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The 1-year challenge: Italian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| staf250 Pentaglot Senior Member Belgium emmerick.be Joined 5639 days ago 352 posts - 414 votes  Speaks: French, Dutch*, Italian, English, German Studies: Arabic (Written) | Message 185 of 244 07 November 2009 at 3:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I grasp the Italian words without translation. For reading I agree with the idea developed by Liz.
But speaking Italian my mind first passes French. So chatting with a group of family members in Italian, they asked my brother if he understands what was being told in Italian he said. "I understand the Italian spoken by my brother but only a bit of what you Italians are telling!" 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| staf250 Pentaglot Senior Member Belgium emmerick.be Joined 5639 days ago 352 posts - 414 votes Speaks: French, Dutch*, Italian, English, German Studies: Arabic (Written) | Message 186 of 244 07 November 2009 at 7:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
Hi Liz, You'll find here a more advanced test: http://www.italicon.it/index.asp?codpage=test&bodytext=page0 0 When you don't like to register, use my login, I'll PM the **** Good Luck, use grammar and dictionary, why not. Staf 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| 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 187 of 244 07 November 2009 at 8:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
I took this test today, it's fun. Go for it! 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 188 of 244 08 November 2009 at 3:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks Staf, I might take the test later when I have time. I feel like I have a pretty good sense of where I'm at though, so I don't particularly feel the need to test myself in that way anymore :-)
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| staf250 Pentaglot Senior Member Belgium emmerick.be Joined 5639 days ago 352 posts - 414 votes Speaks: French, Dutch*, Italian, English, German Studies: Arabic (Written) | Message 189 of 244 08 November 2009 at 4:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
I see, it's OK! 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 190 of 244 14 November 2009 at 1:24am | IP Logged | |||||
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Started a new wordlist today, 70-something new words so somewhat less than the previous one, but still a little more than I can comfortably deal with in a couple of days. I have a long queue of texts waiting for me, so I won't run out anytime soon. I do still think the texts were probably originally written by a native English speaker. Must be. The whole thing just reads like a translation sometimes, and makes next to no references to Italian writers and so on, but mentions plenty of things that might be on someone's mind in an English-speaking country. That's fine though. It's nice just to have a source of vocabulary that presents words in appropriate-sized quantities each time. I don't know what else I'd use if not these.
While doing wordlists and reading these days I've been reading around Word Reference when I look up a word, I guess this is the closest thing to simply picking random things out of a dictionary that I'm going to get at this point. So when looking up a word I might skim through one of the threads on their forum about that word if the thread title looks interesting enough. I've also started looking up known words that I haven't looked up in a while, I guess just to make sure I've understood them correctly, but mostly to look for possible alternative meanings to make a mental note of. WordRef is nice that way, it gives you all kinds of different idioms (though sometimes not the specific ones I need) and possibly long threads where native speakers have explained the meaning of words and idioms in detail, nuance and all. And some things are just fun to know about, like how one of the first words I ever learned in Italian, muso (as in, the nose of an airplane - obviously one of the words you should learn first), can mean sulk in "fare il muso". And my handy Webster's New World dictionary tells me that "rompere il muso a qualcuno" means to smash somebody's face in. Good to know! At this point this is the only dictionary digging I feel inspired to do - I only do this once I feel stable enough about the meaning I already know though, and I need to have a degree of curiosity that makes me think that if I look this up now then it'll make sense if/when I see it in context, and that I might even remember it without further reinforcement. On a related note, it's strange how many swearwords and violence-related vocabulary you pick up if you read non-formal stuff. And the worst part of it is that even though I don't swear in my other languages, I could easily risk doing so in Italian just because the words are there in my memory just like others are, I know them so well from exposure, but it's very hard in the beginning for a foreigner to grasp how harsh or vulgar some things sound. I know some foreigners overuse some very harsh swearwords in Norwegian and the result sounds awfully crass, but to a learner they're just like any other word. So I just make a mental note of what to avoid - although by now I have a fairly extensive arsenal of obscenities at my disposal should I ever decide I want them. As for my wordlists, I've changed things a bit, so that when I write the Italian words in the final step I go over things once writing out the known words first, the words that come to mind with no effort at all, before I start working on the other ones. I don't particularly care if I don't have them memorised until the last step, but some words are easier to remember than others. I sometimes do this when writing out the English translations in the middle column too - so writing out the ones I'm fairly sure I know before I do anything else instead of writing the list out from top to bottom. I always make sure I double-check before writing anything down in that step though. It helps to look things up several times before I try to produce it. I like doing wordlists the way I've been doing them, but I suspect I won't really retain all of the words until I've seen them in context once or twice. There's something about that "oh hey, I get it now" feeling that you get after sort of understanding words and then suddenly having them click into place, that I find really helps me remember them, passively and actively as well. Especially if the context is memorable or weird enough that it's not just another word out of hundreds of new ones I might see in an average week. With some words I just need to see them once, wonder what they mean, look them up, then see them once or twice more (if that, even), that's all it takes for them to be permanently stuck in my brain - and even show up on demand without trying to translate from English, they just come to mind when I need them. That doesn't mean I know them perfectly, and I might add to my knowledge of them as they come up more, but for basic memory and understanding this sort of well-timed exposure seems to be the way to go. The wordlists are a good way to start though, because they're a more thorough first run-through than just looking them up once would be, and they're based on context so I get a good first impression of what the word means - I do try to make sure I can make sense of a sentence at least on a basic level (that is, possibly lacking some nuances and cultural references and such, but at least grasping its general meaning) after looking the words up when I do wordlists. After reading some discussions here and there on the forum it occurred to me truly how little grammar I know, in terms of naming things anyway. Honestly, I don't know the grammatical terms to describe the difference between era and è stato, nor would I be able to easily formulate a rule for when you use one or the other. I just try to get a sense of how they're used and that's all - I just don't care about the names and formulating the rules. Maybe that's a mistake, who knows. But even if it is, I can't care about it - because reading up on them and making sure I learn them explicitly would be boring, and there's no room for that. So I'll just have to do without. I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything though. And whenever I hear people describe Norwegian grammar to me I get confused, kinda like when people try to explain theoretical physics to me, I go from "huh?" to "look I just don't think I'm gonna be able to understand all this so don't waste your breath trying" to "oh god please stop" to changing the subject to something else before my ears start to bleed. And yet, I use those same grammatical structures correctly every day as a native speaker of Norwegian. I think if you put me in an Italian class for foreigners right now I'd still be that person in the back of the class asking "uhh what's the imperfect again?", while actually getting a good score on actual questions. That happened in some of my Spanish classes too - for the life of me I couldn't seem to care about the labels nor remember them except by brute force, but I get the concepts, honestly I do - and can learn to use them correctly and very accurately without ever really committing the labels to memory. So it seems like a waste of my time to focus on learning labels for things that don't need them to make sense in my brain. Also, another discussion (which unfortunately had to be closed - death by politics) got me thinking about names, and how on earth my name would work out in Italian. Long story short, it wouldn't really. I'm tempted to just pick a name that's related to my original name and run with that, after all I'm universally known to English-speaking friends by a shorter version of my name, one that would never be used by, say, my parents, and yet, there you have it. Some people insist that it's like they're different people in each of their strongest languages (advanced or native fluency), and I suspect that's at least partly true, so in a way I guess it makes sense to have one name for each personality. I don't really know what Italians would think though - altering someone's name even in the form of a nickname is not taken lightly here in Norway, in English-speaking countries it seems relatively more common, then in some countries like Greece they just flat out translate their own names into English when speaking to us and it just gets confusing and more than a little weird and then we have to ask them to stop. So I don't know... Current word count (see page 6): 4266 unique words, based on 19 texts. That's 250-ish new words since my last wordlist, but I didn't use anywhere near that amount in my new list, so it's still adding already known words. And some names, but oh well. Lastly: Hello lurkers! Nice day to post, eh? Liz 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| paisley Groupie United States Joined 5654 days ago 59 posts - 60 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 191 of 244 14 November 2009 at 4:41am | IP Logged | |||||
Holy moly! what is a word list! 4,266?! *head spins*. Does this mean you know 4,266 words in Italian?! Edited by paisley on 14 November 2009 at 4:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| staf250 Pentaglot Senior Member Belgium emmerick.be Joined 5639 days ago 352 posts - 414 votes Speaks: French, Dutch*, Italian, English, German Studies: Arabic (Written) | Message 192 of 244 14 November 2009 at 11:08am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think Liz is writing her Italian texts in a piece of computer program. This program counts every single word that
is new on the list and not seen before. Meantime she studies the words with a specific 5 column word-list too. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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