds, which lets me pick out the right word more naturally, more accurately if there's ever any doubt what I'm hearing. At one point today I discovered that I had been mishearing something, I'd heard that line several times before but somehow convinced myself it was another similar word and moved on, but by listening for the sounds without trying to deliberately make something meaningful out of it I could correct the things that weren't working out. It's especially helpful when listening to fast speech where I might initially find it hard to understand even the things I already know. A while back I mentioned a video I found some months ago, at which point I could understand next to nothing of what was said, then a few weeks ago I could understand maybe 50% - well, I watched the video again yesterday and I can understand a bit more than last time now, so maybe 60%. Win! Still a lot left that flew right past me, but at least things are going in the right direction. Had a look at Amleto yesterday, and out of curiosity I ran it through the word counter. I didn't bother to take out the footnotes or even the (brief) preface, so the number is by no means accurate, but it counted over 8000 words. Even if you reduce that number to lexemes, that's still an awful lot of words. I'll probably just read it without worrying about each word so much, but we studied the book in quite some detail in high school so I can probably pick up a lot of things from reading it even if I don't look up everything. Also started going over my next text, I copied it into Word and read over it underlining the words I don't know or want to look up to be sure. There are enough new words there that I'll do it in two rounds. But I haven't really started writing out my lists yet, mostly because I haven't decided how I want to do it. I might just do what I did with my first 15 texts and write the word on the left and then the example sentence in the next column, and then English and Italian in the second and third columns, though I might just underline the word in the sample sentence instead of writing it in a separate column. Or I might write the word in the first column, and then the sample sentence in the middle column, leaving the word blank and writing the translation in the middle of the sample sentence instead, and then the word again on the right, and then just leave out the English-only column altogether. Not sure. I guess I'm kinda leaning toward the latter option, because I like the idea of using the sample sentence to help me produce the Italian word in the last step, rather than just having them there as something I happen to read before I write out the English translation. But I'm not sure I want to use translations anymore at all, so I might try to work out some other way to do it to work around that. I'll get started on it sometime tomorrow. Liz 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 133 of 244 15 September 2009 at 12:25am | IP Logged |
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I haven't had much time for Italian today, lots of uni work to do. I did spend a bit of time looking around LiberLiber though. Downloaded Tao Te Ching, audio and book, complete with a singing bowl ding to separate the different parts of the text. Cool! Loving the efforts to make books like these publicly available for free. Always wanted to read that book whole (it's not that long, but I guess I just never got around to it). I also downloaded The Apology of Socrates, another one of those things I've been meaning to read for a while. And now it's on my ipod. So I spent a bit of time listening to both, which went better than expected. Awesome site! I'll need to download their Shakespeare one of these days. They even have Anna Karenina... HUGE book, and one I will likely never read in my lifetime, but if anyone is interested, it's all there. If you're learning Italian and haven't checked out LiberLiber (for Italian only) or Librivox (for a whole bunch of other languages too), go do it now. HERE BE GOLD. I love the internet!
Haven't had time for much else than just listening to audio books for a while, but hopefully tomorrow will be less busy so I can get going with that text I've been meaning to start. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 15 September 2009 at 12:27am 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 134 of 244 16 September 2009 at 12:34am | IP Logged |
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Busy girl today too. I flipped through one of my idioms dictionaries a bit more and picked up a few new things that were kinda fun to read about. I like having these books nearby so I can just grab one - it has happened a few times that I've seen something idiomatic-looking in a text and then just grabbed one of the books and found it, and either it meant exactly the same as what you could deduce from the context, or something slightly different. Very useful either way.
Also did some other random reading, looking up every word I didn't know - there weren't that many, which was kinda encouraging. And many of the new ones could be deduced from context - though I prefer to look things up anyway just for confirmation, it seems that with Italian the words often mean something else than the obvious assumption if it's something you recognize, so it's best to look things up just to be sure, to avoid learning something wrong when it's really just a false friend. Oh, and I did a bit of listening practice after I got home from uni. I love my new Socrates audio! Though the voice isn't right, that's totally not what Socrates sounded like. (You know how some people are all like "Everyone knows that God sounds like Morgan Freeman"? Same concept.) Fun times, if you're interested in the same kinds of nerdy things I'm interested in then go download some of these, they're great! Even if you think you don't like audiobooks, I never used to like the idea either, but these are surprisingly good, maybe it's because they have that Italian enthusiastic voice thing going, I don't know. But I like them. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 16 September 2009 at 12:39am 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 135 of 244 17 September 2009 at 12:24am | IP Logged |
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Finally got around to doing the first round of the wordlist for this week's text. The text runs from September 11th-17th, which is technically more this week than last week, so I'm technically not way behind, just a bit... That's my story and I'm sticking to it! Since I'm only doing the wordlists this time, I'll spread it over 3 days instead of 2. And not necessarily 3 consecutive days, if something comes up I'll just do the next step whenever I have time - and from past experience, things 'come up' a lot, that's just how life works for me, so it's OK if I have to rearrange or postpone things.
I'm sticking with English translations for the middle explanatory column, for the time being anyway. Sometimes they help clarify things, sometimes it's good to have something familiar to use as a crutch until I get a natural understanding of the word, I should read the translations anyway to make sure I don't teach myself any false friends by relying on context too much, an Italian explanation would take too much space and might contain words I don't know (a very real possibility, obviously), and frankly I can't seem to find a method of not using translations that I feel I can comfortably use successfully at this stage. I might revisit that point later and see if I can work something out, but for now I'm happy (ish) with just using translations, it's certainly better than nothing and it's as tangible as it needs to be, even though it obviously has some flaws. Those flaws can be corrected, though, by more input and context to see the nuances of the actual use of the word - the translation is just a decent starting point for understanding to build on. I guess the reason I've been postponing the text in favour of other things this week (besides being busy and all that) is because it kinda feels like it was a bit much to do all in one go, even though I was planning to break it into two parts. There were maybe 50% more words than what I usually do, so there was a bit of a threshold for sitting down and taking the time to go over it. And it did kinda take a while. So I'll try to actually go ahead and split the text next time, so that there isn't too much to do in one sitting. And since I have a week per text and 6 days total needed for wordlists if I do it in two parts, and one after the other, then I can spend the first day underlining the words I need and then two rounds of 3 days each going over the words with wordlists. I like the symmetry of how the numbers work out. Also, I'm definitely going to continue using example sentences in my wordlists. Sometimes I need to cut bits out so that the sentence makes sense, since I'm not going to see it again in context in a translation this round. Using sample sentences in my lists really helps make the whole thing more interesting (to me anyway) and it makes the word more meaningful when I read it again. It lets me include idioms seamlessly - I included a couple today that I looked up in my stellar Barron's Italian Idioms (which is the one that's been most useful to me so far). It preserves context so that I can learn what I need to from the rest of the sentence - including important little details like preposition use - and I don't have to go back to the original text to find out what went on around the word I included in my list, the small excerpt helps me remember. Then I can keep a sense of the story (which is more interesting than a collection of seemingly random words) on the paper where I do my wordlist. And I try to find texts that I like to read anyway, so it's nice to read a part of them again. The text I did today (and most of the ones I've already done) was quite a light read, and very random (which I like), and the writer likes bringing in all sorts of peculiarly interesting topics, so I find that using texts this way makes wordlists enjoyable enough that I don't have any resistance or negativity towards doing it, which is quite a victory in itself, considering how I felt about wordlists for years and years of my life (thanks, German!). I doubt if I'll ever do a wordlist without examples ever again - this way works for me, though I might tweak it as I go along of course, and I know there's room for improvement. I didn't feel like I skipped that many words this time because I was more careful not to, but there are some words that are problematic because they're definitely in my passive vocabulary but not something I'd be sure about if I had to use them actively. The problem is mostly when I find words that are so close to their English equivalent - and identical in meaning - that if I needed to use it I might doubt myself thinking I was making them up on the spot, even if I'd seen them used several times. When I read them they don't stand out as problematic at all and I feel like I know them, but would I trust that I'd learned them properly if it came up? I'm not always sure. I can definitely see myself in a situation where I need to use words like esplosione and actually using it correctly whilst mentally berating myself for being one of those ignorant people who just come up with something reasonably sensible-sounding based on their L1 and hope they can get away with it. Ah well, I guess all I can really do is hope that I somehow manage to pick things up if they're different, and then I can have more security in using the words that are similar, knowing that it's likely that if the Italian word was different I'd already know about it. Current word count (see page 6): 3393 unique words, based on 16 texts. There weren't that many new words. Maybe 80-ish. There were a lot of words here that I already knew, that I know weren't included in any of the first 15 texts, which is nice, and part of the point, and this brings me closer to a somewhat realistic value. The word count is still probably counting new words that are just different forms of verbs and whatnot that had already been counted, I know there were several in this text, but nothing I can do about that. I was going to do some more Assimil lessons if I had time tonight, but I don't, so I guess I'll do that tomorrow. I wonder if I'm ever going to finish that active phase, lol. It's good review, but it's not the end of the world if I don't finish it straight away, so no biggie. Liz 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5851 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 136 of 244 17 September 2009 at 11:28pm | IP Logged |
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Today has been another one of those busy days, I've had a lot to do so I haven't had time to do much for Italian, and now that I'm done (ish) for the day I'm too tired to do any actual study.
I did listen to Tao Te Ching for a little bit, which was pretty much smooth sailing, and read a small part of another text in one of my uni study breaks this afternoon. And looked up something I'd been wondering about for a while in my handy Barron's idioms dictionary, and found exactly what I was looking for. I like how it sorts things by the most important word, it makes things easier to find, and if that fails, there's an alphabetical index in the back, as well as a list of English idioms and where to find their equivalents. Useful! I'll do the second part of my wordlist (translation into English) tomorrow, and then the reverse on Saturday. Again, it's not really a problem to leave an extra day between different parts of each round, I'm still trying to find out what's most sensible but it doesn't seem to do any harm and can even be a good thing. I guess I might start the next text on Saturday as well if I have time, but if I don't then no big deal. Tomorrow looks like it's going to be a busy day, but hopefully I can sneak in some Italian here and there... Liz Edited by Lizzern on 17 September 2009 at 11:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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