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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 6775 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes  Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 137 of 244 18 September 2009 at 12:27am | IP Logged |
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Liz, I'm having some misgivings about the utility of Assimil. Could you tell me what you do with it or point me to some place where you explained it? :)
And can you tell me what you think the goal of it is? Is it to familiarize someone with the language so that they can get an introduction to it? What does it aim to teach? Are you supposed to come out of it primed to write full sentences correctly? Apparently I can't quite grasp the philosophy of Assimil.. and what are you supposed to do in the active phase? I totally don't get that. You start from lesson 1 again, right? And do what? Edited by numerodix on 18 September 2009 at 12:47am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5901 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 138 of 244 18 September 2009 at 5:44pm | IP Logged |
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I've described my method of using Assimil here, the thread is worth reading for other people's experiences with it, because people have very different styles of using the same material, and it's great that different people can tweak it to suit their needs. Here's what I wrote:
Here's how I use Assimil, more or less (I'm very much a I'll-do-this-however-I-please kind of language learner though, and enjoy a rather messy learning style with most things): Once I'm past the first couple of lessons and more or less comfortable with pronunciation, I'll read through the lesson, without listening to the audio, as well as reading all the notes, reading the whole text out loud of course. I'll make sure I understand things to the degree I think I can at this point, based on previous lessons, but sometimes Assimil will introduce things you won't really 'get' until the revision lesson so I'll just read and try to take it in and give my brain a chance to work it out. Also, I'll go through the exercises, but might cheat a bit at this point, since I'll be going over it again before I move on anyway. Then listen through the audio while reading the text alongside. If there's anything I don't understand that I think I should, I'll have a closer look, but mostly I just breeze through this :-) ...on purpose. Then I'll do this with 6 lessons until I get to a revision lesson. At that point, I will re-read the notes the revision lesson recommends from previous lessons, as well as reading through the revision lesson itself and most of the times things click into place at this point. But I still haven't moved my bookmark from the last revision lesson... Then start again from where my bookmark's at, that is, the 1st lesson after the revision lesson before the one I just read. I'll play the audio, stop it at the notes, read the notes, then carry on with just the audio. Whenever I stop at a note I'll usually read the section leading up to it out loud, to make sure I've corrected details in pronunciation (or I might do it all before or after listening to the audio), then let the audio continue playing until the next note, stop, read the note, read that part of the text out loud... Until I get to the exercises. At this point I should be able to get those right. Once I'm done with all this, I will consider myself 'done' with that lesson, and move my bookmark. I will usually do 1-2-3 lessons a day during the first round, then all 6 in the same day for the second round. Then, of course, read the revision lesson (minus the recommended notes, which I will have just read anyway) again. Rinse and repeat. Works for me... <snip> Assimil doesn't expect you to produce anything yet. Wait till you get to the 'second wave' before you start measuring this and you'll see you've learned tons. It worked really well with Hungarian, I've only just reached the second wave with Italian but based on Hungarian I'm confident that their method is a good one and you'll see this work out beautifully once you get there. Trust them, they know what they're doing :-) (A gold star for the person who can tell me - without googling - which TV character the last sentence in the previous paragraph was inspired by.) Personally I think the goal of Assimil is to give people a firm basis to work from, by trying to get us to develop a natural understanding of the fundamental rules of the language (as well as obviously teaching some of the most useful vocabulary). They don't insist that students understand everything by the time they finish a lesson - quite the opposite, they introduce concepts, then let us chew on them for a while to give us the chance to figure out how things work, or at the very least have some vague idea of how the language is put together. They sometimes underexplain things on purpose, before you get to the revision lesson, so no spoon-feeding, because it's much more effective to be told the answer to something you've already pondered and have been curious about than simply being told flat out how things work. Then in the revision lesson they explain things clearly, without getting too technical - which will achieve one of several possibilities: 1) confirm what you think you've understood based on passive reading, 2) solidify your vague ideas about things so that it makes sense, 3) correct you if you had drawn the wrong conclusions, or 4) spell it out to you if you have no idea what's going on. Then you move onto the next lesson, and the next, and even if things aren't perfectly clear straight away then by natural repetition in the rest of the book you will eventually find that you understand the things that were problematic in the beginning without even having to think about them. It's a pretty sneaky system - if you do as they say (or something close enough) then the system will give you a natural grasp of the structure of the language without you really noticing it's happening. The way I see it they're trying to make you an L2 thinker, by replicating the natural language learning process to the degree that that's possible (which is obviously never going to be exactly the same way of learning as what we did when we were kids), by letting you watch, think things through, try to make sense of things, and letting you learn things yourself as much as possible, and then gently directing you onto the right track in explicit ways when that's needed. So for the passive phase, just sit back, pay attention, see if you can figure out what it all means by observing and reading, but no stressing about things you don't understand - give them time to take care of it for you. Don't worry about production during the passive phase - they don't expect you to be able to do it, nor do they really want you to try, because you'll be in a much better position to do that after you've developed a natural understanding of how the language works by doing some passive learning first. As for the active phase, you start the course again from lesson 1 and then do the passive phase for the rest of the book alongside your active phase lessons from then on. I suppose there would be different ways of doing this too. I just read the English translation and then type up the Italian sentence that I think they're trying to represent in the translation. Their translations are frequently much better suited to the passive phase and don't necessarily work out that well in the active phase, but I just try to go by the content - trying to make it 'wordless' first so I don't really translate as such - and then type up how I would express that concept in Italian. I should probably note that this is related to my synesthesia issues, that I develop representations of concepts and words in my mind that have a connection to the words that express them, so I try to avoid basing my Italian on their translations. I use the English representation to find the meaning, and then put that meaning into words in Italian, leaving aside English ways of representing the same thing when I write in Italian. Anyway, in the active phase they're having you revisit the concepts you learned a while ago, after you've gone through a bunch of other passive lessons beyond what you're now trying to produce, so that hopefully by the time you get to the active phase you will have a pretty good grasp of how to express things. They don't expect you to be able to produce things straight away after studying a new concept, but after seeing it used many more times after you originally studied it, then hopefully by the time you get to the active phase it won't be that hard to produce it more or less right. For example, the present tense isn't going to be the most complicated thing in the world once you've seen it used for 50 lessons, the same thing goes for aspects of word order, so when you get to that in the active phase you might be quite surprised at how easily you're able to write or say things and how much you really learned in the passive phase when you thought you weren't learning much. As far as I can tell, the idea is to let it sit for a while and then having a go at using it. That doesn't make the active phase unproblematic, but it does mean you take the step from passively taking things in (and hopefully understanding them) to using the language, which takes you to a different level of ownership of the language, if that makes sense, but you do it once you're ready, not through trying to force yourself to try to produce something you've only just seen for the first time. Just see if you can figure out how you want to use it, based on your own needs. Everyone is different, and people use very different techniques to achieve the same thing, it all depends on how you learn best. It's not a perfect course, but imho it's a great starting point if we can use it in a way that suits us. It's not going to make you fluent or even perfect at what it teaches, but it can give you quite a natural grasp of a great deal of fundamental points in the language, so it's worth experimenting to adapt it to work well for you. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 18 September 2009 at 5:55pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6775 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 139 of 244 18 September 2009 at 7:04pm | IP Logged |
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Hm, I've been doing something completely different. I started from lesson 1 and I did dictations. I could get much of it down on paper correctly, otherwise I would listen to it once or twice before starting it to try to decode the sounds. Naturally, I do this on the computer and I pause so I have time to write, not like in a classroom. I also replay chunks liberally. Then I would do your roundtrip translation thing, being quite hyperliteral in some cases. This way I didn't anticipate doing more than one pass over the material, albeit doing every lesson several times as it goes through the three stages.
Granted, I can do this because Italian is phonetic and I'm used to the sound of it. I couldn't do it with a completely unknown language. I've now completed 10 lessons this way and I'm into number 16 on dictations. And I'm sort of wondering if this is the way to go. Do you think I should do a passive phase first? Edited by numerodix on 18 September 2009 at 9:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5901 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 140 of 244 18 September 2009 at 11:31pm | IP Logged |
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I probably wouldn't want to do it like that if I was just starting out, I need to have the basics down before doing roundtrip translation - if I did that right from the get-go it would probably be discouraging and wouldn't work well. For me. It could be a good way of doing things for you - but you do sound a bit frustrated... No? Personally I would do the passive phase until they tell you to start the active phase, because it helps to have that time to just take things in without trying to do more with it than I'm able to do, then once I have a decent understanding of the basic framework of the language I can move on to other methods that are more active. But if it works for you then by all means go for it.
Today I thought I'd try something new, so I had a go at that speaking-along-while-reading-and-listening-at-the-same-time thing (which I first saw described here) and it was just... Weird. Fun, but still just awkward somehow, which I kinda expected, I guess. It really helped show me where my rhythm and tone need work (overall I just sound very very flat). Somehow I ended up kinda having the same problem I have on buses when I can't tell if other people can hear my audiobooks if I have my ipod with me, I felt like maybe the neighbours would be able to hear me speak (I still don't know how well my neighbours can hear me, if at all, but I sometimes hear them and I don't want them to hear me - I always wonder how much my neighbours know about what goes on in my endless volunteer work-related evening skype meetings) and found it hard to regulate my own volume when I had the audiobook on full volume in my earplugs. It helped to turn the volume down a bit and try to speak at normal speaking volume - which isn't all that loud for me anyway. For some reason, though, it was actually pretty tiring and got me a headache in no time - not sure why. But it still seems like a really good idea, and I liked what Jimmymac said about it, that it "has nudged the spoken language to the tip of my tongue rather than the back of my neck". Definitely something I need... So I'll try it out again tomorrow, hopefully in the morning before I start studying uni stuff, just in case the headache thing wasn't pure coincidence. (Really didn't expect that to happen. I hardly ever get headaches and doing this gave me one in less than 9 minutes. Weirdness.) Other than that, I've done a bit of reading, but haven't done the wordlist thing I was supposed to do (you know, the one I was supposed to do yesterday) because I've been busy with some other things and put it off for too long and now I'm too tired to do it. Ah well. Tomorrow, then. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 18 September 2009 at 11:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5901 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 141 of 244 20 September 2009 at 1:37am | IP Logged |
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Today has been an odd day, haven't been feeling well for a large part of the day so I haven't gotten much done, and have had to prioritize uni. I did listen to a snippet of an interview about the role of the church in Italy, which was interesting, except the interviewer was a bit of a jerk about the whole thing. The interviewee was taking part via phone, it was interesting to see that I could understand her just fine and without straining even though the sound quality wasn't very good. If there's one thing I truly can't stand it's phone calls with anyone except people I know for sure I'll be able to understand, so it was nice to be able to follow the conversation and understand most of it without getting that intense feeling of wanting to hang up the phone that I get with just about everybody except immediate family and friends, and people I speak to in English. (Norwegian is a chronically tricky language if you don't know who you're going to be dealing with, because people can have the most messed up dialects ever and it's not always easy to make out what people are saying over the phone. In some cases it can take you several seconds to even be able to make out individual words. Hence the dislike of phone calls with unfamiliar people.)
Also read a couple of different things and learned some useful words, though I didn't look up everything. When I do so-called extensive reading (as opposed to intensive, which would be looking up everything) I obviously frequently find words that seem important, but sometimes it can be better to just leave them aside for a while, to have a go at grasping their meaning from the context, and then giving myself the chance to see them a couple more times in context before looking them up. That way I can have at least a vague sense of what they mean, and then looking up their meaning becomes so much more meaningful, because it's not just looking up some random word I've just encountered for the first time, but rather, looking for confirmation or clarification about something I'm curious about. Big difference. I encountered one of those things today, it came up 3 times in the different texts I read (quite surprising for a word I've only seen once or twice before) and then when I finally looked it up I got that "ah, so that's what it means!" feeling, rather than just thinking oh ok and then forgetting about the whole thing. I think that with some words doing it this way will make them stick more effectively, so for words that I don't study using a wordlist or some other way that I'd review at some point, it can help to at least develop that curiosity about what it means before finding an explicit explanation of it. That doesn't mean I'll know that word forever and ever, but I do think I have a better chance at retaining it. Then hopefully the next time I see it in context I'll at least remember the meaning, and then each time I see the word again will reinforce my understanding of it until I can understand it perfectly. That method seems to have worked out well for my English vocabulary, so I'm happy to use it for Italian too, but it can be hard to know what to look up. I've also noticed that I have to be careful not to fall into passivity with how I learn, I do have certain habits for how I study that I developed while studying languages I was never going to speak anyway (i.e. languages that are no longer spoken anywhere I would ever find myself), and sometimes it's hard to not approach Italian in the same way, because my habits and my default approach are the way they are. Misunderstand me right, I'm definitely the kind of person who could study Italian without any intent to speak it. That's not what I'm going for though, this time, but I could - so I just have to be careful how I approach it. As long as I'm aware of the kinds of things I gravitate towards I can do something about them, but it's not always easy to pick up on, especially when I can understand things well passively. Hopefully I'll be more productive again soon. What can I say - it's been a weird week. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 20 September 2009 at 12:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5901 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 142 of 244 21 September 2009 at 1:43am | IP Logged |
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Today has been spent mostly doing uni-related stuff, plus superfun household stuff like fighting with lightbulbs - so I've been fairly unproductive in terms of Italian, partly because I've had a headache for most of the day. That's about the third time I've had a headache this week, which is extremely unusual, so hopefully this means I've had enough to last me the next couple of years or so. I'll need to see what I can do to regain some momentum with Italian, so I don't end up dropping it altogether. That seems to be the direction things might be going in, and I'm not sure I want to let that happen. I watched a few cooking-related videos (in Italian but subtitled in English, which was kinda surreal), unfortunately none of the recipes the guy went through in his different videos looked that appetizing (!!! I mean seriously, did that just happen?), I kept looking for something that looked interesting enough for me to try - not that I would've been able to get the ingredients on a Sunday anyway since all the stores are closed - but nothing really stood out. So there you go, it is actually possible to skim over 20+ genuine Italian recipes without finding anything I think I might want to try out. I should really get my Italian cookbooks out and start experimenting. I wonder where I put those...
Liz 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5901 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 143 of 244 21 September 2009 at 11:50pm | IP Logged |
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The books I ordered from Italy came in the mail this morning (woop!), so I now have La Divina Commedia in book form and a full set of Il Signore degli Anelli. It's been a while since I read either of them in English, so this should be fun on more than one level. I generally hate translations of books, in large part because the translations I've read in my life have mostly been Norwegian translations of English originals where the translators have had to tweak some things, resulting in bad bad Norwegian, but the translation from LOTR into Italian seems decent (native speakers might feel differently, I don't know). Anyway, it's much better than nothing - and I won't read just anything, so if this gets me reading then it's a good thing.
I was quite surprised to find that the edition of La Divina Commedia I got was very heavily annotated - as in half of every page on average, frequently more - which is great. I was expecting much less - I literally sorted them all by price and went for the cheapest one on the list. Only the covers are illustrated, but that's OK, all the books I got were supercheap, and I already have the best illustrations in the English versions of both. The notes are in Italian of course, so I might learn something new from that - but I'm reading Dante first and foremost because I like reading Dante, using it to learn Italian isn't the main goal. But I guess I'm bound to pick up a few things here and there, right? Right. Anyway, I started reading La Compagnia dell'Anello, and I was surprised at how well it went. It flowed, even. Some of the verbal tenses they use feel somewhat unfamiliar (labels are for linguists, so I don't know what they're called), not because I've never seen them before, I have, and I know what they mean, but they just haven't been the most frequently used forms in most of the material I've read so far. It didn't slow me down all that much though, once I got used to seeing them. I'm not the fastest reader in the world but I could read it at about the same speed as I can read Norwegian nynorsk, which is somewhat unnatural and unfamiliar for me to read (mostly because I rarely have to), so I can't read it as fast as Norwegian bokmål. Anyway, I need to get my Italian up to the same speed as my English, which is faster than either form of Norwegian because almost everything I've read for the last 7 years has been in English. Reading lots (and lots and lots...) will take care of that. I didn't understand everything, but resisted the urge to look stuff up, which helped my reading speed - it does mean I don't understand every single thing I read, but that's OK, I'm aiming for extensive not intensive reading here. I looked up a few things after seeing them several times, when I got to a point where it seemed like I was curious enough that it would be a good idea to check what a specific word meant. But not a moment before. And only if the word seemed important to know - if it didn't stand out in any way then I just read for the gist of what was going on and moved on. I might consider starting an ongoing wordlist to preserve bits of neat syntax that I stumble across while reading, sometimes cool things happen but I never know when I might see the same thing again, so I might just have a wordlist for writing these things down including their context, so that I can look at them later to refresh my memory. No SRSing though, that principle still stands - I will confess I use it extensively for uni, and love it, but I'm just not going to do it for Italian. Because I'm stubborn? Because I'm easily bored? Because I refuse to do anything for Italian that doesn't qualify as 'fun'? Whichever explanation makes you happy. Lastly, a nudge to all my lurkers: I'm awfully curious about who you all are - I can see you, you know. The number of views keeps going up, and granted some of those views are from when I almost invariably find stuff in my own posts that needs editing, but I didn't get over 9000 views from my own obsessive editing alone. So I know you're out there. Let me know who you are, why you're reading, your thoughts, ideas - you know, the usual. So go ahead and post to say hello :-) Liz 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6134 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 144 of 244 22 September 2009 at 2:16pm | IP Logged |
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Boo!
I'm still reading. Your posts are really entertaining and informative to read. Yeah...so I'm still here! --Philip 1 person has voted this message useful |
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