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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 5851 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 193 of 244 14 November 2009 at 11:55am | IP Logged | ||
Like Staf said, the word count system I use counts the new words that are added each time, so whenever I work on a new text my word count goes up - but the total of 4266 is cumulative and counts every unique word I've seen in 19 different texts over the last 3-ish months. So it's not all in one list! :-) When I do wordlists I write down the words I don't know in a text and an example of their use, then their translation in the next column, then I translate them back again in the final column. I used to do this in conjunction with roundtrip translation of whole texts, where I'd translate the text into English then try to translate it back into Italian. These days I only do the wordlists, because the texts are longer now. I've written a bit here and there about the unavoidable problems of this system - it doesn't reduce related words to 1 lexeme (so for example, variants of the same verb show up more than once and are counted as a unique word each time), it includes proper names, and so on, so the number will inevitably turn out higher than the real number of lexemes I've seen in those texts. That said, when I do a new text and the word count goes up by, say, 200 words, and I only include 70 words in my wordlist, that does mean that I know those 130 words that didn't go in my list. So as I do more texts, the word count gradually includes more and more words that I know that haven't already been counted, as well as teaching me new ones - so it will gradually come close-ish to a realistic number. And besides using the word count to keep track of roughly how many words I've encountered, I'm also using it for motivation. I like seeing the number go up :-) It really does help to know that even if the total number is too high, I still know several thousand words at this point... Liz Edited by Lizzern on 14 November 2009 at 3:29pm 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 194 of 244 14 November 2009 at 11:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Needs to be said: the Collins Italian English dictionary at Reverso is FABULOUS. My saviour on many occasions.
Wikizionario and the dictionary at Corriere della Sera are great too. I might need to get me that Sabatini Coletti one... Not only does it find things that aren't in most of my other dictionaries - it also has a very awesome name. Likes. Anywho, just thought I'd mention these, in case any of you find that the dictionaries you use the most sometimes just don't explain what you're looking for. WordRef is a beauty, but sometimes you just need other sources when one fails. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5866 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 195 of 244 15 November 2009 at 1:15am | IP Logged | ||
Learning swearwords is unavoidable, but using them in an L2 is tricky. I'm never sure if profanity is acceptable, and if it is, are some words more acceptable than others? I know a few Spanish, Afrikaans and Finnish swearwords (No Swedish swearwords yet) but I'm reluctant to use them in writing or speaking although I figure knowing them is necessary to understand what people say or write. Another strange thing is that since I've started learning languages I no longer want to use English swearwords much anymore. I like the fact that wordlists give me vocabulary without context because many words in any language can have multiple contexts and anyway I can always learn a new definition by reading things in an L2. I like learning grammar gradually, but my Swedish grammar book was frustrating to read because the author used terms like finite clause. I don't understand that term, or the concept, in English so; How could I possibly understand what it is in Swedish? Or any other language for that matter. What I want is just some basic information, for example does language X require a sentence to be structured Subject Object Verb? and Will this word order change if I'm talking about something happening now versus something that happened yesterday? or something that may or may not occur tomorrow or next week? Is there a future tense? More than one past tense? And if these features exist, Could they please be presented in an uncomplicated manner? I don't want to get a headache when studying them. I only know English grammar based on what my mother and grandmother told me when I was younger and they didn't use any of the fancy grammatical terms found in textbooks so I struggled a little with learning reflexive verbs in Spanish even though a similar concept exists in English, because I was unfamiliar with the word reflexive. I know what reflexive but I don't know if learning the word in English actually helped me learn any Spanish. Finnish has 14 or 15 case endings and most often the first information given to me is the following terms: partitive, genitive, inessive, allative, ablative etc., but maybe it's better to just teach me the actual endings, what they do and how they change a word's meaning. As for names I found the discussion (before politics killed it) to be interesting, but my rule is to call someone the name they tell me, even though I must admit that if it is a name from a language I can't pronounce I'm obviously going to struggle to say it at all, but if in doubt about this I ask the person since in North America there are so many different ethnic groups and therefore different names it's unrealistic to expect people to pronounce many names without some guidance. I figure using a nickname is fine if that is the name told to me when I meet someone for the first time, otherwise use the person's actual name. Translations are fine, and better than severely mispronouncing a name, but they can be confusing since if I see the name written it probably won't be in the translated form. Congratulations on learning 4266 words, Great work! Hope this post wasn't too long. Edited by mick33 on 15 November 2009 at 1:19am 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 196 of 244 15 November 2009 at 1:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah learning swearwords is unavoidable, but sometimes it's hard to know what's acceptable. Some things are listed as euphemisms for worse things, and are used on TV without being bleeped out, but I'm still not sure I'd want to use them myself. Ah well. A lot of the time swearwords just sound harsher when non-native speakers use them. Not that I want to use them at all really. But at least I can understand them well enough that they don't confuse me, like with any word I want to at least know what it means when I hear it so that I can make sense of what's being said, even if I wouldn't express myself in the same way.
I like the fact that wordlists give me vocabulary WITH context :-) I prefer to have one context one translation rather than one word several translations. If a word I've previously studied shows up again with another meaning then it goes in my wordlist (happened recently, with anche). I guess this is my way of learning new definitions, sometimes just the main one and that's all I get for the time being, sometimes it's nuances of old ones. I get to deal with each one more thoroughly this way than just by looking it up. but I definitely use reading as a source of new understanding too - I only use wordlists for very specific texts and just look up everything I read or hear elsewhere. But it does happen every so often that a new word will show up in two different wordlists with a different meaning each time. That's when I find it's important to have context alongside, to be able to distinguish between the two, to reinforce one translation more carefully by use of context in the wordlist. Agreed about the grammar books, I've found similar issues. I think the problem is that courses often explain things in ways a linguist might, not in common terms that anyone can relate to. When I studied Hungarian they never really told me the names of the cases, just their meaning and some examples and that was it. I remember reading a basic hungarian grammar after I'd understood most of the cases reasonably well, and the wording made the things I already knew sound more complicated than they needed to be. For me that really reinforced how you don't always need a grammatical explanation to grasp grammar, in fact sometimes it's better just to leave that stuff to the linguists and just study the living language as a native speaker would use and understand it, to get a natural feel for all those structures that aren't as difficult as they can be made to look. Some grammatical terms can be useful, like reflexive, once you've grasped them - for someone who has no issues whatsoever with the concept of a genitive, it can sometimes be easier just to give people the word rather than going into long-winded explanations aimed at people who aren't used to dealing with grammar, so in some ways I guess different course books suit different people. But those of us who are serial learners (meh) not only does it become easier to grasp new grammar but we develop our own methods as well, then textbooks don't matter so much. I think Assimil has struck a good balance between answering all those questions you posted, while still keeping things simple and understandable. I think it's good to have the basics down at Assimil's level as the first step, in the beginning only using native reading material to the degree that we can without demotivating ourselves (except for music. music from day 0, always!). I wrote more about this in another thread, I might copy that in here once that discussion is over, for future reference or whatever, since it's relevant to my own approach to learning. I basically feel the same way you do about names, the most important thing to me is that nobody has the right to take the liberty of calling another person by whatever they please. I'm not sure how I'd feel about it if I hadn't known people who had been wronged through having their name changed and therefore felt strongly about it. It should be up to the person what they prefer to be called, most people get to know their range of options (severely botched attempt at native/pronounced according to the rules of the other language/whatever). I introduce myself as Liz when I meet someone new that I expect to be speaking English to, so it would be very odd indeed for them to attempt to say my full name as it is pronounced in norwegian. I'd prefer no name at all (and I've lived with people who never called me by name, so I know it works). Not sure what I'll do in Italian though, cause neither name I currently use works. To be honest, I wish I had a proper nickname - a friend of mine in primary school had one that was used by everybody, including teachers, and I was kinda jealous - but the nice thing about learning new languages is that you can have a degree of choice in what you prefer to be called, certainly some people would find that weird but I'm sure they'd prefer that over being made to pronounce something that sounds unnatural to them. And every Norwegian is used to the concept of asking someone what form of the name they use - in particular, whether they use both their names if they have a middle name, or just one - so I'm fine with the notion of just giving yourself a new one in another language. I just can't seem to decide on one... About the word count, yeah I'm starting to like the numbers now. Told you it was good for motivation. I'm obviously going to need to review many of these words, though, if I want them to stick properly, passive and active. I prefer to review by seeing words in new contexts through reading and listening rather than reviewing wordlists, but I do leaf through my previous lists every once in a while. Anyway, I don't really keep track of how many of them I've seen in reading since I used them in a wordlist, but lots of them, definitely - so the results have been quite good, even if they're not measureable beyond the word count itself. The important thing is seeing the amount I understand gradually go up, and it is going up, and it shows. I love being able to just read things and enjoy them without needing to look up words everywhere. And it makes new vocabulary learning so much easier as well, so if in a paragraph there's one word I don't understand, it's much easier to learn that one word than if I had several more words around it that were unclear to me. So I'm glad I decided to have a go at this, I didn't expect to like it this much, but somehow I just do. Liz 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mike789 Newbie United States Joined 6269 days ago 39 posts - 51 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 197 of 244 15 November 2009 at 10:23pm | IP Logged | ||
Thanks, Mike 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 198 of 244 16 November 2009 at 12:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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I do my wordlists (and translations, when I do them) on paper, some people insist that it helps just to write things out in full the good old-fashioned way and I guess I believe them, and it lets me review my wordlists whenever, plus there's a lower risk of writing something wrong by mistake (we all make typing errors don't we). All my wordlists are on an A5 sheet of paper, which is half the size of normal A4 (about the same as letter paper in the US, I think). The Italian columns are in a different colour than the English column in the middle.
How I do wordlists + roundtrip translation (first 15 texts) The first thing I do is read through the text (without printing it out) and write down every word I don't know in the wordlist along the left side of the page, followed by a snippet of the sentence from the text in the next column, as an example of how the word is used in context (how I deal with sentences with more than one unknown word). I tend to look up the words as I write the list, or as soon as I'm done writing it all down. The word on the left is always in the basic dictionary form - infinitives, nouns in their singular form, and so on. Then on the same day, I write out the L1 translation in the middle column - but only the translation that is relevant to that specific context. The next day I write a translation of the text on another sheet of A5 with each language in a different colour, splitting the text if I need to use both sides, so that the translation and re-translation of the first half goes on one side, and the other half on the other side. The translations vary from hyperliteral to writing out what sounds natural in English, it depends. Then on the third day, I translate the L1 column of the wordlist back into Italian. On the fourth day, I translate the text back, trying not to go by memory too much. Then on the fifth day, corrections, writing the correct Italian word or expression over what I wrote in a darker colour if I made any mistakes. How I do wordlists on their own (text 16 onwards) Pretty much the same thing, except I don't translate the text itself - if they're longer than a page in Word it's too much work to translate the whole thing back and forth. So I simply underline the words I intend to use, looking them up as I go, then write out the first column as well as the context column a few hours or days later, looking things up again as I work my way through. Then I leave it for a day or so before I write out the L1 translations that immediately come to mind, then later try again, and look up the words I need to before writing down the translation. Then I leave it for at least a day again, before writing out the Italian words I know from the translation, and for the ones I don't immediately remember, I might spend some time looking over the first columns before having another go, until I've completed the last column of the list. The word count Every text I work with gets pasted into a Word file reserved for wordlist texts only. After adding a new text I run the file (well, files now, I've split them in two parts) through this word counter for a total number of unique words from all the texts I've worked with so far, which is what gets posted here. Every new text adds between 150 and 350 new words to the word count, but that doesn't mean I study that many new words each time. It's not perfect, but it's a good estimate of the number of words I've encountered in my texts, and a useful enough approximation of how many words I've studied so far. Of course you're only going to see so much in a handful of texts, so there are always words that I know that have come up elsewhere that haven't been included in the count, but as I do more and more texts hopefully those will be included somewhere, or compensated for by the words that shouldn't be in there but get counted anyway. On that note, this is only one part of what I do - it's heavily supplemented by reading and listening, which is great for reinforcement of what I've learned from doing wordlists, as well as teaching me a range of other things as well. But I like doing wordlists as preparation for the other things I do alongside, it helps to have a head start on the vocabulary side of things. 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 199 of 244 19 November 2009 at 8:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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Been studying my wordlists here and there when I have time, getting quite busy now so I'm not even going to try to plan how often I want to start new wordlists.
Had a nice experience the other day while listening to a song - one of those moments where you forget that you can understand it, despite knowing all the words I could hear the sound of Italian the way it sounded to me before I started studying. A nice reminder that I do in fact ADORE Italian. One of the only downsides of learning this lovely language is that you lose that original beauty you saw in it and you can't get it back, it's almost impossible to hear the sound of a language you can understand as if from the outside without your knowledge of it interfering. In some ways I think that sense of beauty and replaced it with meaning - misunderstand me right, I love Italian at any degree of understanding, but it was just nice to hear it again. (I can still get a similar effect from listening to things in napoletano if I feel the need to hear that beauty again, it's not the same but close enough in music at least, so it works more or less. And napoletano is lovely in its own right.) Also, I had a word from a recent wordlist come up in an English text - the English equivalent of the word was almost identical in structure and apparently also in meaning, so the translation from Italian didn't do me any good since I didn't know the word in English, but then it came up out of nowhere in a completely unrelated text and made more sense after seeing it in context there. Nice to be able to transfer that sort of thing to Italian, I think I more or less get it now. Weird that the English word showed up just a few days later, but oddly reassuring that it's reasonable to do all this. I'm not much of a believer in coincidence, so I like it when these things happen. Another thing I find interesting, that happens every so often, is seeing the connection between an Italian word I know and a Latin word I don't, it can lead to all kinds of weird associations though. Sometimes that's a good thing, other times, not so much. I really should start reading LOTR again - at least mass read something. I don't really have time for much, but I do have some little moments that could be filled with something like reading without having to take time away from other things. November is a fun month in this part of the world, so I might start reading a bit in the morning while I spend my minimum 15 minutes in front of my daylight lamp (my darling), or I might read a bit at night as a break from trying to sleep after an hour or two of failed attempts. To my surprise the hours at Schiphol during my stopovers in October just flew by because I spent most of my time there reading (who knew?) but somehow I don't get that much of it done when I'm home and have More Important Things in a mile-long queue crying for attention. I suppose I could fit in anything from 10 pages to a chapter a day though, it's meant to be extensive reading after all, not intensive, so it takes less time. Most of my other reading tends to be intensive these days, because there are usually few enough words I don't know that it makes sense to look them all up. But I still think I need to read something extensively, and I'm not even halfway done with the first part of the trilogy yet, so I'm sure I'd benefit from using those little moments for something useful. Besides, LOTR is awesome, and inspiring, so it'll be good for me in other ways too. As a last comment, a big thanks to the Italian educational system for producing decent spellers. On the whole it seems like most people make the effort, yes some people write Youtube comments sms-style, but at least they're consistent with most things, and not a seemingly grammatically challenged bunch like many Norwegians (hint: if two words can be combined into one, more often than not they should be - it's not rocket science). It would make things a lot harder for us learners if most sentences were littered with mistakes, so I'm grateful that the random pixel people whose comments I read at least bother trying, and know enough about their own language to actually write well most of the time. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 19 November 2009 at 8:10pm 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 200 of 244 23 November 2009 at 6:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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So someone's asked me in a PM which idioms dictionaries I bought way back when, and what I'd recommend they buy. Thought I might as well post it here in case anyone else is interested in getting an idioms dictionary...
If I had to choose again and could only buy one, I'd probably get Barron's Italian Idioms. It sorts idioms by the most significant word, which is usually a good approach. In any one entry you'll find the base word and its most common meaning, the idiom itself and a translation or equivalent in English, and then an example of its use, including a translation. It has two indexes (indices?), one listing English idioms alphabetically so you can find what you need even if you don't know the Italian word, and another for Italian idioms in case you're unsure which word to look up. It also has a list of common abbreviations and unit conversions in the back. Lovely little book. I also have 2001 Espressioni Idiomatiche, also by Barron's, which uses the same sort of setup - word, idiom, example. But this one is larger, and some idioms are illustrated. But unlike the little Barron's book, this one is bilingual, so you can look up an idiom from either language and find its equivalent. I quite like this one. I also have Streetwise's dictionary/thesaurus and Hide This Italian Book, but I don't really use them - although if and when I decide to try to pick up new terms by category, or need something situation-specific, they'll probably be useful. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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