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The 1-year challenge: Italian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| densou Senior Member Italy foto.webalice.it/denRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6074 days ago 120 posts - 121 votes  Speaks: Italian* | Message 41 of 244 03 August 2009 at 4:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
OW! .... I'd suggest 'Italiensk blå ordbok' because there's NOT a modern bigger one :( or Bussoli, Nino - Ed. Damm - last edition: 1971 Don't even think to buy it here: we only have a 'pocket-size' version while both Danish and Swedish have their own huge dictionary (>700 pages).
That's what I wanted to say when I wrote "Norwegian-ify your Italian" ;) 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 42 of 244 04 August 2009 at 12:19am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks Denis, I'll be sure to look into the ones you've suggested, here and elsewhere - you're right about monolingual but sometimes I get stuck! I might get one for Italian-Norwegian if monolingual ever fails me, so I'm covered for everything. Heck, sometimes it's Italian-Spanish that helps me the most.
Iversen, yes I was referring to the same kind of use of wordlists that you've mentioned here, this was the only kind I had ever done and it just didn't work for me at all and just took any joy I had away. I had no idea there was a better way to do it, so I'm grateful for your contributions and that of others on this forum. I just wish it could get out to more people who are equally fed up with 'regular' ineffective wordlists like I was. It seems like it's presented as part of the pedagogical way of doing things in school, that that's how it has to be so that's what everyone needs to be doing, and the outcome of this whole system as a whole is a bunch of people (thousands upon thousands) who have taken language classes for years but couldn't string a sentence together if their lives depended on it and don't exactly have fond memories of their supposed learning. Thanks for the reminder about the repetition round - you are, of course, right, and I tried this out today by covering up both columns and seeing if the Italian word would come to me easily. So far I'm really optimistic about this, both in terms of liking it (would've never seen that coming - I'm genuinely surprised I'm even writing this), but also most importantly in terms of results, though of course I'm still a newbie at it... So it's kind of early to say and I'll keep working at making this work optimally and adapting things. If I can just fully overcome the resistance against working with wordlists in the first place - caused by using the wrong kind, fairly obviously - then I'll be able to use it properly as an effective tool for some serious vocabulary study, which is certainly needed. The results will be very motivating too, I'm sure. I'm actually fascinated by the connections between words and etymology and all that fun stuff (not being sarcastic here) and sometimes just flip through dictionaries just for the enjoyment of seeing some new things here and there and how it all fits together, so hopefully I'll get to the point of using wordlists for that too, eventually, perhaps when my sources of input no longer provide material for wordlist study in sufficient quantities (not a problem yet!). But first, I need to learn to apply the method enjoyably (it's a pity that the first part of this sentence actually makes a lot of sense to me) before moving on to the more 'advanced' uses of it. Today I did the second part of a 4-part experiment I'd been thinking about trying out - yesterday one of the things I did was make a wordlist out of all the unknown or only vaguely familiar words in a text (actually I think I did this over two days, my weekend days kind of blend together), I went through every word that needed to be dealt with and had a decent level of recall by the time I got to the third column. Then, today, I had a look over the wordlist, covering up the Italian columns and trying to recall the words and expressions from just the translation/explanation. After that, I translated the text into English, a bit like the passive phase of Assimil I suppose. This was useful in itself. Tomorrow I'm going to review the vocabulary again by writing out a review list like Iversen has described - so one column for base (English/Norwegian in my case) and another for the target language, Italian - and then review until I'm comfortable with everything and I can easily recall the Italian words. Then, the day after tomorrow, I'm going to translate my text back into Italian and see how that goes. So: day 1, regular 3-column wordlist for the relevant words in the text, day 2, translate into my target language, day 3, 2-column review wordlist and (hopefully) final vocabulary study, then finally day 4, produce the original text in its entirety based on the translation alone. Hopefully something useful will come of this, and it will help with syntax for sure. Why am I not just doing more of the active phase of Assimil? Well, I might do, but I was planning to type them all up on my computer as I do them, but because of health issues that's been kind of difficult recently, so I had to put that on hold. Oh, and doing this with real texts is kinda more fun anyway. I might just start writing the Assimil lessons out by hand, I suppose that could be helpful in its own right. All of what's described above is done on actual paper though (my apologies to the tree population of the world) so I don't need to be in front of the computer to do it. I'm feeling somewhat better now though (hence the long post, I guess), so I might try to get back into the run of things with Assimil, one way or the other. Also, September is going to be vocabulary month, I'm not sure where to set my target yet, or if I'm even going to set one, but I'm going to spend it trying to pick up as much vocabulary as I possibly can. Input is going to be much more useful when I have a sound base of however many thousand words, so I think it's worthwhile. Anyway, I'm going to cheat shamelessly by trying to learn as much as I can in August as well, not least so that I can learn as much as possible about how I want to use wordlists and tweak my method any way I need to tweak it to make it work most efficiently, so that by September 1st I'm prepared and ready to go. Place your bets now, people. Lastly a bit of speculation, I wonder how much vocabulary I can fit into my little brain by the end of my 1st year of study. I'm not even at the 4-month mark yet, I have no idea how many words I know at this stage (because life unfortunately doesn't come with a percentage progress bar) but I have enough time left that I should be able to learn a decent amount of words, even for active use, by my deadline in late April. Good times! Looking forward to, if not native-level fluency, then at least a relatively advanced level of fluency by then, hopefully. Going to put in the necessary work, so we'll see how far that takes me. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 04 August 2009 at 12:55am 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 43 of 244 05 August 2009 at 6:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Yesterday wasn't the most productive day, mostly because I was in bed sick most of the time I was home, and computer time was reserved for More Important Things that I'm behind on because I can't spend as much time on the computer as I need to. I did, however, get through my scheduled mischief, as well as listening to a bit of music.
Today I translated the text back into Italian, which went well. The words that I'd used in my wordlist weren't difficult to remember at all. The things that were problematic were mostly the things that I understood well enough that they didn't go in the wordlist, but apparently not well enough to remember them on demand, which I suspected would happen, as I have a passive understanding of these words that makes me pass them by without considering them in detail when I see them in a text, but they're not yet in my active vocabulary. To address that problem, I'm adding a 5th day to my project, for clean-up, which will involve going over the original text again to check how it compares with the Italian text I've produced, writing notes on my version in another colour, then compiling a still-needs-work wordlist. I'm still undecided about whether I want to split the days like this, but I'd like to try it to see if spacing things out a bit helps me retain things better, seeing as it'll give me some distance between review sessions and that tends to work well for me vs straight-up cramming, which I just don't do well unless I have an exam coming up in the next 24 hours (at which point it works just super). I'm also going to work towards knowing a rough estimate of my vocabulary, starting now, using an online word counter, which gives you the number of unique words in a text. The texts I use for my 5-day wordlist thing will be the only basis for this estimate - each text I use will be copied into a file containing every text I've done, which I will then copy into the word counter to get the total number of individual words I've gone through in my texts so far. (Edit: Once I finish the active phase of Assimil I will incorporate that into the word count system as well.) Initially it will grossly underestimate the number of words I know, because there will be a great deal of words that I know that will not be included because they haven't yet come up in my texts, and idioms that will only show as their individual components. Gradually the number of words will increase and will hopefully come to approximate the number of words I actually know, since I will see a lot of them again in my texts but simply skip past them without including them in my wordlist (because I already know them, or will study them in my clean-up session) and yet they will still be counted as one unique item in my total word count, even as the number of texts that forms the basis of the estimate increases. Not everything I know will come up in a text, but I can at least have a reasonable expectation that many of the things I know will come up in a text eventually, and the new things I learn using wordlists based on texts will of course be included so it will be useful for that reason alone. It'll give me a tangible way to measure my passive knowledge, and I tend to do better when I can measure the results of my work in some way. So there you go, progress bar. Or, at least, as close to one as you can get, within the limits of my current level of imagination. Just found another text that is not only interesting and funny, but provides me with enough unknown vocabulary for a full-on list, so I'm going to do the second round of my experiment starting today. I'll probably try to have them overlap more in the future, but it's been a weird couple of days. Current word count: 180 unique words. Doesn't look like much, but it's a start. Looking forward to seeing the number increase! Liz Edited by Lizzern on 07 August 2009 at 1:02am 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 44 of 244 06 August 2009 at 10:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Finished up the first round of the 5-day experiment today, and it was sooo helpful just to go over what I'd written after a day away from it and take a good look at what actually went wrong. The parts of syntax where I messed up, the vocabulary I didn't remember, the bits and pieces that just weren't where they needed to be. It helped to go over it with a different coloured pen, writing the correct way of writing it over what I said, in the places where I was wrong, as well as re-reading what I did right. I'm fairly sure that if I carry on doing this, actually forcing myself to go over my own mistakes in this way, I'll be able to pick up the right way of saying things in a more natural way and be able to produce it without too much of a hassle. I can already say I've learned something new and that was just the first text.
I'm halfway done with the second part of round two, that is, translating into English. Again, this is useful in its own right. I'll probably update my word count at this stage of the process, just to see the number 3 days earlier than I otherwise would, and in the hope that it'll encourage me to work with the text, knowing how much more it'll give me... Short post today, enjoy it while it lasts. I can't believe my summer has been this busy. Crazy! Been catching up on heaps of other work today so I only got round to doing day 5 of the previous round and day 2 of this one. Anyway, onto the second half of the text... Current word count: 481 unique words. Still an obscenely low number, but like I explained in my first post about this, it'll be far FAR below the actual number of words I know for a long while, because of what it's based on. But it's still kinda nice to see it increase by that much from one day to the next - I suspect it won't continue to do so. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 29 August 2009 at 12:22pm 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 45 of 244 07 August 2009 at 9:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Went over the wordlist for my 2nd text today, trying to recall the Italian word from the English word, and magically I didn't really run into any trouble. And it's fairly enjoyable still, mostly cause it's intrinsically rewarding to see myself learning things at that rate. I think I'll stick with my 5-day plan for a while, try it out properly, cause I'm LOVING it so far. I might start another text today, I'm not sure how to plan it out so there's an overlap that doesn't leave some days half-empty and others more than full, because I can't always make extra time, especially on days like today when things are crazy for whatever reason. Tomorrow will be better - gotta love weekends. I'll see if I have time after I finish what I have left to do today, I have a couple of texts lined up that I'm aching to get into. So surprising that I actually feel that way about the whole thing, I didn't expect to find myself liking wordlists, but there you go. The results are very promising.
On an unrelated note, I was reminded today that I really ought to learn Greek properly sometime. Pretty. At Easter when travelling around Greece with a group of friends - some Greek, some not - one of them told me that it's my turn to learn Greek now... I should get back into it sometime, I don't know anywhere near as much as I should, considering how many of them I know. Maybe after my 1 year of Italian. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 07 August 2009 at 9:41pm 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 46 of 244 08 August 2009 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Day 4 of text 2 today, so I first went over my wordlist to check that I could produce the Italian word from the English translation - I was surprised at how little difficulty I had in this, considering how many words there were that were new to me - then translated my English text back to Italian, which also went pretty well. I'll check it tomorrow, right now I just want to go over it and find out where I made mistakes, but I want to try to stick to my plan, which means I'll have to leave that for tomorrow. I did, however, think of one mistake I'm prone to making and one I thought I'd made in my translation today, but then had a look at what I'd written, and I had written it the right way! That has to be a good sign. I wasn't even paying attention to that part of the sentence that closely when I wrote it, and it turned out right anyway. Hooray.
Going to start another text today, it's long-ish (that's not entirely true but it's longer than the previous ones) but I think I have time to do the wordlist for it. The increase in unique words with each new text is still pretty significant, but I'll include that in my post tomorrow after I've translated the text. Still haven't decided how I should do this so that my texts overlap sensibly, but I guess I'll figure that out. I can always just postpone what I have planned for one text until the next day if I need to, I think that the way I'm doing it would allow me to be flexible like that, though I don't want to start postponing things - that's hardly ever a good idea. 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 47 of 244 09 August 2009 at 9:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Short post again - I seem to have a flu type thing these days, but I imagine I'll be back to essay-writing in no time. Consider that your official warning.
Wrapped up text 2 earlier today, I wrote about as many comments on that as I did on the first one, good to see my own mistakes like that, because I'd hate to go on just studying and learning and studying some more without knowing what mistakes I'm still capable of making. It's mostly syntax issues that get the red pen treatment (or rather, dark green-blue-green-blue pen), as well as the stupid mistakes. I'm hoping that after doing a few more texts I'll stop making some of these mistakes, or at least think things through more carefully before I write, so we'll see how that goes. Also did the English-Italian part of the wordlist today, I think I maybe-kinda-sorta like doing it on the same day that I do the translation into English, which I also did today. We'll see in a couple of days time if this text works out any better than the previous two. I've caught myself writing the English out with Italian syntax where possible, not sure if I need to knock it off or if it's fine (or even helpful) to carry on doing it. I'm still skipping words that should go in the wordlist - not good, and should be changed. This is the problem I have when I understand things passively well enough that they don't stand out to me when I read or even translate the text, but then on day 4, when I need to translate the text back to Italian... I'm stuck! So I'll need to pre-empt this problem in the future by being more thorough when I do my initial wordlist. Current word count: 759 unique words. One thing that sucks about estimating in this way is knowing that it's far too low, feels a little unfair but I knew it would be this way - hopefully within the next few weeks/months/whatever it'll be close to my actual level of knowledge. 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 48 of 244 10 August 2009 at 11:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Quiet day. Watched some videos on youtube that weren't exactly easy, they were supposed to be funny but I guess I didn't quite get it. I think I have some more vocabulary and idioms learning to do, not to mention cultural things to figure out, before I can really follow that sort of thing. I know comedy in my own country is full of national private jokes so I reckon it's probably the same elsewhere too, but I haven't been studying Italian that long (3 and a half months to be exact-ish) so it's not that big a deal that I can't quite follow everything. A couple of days ago I watched some youtube videos I bookmarked a while back that were too difficult then, but I could follow them just fine now and understand anywhere between 90% and everything, depending on the content (and vocabulary, sigh). I found another few videos, some of which were just FAST, but I could follow most of it. Some of these videos used words that I've used in my wordlists for one of the first 3 texts, which I wouldn't have known otherwise. Win!
Haven't done much besides video-watching today except day 3 for the 3rd text, which involves going over my wordlist from English to Italian. I don't usually do this in writing - maybe I should. Day 3 still feels a little empty whereas other days take up more time, so I might need to re-evaluate how I want to do things, not least cause I still can't seem to find a sensible overlap pattern. Anyway 90% of the words came to mind instantly, another 5% after thinking about it very briefly, and the remaining words just didn't work out right. I think that's because they were words that my brain suspects are relatively rare - rare enough that it's unlikely I'll ever need to use them (which may well be true in these cases), but would understand them if I heard them again. Danger, danger. On a random note, I found a beautiful song in Neapolitan yesterday, and I think I kind of love the language. I'll probably never need it, so I'll probably never learn it... But I enjoyed the sound of it anyway. Before I started studying Italian I had no idea there were so many different languages/dialects/whatever in the country (besides Catalan, which is spoken in a part of Sardinia). For no particular reason the others besides standard Italian interest me too, with only a few exceptions I'm really fond of pretty much every romance language. Some days it looks like I'm destined to focus on this group of languages until I speak the main ones fluently, though I'm not really sure why. I remember having concrete plans about how I was going to not do that, and now I find myself thinking I might want to have a go at Portuguese (which I'm curious about and have materials for and like the sound of) and French (for business purposes only - that is, all the really sweet Assimil courses are French base). It'd be kinda cool, I guess, to know 5 of the main ones well. Not sure what I'll do once I've reached the level I want with Italian... If anyone's still reading, feel free to bias me further in either direction by shamelessly gushing about either 1) Italian and related languages, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese or French, or all of the above, or 2) Any of Estonian, Hungarian, Hebrew, Finnish, Hindi, Icelandic, Greek, Japanese, Mandarin, Ancient Egyptian... Which have all ended up on my hitlist. I still can't tell which camp I'm in. Liz Edited by Lizzern on 10 August 2009 at 11:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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