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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 5901 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 145 of 244 23 September 2009 at 12:23am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm afraid you don't qualify as a lurker, Philip, sorry :-)
In terms of language learning, today (well, the last few days really) has been one of those days where everything has been upside down and I don't know what happened. For some weird reason I really wanted to start studying Ancient Egyptian again, but more seriously this time, so I picked up my book and started reading, had a look around online, on Amazon... Reminiscing about my childhood (ok, late teens) when I still really wanted to be an Egyptologist and had actual plans for how I was going to do that. And I was reminded of how much fun this was. So I'm going to have another look at the language, because I would love to be able to read the original texts that inspire me. But it's not going to be at the expense of Italian, which is still the number one priority language-wise of course. All this means is that if I feel like reading something else additionally I know what I want to do, which is more productive than reading up on random bits and bobs that sound interesting (it happens). I'll enjoy this more than the random things, so at least now my random non-Italian stuff has some sort of overall point to it. I'll be writing about it here, so I probably won't bring it up that often in this log. I might still talk about what to do after Italian here though, because I'm not really sure about any of that stuff yet, and stuff keeps happening that makes me more keen on any of several of the languages currently on my list. I suspect this new project will remain a minor one for a while, possibly forever, but it's interesting anyway. Now. Italian. Read some more Dante today, as well as a couple of journal articles, I find that reading the comments is often just as interesting. I think in a lot of cases that's true in any language, because it lets you hear more about the cultural implications of what's being discussed in the article, how native speakers feel about it, how different people's opinions can be, the kinds of arguments people use for or against whatever it may be, and how people treat each other when they disagree. For some reason I didn't really have to look up much, but that's probably just because the topics were familiar, so even if there were words in there that I didn't know I didn't necessarily notice it all that much, because I could still get the gist of what was going on. Also looked for some more audiobooks online, not really sure why because I have plenty already, and then actually listened to some of the ones that are already on my ipod - but I wasn't really that enthusiastic about the storyline so didn't end up spending much time on it. I found audio of the Bible in Italian (here), which I probably won't spend much time on, but it was the only thing I found besides what I already have that was of decent quality and worthwhile enough. I didn't check everything because I don't download from sites I don't know, but I think I have a fairly decent collection by now, enough to last me a while certainly... Maybe I should just start using the ones I have a little more :-) I don't know how I managed to completely ditch that wordlist I started last week, but I should get around to doing the rest of it one of these days. Then I'll need to do a wordlist for the next text, which I already have saved. That last text out of the first 15 made the whole thing suck more than I realized at the time, I should've been more careful not to pick such a weird text, and I'm still trying to recover from the unawesomeness of the very last thing I did. You know how sometimes if the last bite of your meal happens to taste bad, even if the rest of it was fine you sometimes (depending on what it is) kinda don't feel like eating it again? That's how I feel about wordlists right now. There's a pie that they sell at Sainsbury's in the UK that I know I loved, but the very last bite of the last pie of theirs I ever ate tasted bad for some reason, and it still makes me a little nauseous just thinking about that pie. I don't really want to continue to feel that way about wordlists, so what I really need is to do a couple of wordlists enjoyably, then hopefully after that it won't be a problem anymore. Also, I haven't gotten round to reviewing any of my old wordlists yet, except when the words come up in the stuff I'm reading. Which actually happens a lot... Just seeing them again helps me remember, but I still need to do something to make them active. Or at least I think so... I picked up an awful lot of active English vocabulary just from passive reading and looking things up or having things explained to me, and never really needed to do anything in particular to activate those words, so I'm still a bit unsure about how that whole process works. But anyway, for now I'm not really going to focus on intensive study, I'd rather just read and listen, and then do that wordlist when I have time, but nothing too intense as far as actual study goes. 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 146 of 244 23 September 2009 at 11:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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Did about half an hour of listening practice today, televised interviews are pretty good for this, though they're a bit slow sometimes, and frequently very predictable in their content. Other times they're not slow at all, but mostly I could understand everything well enough - familiar topic though, so that takes some of the credit. Also listened to some rather fast-paced reporting, which was interesting - I like how at this stage I can usually listen to something new and follow the gist of what's being said more or less alright and being able to decipher what the missing vocabulary means so that I don't lose out on whole chunks of meaning completely. I found that if I ever missed a snippet of what's been said then if I went back and listening to the same thing again, listening only for individual sounds, I had no problem understanding it at all. I think this is probably useful as a backup solution if things are too fast to listen for meaning - if I try to listen for sounds then I will either understand things perfectly, or if I don't it's because I lack the vocabulary to make sense of what I'm hearing. Either way, it helps me at least understand what I would be able to understand, even if fast spoken conversation. Thankfully Italians don't speak that fast though, so I don't need to use this method that often, and most of the time when they do speak fast I can still make sense of it all if I know most of the words.
Also, I thought it was about time I had a look at my visual dictionary again - it's been a while. I don't know their reasoning behind what they included but it has some of the most ridiculously obscure words. This is pretty much The Book of Words You'll Probably Never Need. Which is kinda fun, I guess. I don't know half of these words in my own language... A lot of it is really specialised vocabulary, some of it just downright bizarre - who knew there were words for these things, in such detail? Some examples to highlight the diversity of topics covered: - a whole bunch of vegetables I've neither seen nor heard of in any language (...until now) - the names for the various parts of baseball gear (in a Norwegian-Italian dictionary!! baseball doesn't even exist here!) - birds, more birds, and the most important beak and foot types - 12 kinds of purses (not including wallets, backpacks, briefcases or suitcases) - anatomical features that no one outside of medicine and related fields would need to know even exist (a useful overview for me, I suppose) - a thorough review of the various kinds of camping tents on the market, and your options for sleeping bags - the name for every possible part of lightbulbs and windmills (Dutch or otherwise) - the inner workings of your average dishwasher, washing machine, tumbledryer, and toilet - every kitchen machine known to man - every sock known to man - two types of firetruck - starting positions in diving - the structure of a nuclear plant, micro and macro - the lunar cycles and a fully labelled astronaut - 15 kinds of knives - a onesie - and, of course, an obscene amount of architecture-related words (OK, this one isn't that surprising, given that this is Italian we're talking about), including pyramid vocabulary - Egyptian and Aztec... And that's not even half the amount of crazy covered by this delightful book. So in summary - pretty cool. A lot of these things will be useful (most of the examples above, not so much). And I like the visual aspect of it, much better than just seeing a translation in writing. This way I don't even need to look at the translations, being shown is much more useful - and I might even pick up some new words in Norwegian from flipping through this, there are a lot of words here that I'd never even thought about before. The book is probably adapted from an American version of the same (going by the presence of baseball and similar, and because trucks don't look like that here) so it probably exists in English, if anyone is interested in getting one - copyright QA International. I wish I'd had a closer look before buying this one, I would rather have it in English, but oh well. It's not like I'm going to be looking at the translations much anyway. Anyway, these days I find myself kinda shunning the vocabulary-intensive stuff, or any form of study really, because the amount of concepts and vocabulary I need to learn for uni has been quite intense recently, so my brain isn't particularly keen on me trying to fit in too much on my free time in addition to the stuff I already need to do (there are other things besides uni as well). And in general I'm losing steam with Italian. Seriously. I don't know, I guess at this point it makes sense to bump my overall goal down from my own standard of fluency, because frankly I'm not sure I'm willing to prioritize Italian to such a degree that I'll put in all the work that it would take to get there in such a short time - because there are other things that are more important to me, and if I wanted to reach that goal in a year I would need to make some sacrifices I'm not willing to make at this point. Don't get me wrong, I love Italian - just not more than the other things that matter to me. As long as they can peacefully co-exist I'll continue with Italian. Anyway, I don't want a high goal to turn my Italian into something that is plagued by pressure, it's already kinda veering in that direction, and because other things matter more I've pondered just dropping it altogether to focus on more worthwhile things. I probably shouldn't be thinking that way at all. But it needs to be fun, and at this stage I'm not really sure it's fully meeting that requirement. Honestly, and this is gonna sound weird, but I'm fairly sure that one text is to blame for all this, because that's where it all started, that marks the first and only time Italian truly sucked for me, and I'm still trying to get back to where I was before that. So I'll keep trying to find a way to make it as fun as it should be and as fun as it used to be. I guess I'll reach some sort of fluency within the one year I've set aside for Italian, though it'll be fluency by someone else's standard, not my own. Then I'll keep going until I reach my goal eventually. But it's more important that I enjoy it - if I don't, it's just not worth spending my time on. And that concludes my 5-month evaluation. Hopefully I'll have something more positive to say by this time next month. 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 147 of 244 24 September 2009 at 11:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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Other stuff to do today, but I listened to some music earlier (singing along, as usual) and read a couple of things. This (from the most recent post on Personalità confusa, on online advertising) made me laugh: "Bene, la lezione è finita: settimana prossima tratteremo dell’email marketing: posso solo anticiparvi che più o meno è questo: io ti bombardo di messaggi che tu cancelli senza leggere ma a me va bene lo stesso." Just another reminder of why I'm so glad I'm able to read and enjoy that blog... Always an entertaining read :-)
But I don't really have much to report today. At this point I kinda prefer seeing my previous vocabulary list words showing up in new texts and reviewing them that way (happens a lot but won't cover everything), rather than actually looking at my old lists again. But maybe that's just because I don't really feel like doing any wordlist work right now... I'll get around to reviewing those eventually. But it would be good if I would read more extensively than I do, I just don't feel like I can devote that much time to it these days. Anyway, I guess I'll try to come up with some kind of less-than-random approach to things over the next few days. 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 148 of 244 26 September 2009 at 9:40am | IP Logged | ||
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Did some listening practice yesterday, just listening for individual sounds again. I found that I could understand 95% of what I was hearing without really trying, and was reminded of some irregular forms, which was good. Vocabulary is still a major issue though, I'm mostly ok with grammar - at least passively - but usually the problem is that I don't know all the words I need. I should get back to studying vocabulary more intensively, I'll be sure to do that one of these days. I have an unfinished wordlist and two more texts waiting for me!
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| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5901 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 149 of 244 26 September 2009 at 11:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well now. I realized today that I need to make a decision about Italian at this point - it's basically been a case of should I or shouldn't I, and there's little point spending any time in that in-between phase where things aren't going well but you don't really want to quit either. Things were going OK at one point though, not even that long ago, and I was learning at a rate I liked. I think part of the problem, besides what I've already mentioned, is that I've plateau'ed a little, so right now I'm kinda in "you know no Italian and you're certainly not learning" mode. Half-true, I suppose. But I've been trying to bombard myself with fun and encouraging stuff over the last few days/weeks to get over it and keep going, and it seems to be working. So I'm not stopping. Yay.
I've been unusually active with Italian today - actually wait, I used to do this sort of thing all the time, it's the past few weeks that have been unusual, not the other way round... Anyway, I've listened to a bunch of things on Youtube (interviews and whatnot), and read some of the comments below the videos. Also had a look at some articles in a couple of newspapers, mostly I just read headlines though. And I spent a bit of time earlier in the day reading my LOTR, which was interesting. One paragraph in particular was problematic, filled with words I didn't know, but other than that, it wasn't too bad. I didn't look anything up, though I was frequently tempted to. It helps to read in a place where I would have to get up and walk several steps to get to the nearest dictionary. Then I went over the two texts I have lined up to do wordlists on, underlining the words I'm going to use in my wordlists, including some that I want to look up just to make sure, because they look similar to their equivalent and their meaning looks fairly clear from the context, but I still want to make sure. And including them in my wordlists means I'll see them more times too, so it can't hurt (unless it makes the wordlist so long it doesn't fit onto a sheet of A5). I might do the second part of the first wordlist tomorrow. Also did a couple of Assimil active phase lessons, typing them up as usual. It'll be interesting to know how many unique words the course contains - if I had to guess at this point I'd say between 1500 and 2000, which is actually pretty good. I don't think they're going by frequency lists though, but rather, they seem to pick words based on which topics are going to be the most useful for a tourist. With one bizarre semi-exception - like every other Assimil course I've seen, this too insists on including smoking-related vocabulary in the first few lessons. Why the obsession with smoking, I don't know, but most courses seem to do that, because apparently knowing how to ask for a lighter and permission to smoke is far more important than ordering food or finding a bathroom. It still sometimes surprises me how incredibly inaccurate their translations often are - which doesn't present a problem during the passive phase, in fact it can even be helpful because it can help you see the difference between the ways things are expressed in the two languages and makes you think about stuff and understand what they're getting at, but often the things that were useful then are useless now in the active phase. Some of them were clearly designed for the passive phase and turn out to be just awful when you need to use them to translate into Italian. And it's not just can't-be-helped type problems like what the English 'you' is referring to (3 options for verbal tenses there). They switch things like 'want' and 'must' in situations where you technically have the option of expressing yourself with sentences using either word - that doesn't make them mutually interchangeable of course, but their translation might use one of them where the original uses the other. And stupid stuff like the translation saying 'tomatoes' (plural) and the Italian saying 'pomodoro' (tomato, singular). If there was some grammar lesson they wanted to teach by doing that then I'd be fine with it, but there's not. So I wish they'd decide whether they want to be hyperliteral or not and then stick to it, so you don't end up making mistakes because of their inconsistent translations. And I wish they'd spell check, these are things that your average moronic computer program would pick up on, so the typos are unnecessary. Also watched Rai News 24 for a while (yay free internet TV!), the news first, which wasn't particularly interesting. Movies, ballet, a cyclist with blue nail polish (matched her gear, kinda), football, several stupid commercials... Then a long thing about migrant workers (all women) from Cape Verde who talked about their experiences in Italy. Many of them spoke fabulous Italian, or fabulous dialect, or just Portuguese. One of them spoke all three, mixed together, sometimes in the same sentence (and they subtitled only the parts that weren't in standard Italian - weird). Portuguese is lovely. On a random note, I eavesdropped on some Italians yesterday as I was walking through my uni's science campus. The really fun thing about doing that is that they had no idea - I've eavesdropped on these guys before over lunch and I doubt if they've even pondered the notion that maybe, just maybe, somebody might actually understand them. For some reason I think it still kinda surprises me that what I'm learning is how people actually speak - no idea why I'd feel that way, given that I use a ton of native material these days, but there you have it. I'm quite far from complete ownership of many of these things though, so I have a long way to go before I know the language as well as I want to. And that's not just a vocabulary thing - from what I can tell, there's a big difference between having memorised something and really knowing it, I've achieved the latter with several aspects of the language, but other things are still in the memorisation stage - not to mention the obscene amount of material I haven't even seen yet. There, that turned out to be quite a long post. Surprising, no? I know. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 26 September 2009 at 11:39pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| staf250 Pentaglot Senior Member Belgium emmerick.be Joined 5689 days ago 352 posts - 414 votes Speaks: French, Dutch*, Italian, English, German Studies: Arabic (Written) | Message 150 of 244 27 September 2009 at 3:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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Maybe it's time beginning writing in Italian, Liz ;)
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| Lingua Decaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5568 days ago 186 posts - 319 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Dutch | Message 151 of 244 27 September 2009 at 7:14pm | IP Logged | ||
Totally off topic, but which university are you studying at? I got my degree from Universitetet i Oslo, so I'm just curious if that's where you are. 1 person has 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 152 of 244 27 September 2009 at 10:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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Liz, you can't quit! You're my inspiration, my muse, my guiding light. Any time I have doubts about what I'm doing I come here and read the latest. Your passion reignites me. What if I, in the absence of your encouraging progress, were to quit myself? Would you really want that on your conscience?
Good, glad we have that settled. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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