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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6726 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes  Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 97 of 182 03 November 2009 at 7:56pm | IP Logged |
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I have three chapters left to revise, it's been going smoothly. I've been making some notes of non trivial things, which should serve as a reminder of my trouble spots. They're not very many compared to how many pages there are in the book, so I'm rather pleased. At the end of every lesson there is that note saying "Adesso Lei conosce x parole". Which I guess is true, minus those in Anki. It's been nice not doing much handwriting, but I suspect it's going to be quite a shock to return to my normal schedule in a couple of days.
I was thinking in terms of grammar that I probably have almost everything present in basic speech now. I'm still missing some stuff that comes up in writing, but we'll get to that soon. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6726 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 98 of 182 06 November 2009 at 7:05pm | IP Logged |
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Well, boys and girls, review week is oooovah! I was rather skeptical as to what I would get out of it, but I think it was worth going over the material a second time. And the notes I made should serve as a reminder of what gives me trouble.
Now we are back to your long awaited regular programming (no, not that kind of programming, hands off the keyboard). New lessons are here! Not surprisingly, it was tough today writing out 6 pages by hand after a break from this routine. For those of you out there counting, we've slid into 100+ hours of textbook discovery, which officially makes this the biggest undertaking this side of the LHC. The first estimate was 160 hours to finish the textbook, but now it looks like 200 will be the lower bound. Andiamo! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6726 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 99 of 182 07 November 2009 at 3:40pm | IP Logged |
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Online language test
I think it's fun to test yourself from time to time on the language if you can find a test to take. Find one I did: clicky. This is a test that is supposed to take up to an hour to complete, so it's quite long. Well, as you know, I've done the first half of the textbook and thus my level would be somewhere in the vicinity of "advanced beginner - beginner intermediate". For some reason these tests always flatter me. Scored 98/120 points (boss!), which made them tell me this: Hai totalizzato 98 punti, quindi hai una conoscenza della lingua Italiana di livello avanzato. Edited by numerodix on 17 November 2009 at 10:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6726 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 100 of 182 10 November 2009 at 2:51pm | IP Logged |
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And that was chapter 15 on gradi di comparazione and gli interrogativi. The first was explained so poorly I still don't really get it. And the interrogatives I more or less figured out already, aside from quale which always had me scratching my head. I'm sure both will be cured with enough exposure, this is not complicated stuff.
I peaked ahead and there actually isn't that much left. 10 more chapters, actually, but there is passato remoto, conguintivo and imperativo in the formal form (easy). Aside from those there are more chapters that give a deeper view on language use and such, should be useful too. Page wise I'm on 289 of 492. Reading has been largely neglected in the last few weeks. I've only reached page 160. And yet it has become quite easy by now, even comfortable at times. My reading aloud is getting more fluent too, although I don't have a way to check whether I'm putting the stress on the right part of the word. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6726 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 101 of 182 11 November 2009 at 12:55pm | IP Logged |
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Passato remoto. Dear god what a train wreck. I used to think I should hold off on the reading a bit so I can learn this and then I'll be able to read comfortably. It turns out to be the other way around. The fact that I've read a bit helps me a lot to comprehend this tense with a million rules and exceptions.
In the book they spend an entire two and a half pages presenting the main rules (-are, -ere, -ire), then rules governing irregular verbs (-dere, -ndere, -cere, -gere) and on top of that a huge list of just plain irregulars. Then in the first exercise following this, they use a number of verbs whose forms are elicited, which obey none of the aforementioned rules, nor are given in irregular form, meaning they have to be looked up one by one in the dictionary. Well if that's what you're gonna do, why frickin bother with the rules?!? Edited by numerodix on 11 November 2009 at 12:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6726 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 102 of 182 12 November 2009 at 9:58pm | IP Logged |
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Well that was quick. Guess they didn't bother wasting much time on passato remoto, it is done with. Really not very hard in terms of usage patterns, just a truckload of irregular forms.
Been reading Khatzumoto/ajatt (the man is brilliant!) and consequently I've warmed to the idea of switching some of my environment to Italian. I specifically declined this option at the start because I thought it'd be too annoying. At any time of day, while not studying, I would need to do something and that would not be the time to look up words. But I decided I could try it now, fully expecting it to annoy me too much. Fortunately it's pretty easy to throw the switch in Ubuntu so it took very little setting up. If I hate it I'll just switch it back, but so far I've had it this way all day and it's not been bugging me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6726 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 103 of 182 15 November 2009 at 5:33pm | IP Logged |
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I discovered something today. Have a look at these two:
http://www.wordreference.com/conj/ITverbs.asp?v=avere http://www.wordreference.com/conj/FRverbs.asp?v=avoir Almost a mirror image. Veeery interesting to know. :) Edited by numerodix on 15 November 2009 at 5:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6726 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 104 of 182 17 November 2009 at 10:15pm | IP Logged |
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Milestone: 3 months
That's 3 months. I have to stress right away how helpful it has been for me to keep track of my activity in Italian. I've counted the hours that I've spent and I've posted lots of updates in this thread. Right now is actually not the best time for me to be writing this, because I've had some distractions the last couple of days and actually haven't been able to do any Italian at all. But since I can refer to my very first post here, where I recorded my goals and my assumptions, I can restore my context. Highly recommended! Metrics Khatzumoto wrote that when you're learning a language you can't measure progress, therefore you should measure activity. I have to agree. I know it sounds like an argument you could use to justify any fruitless activity, but I really think keeping track of what you're doing is a tremendous help against looking back and getting the feeling that you sorta didn't really do anything "significant". So here we go: 302 hours on the meter after 92 days On top of that I've had some other background activities that aren't counted, like listening to radio and podcasts, some light online reading and so forth. This makes up maybe another 50 hours, but it's not terribly significant. Goals achieved? Alright, so there's a reason to do a milestone post after 3 months. Back when I started what I had in mind was that I was after two languages in the immediate future: Italian and Dutch. I would start with Italian, hopefully it would go well, I would learn a lot of stuff about how to learn effectively, and then I would start on Dutch. I had a quiet hope at the time that I could reach my intermediate goal in Italian within 3 months, but I didn't want to have it on the record. I think it's better to keep those riskier objective to yourself. Not even because anyone is going to call you on it, but purely because you can avoid that "uh oh, I told people, now what?" feeling. So where are we? My stated goal at the time was basically to be able to consume content. To read books, papers, forums; to watch tv, movies; to listen to radio and that sort of thing. I also said I wanted to achieve basic writing ability. I think it's fair to say I have achieved that goal, in fact. My reading is at a point where I can make sense of content and enjoy it, not merely read it because it's in Italian. I don't have to force myself to read, and it doesn't tire me that much either. My listening is not quite as good. I can't quite follow fast tv dialog, so if I see the sentence on paper it helps me a lot. I can also understand a lot of song lyrics, if not sung then definitely on paper. But this has more to do with the vagaries of spoken language than anything else. I started reading a regular novel of the kind I'd read in English and while it's not effortless I can follow it quite well. Then there is the writing. So far in my program I've done a whole lot of transcribing text, but very little composition. My writing is very basic, but I can make myself understood and interact on a basic level. This has not been an area of focus so far, so I'm not too concerned about my progress. While it's true I've more or less reached my 3 month goal, I have spent a lot more time getting there than I thought I would. I thought I would be working an hour a day solid, and then maybe do some more things on the side, unregulated. In fact it has been more like 3.5 hours a day on average! I can only say that I'm as amazed as you are that I've been able to keep it up. Francois's estimate reads: "If you speak English and no other Romance languages, an hour of study a day you should get through to advanced fluency within 12 to 18 months at most." I would say he may have lowballed that a bit. If you subtract all the time I've spent on passive learning (watching movies, reading etc) that leaves 250 hours of pure "study time" and I think it's going to take another generous slice of time before I consider myself fluent. My other long term goal was fluency, and I'm nowhere near there yet. Methods Since I had no particular insight on how to learn, my trajectory has been the consequence of the materials I was able to use. I started with audio-only courses, then moved to Assimil, then quickly moved to a textbook track. My program ended up being a lot more grammar heavy than I might have anticipated, purely because I have this textbook and I think I'm learning a lot from it. This may sound surprising, but I've maintained a pretty pleasant relationship with Italian grammar so far. It's clear I've had good materials to explain the various concepts to me. The way I like to think of it is that at the moment I am still learning what the different grammatical concepts are, what they are called, what rules govern them, but once I've done all that I'll just be exposing myself to language and the grammar understanding that is now explicit will become implicit. I'll forget the rules as such, but I'll know them at a functional level just the way I know the grammar of English without explicitly knowing it. Now, I have to say that I strongly suspect my grammar focus has helped me understand content that I otherwise wouldn't have nearly as easily. I know many are opposed to explicit grammar study, and prefer exposure alone, but I have to wonder if it wouldn't have been much harder to understand these concepts that way. I really think so. Vocabulary, on the other hand, is a weak point. I started out with Anki and used it regularly, but I got sick of it. I'm not a big fan of vocabulary study as such, but obviously you need a pretty good base of words from which to infer new ones. What's next? I mentioned that I want to get started on Dutch, and recently I've been thinking about this problem. Obviously my Italian isn't anywhere near fluent, so I have much left to do. Nor do I very much want to scale back the amount of effort I spend on it. But, all told, it's "only" been 300 hours, which I'm sure most people would say is not a huge amount of time to spend learning a language. So here's what I'm thinking. Let it go another 300 hours. The FSI estimate for easy languages was 600 hours to reach the kind of goal I want to reach. It's been 3 months, give it another 3! Then we'll re-evaluate. This seems like a pretty reasonable strategy. It means I still have plenty of time to learn. I can finish the textbook pretty soon and still have lots of time to move onto other kinds of learning. I'm thinking of trying L-R next. I tried it once and it seemed very confusing, but it would be rash to brush it off based on 15 minutes alone. It should help solidy the grammar, it should help with vocabulary, and it should help a lot with idioms and forms of language use. I might also want to try some of the other methodologies various clever people on the forum have come up with. Edited by numerodix on 17 November 2009 at 10:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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