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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| 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 137 of 182 08 January 2010 at 11:52am | IP Logged | ||
Yes I am :) I didn't know you could absorb more or less the whole grammar of a language in such a short time. That's not to say I have it down pat, but I can recognize and understand it and I should get to a point where I can use it myself without any further explicit instruction, just by observing it from now on. All in all I'm extremely pleased. :) 1 person has 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 138 of 182 08 January 2010 at 3:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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Reading your post on the book "La lingua Italiana per stranieri" I think I've used and finished a similar book in
Dutch to learn well Italian grammar. For me it also was a big leap forward. 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 139 of 182 09 January 2010 at 4:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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REVIEW: LIS TEXTBOOK (PROCESS AND PICTURES)
After writing the review of my textbook the other day, I thought I should do a follow-up. What I wrote in the review should be sufficient for anyone to make up his mind on whether to use this textbook or not, but it's still a bit distant because it's not one of those resources like Pimsleur that everyone knows. Furthermore, for someone who's in the same place I was a few months ago, uncertain about what to do and how, I think it's helpful for people to describe their own process. Not that you'll find anything innovative here, but just to see that yes, someone has done this particular thing, and so it doesn't seem quite so foreign or weird (or crazy) anymore. MY PROCESS Here's what I did. I ordered the textbook from the publisher and then I didn't really know what to do with it. At first I thought "oh this is the same kind of textbook I've used in foreign language learning at school and I hated those". So I did the first two chapters quite casually, just reading the text and filling in the blanks in the book itself. I felt that I wasn't really learning a lot from this, it wasn't substantial enough. So I abandoned it. A couple of weeks later I was finished with both Pimsleur and Michel Thomas and I needed something new to *do*. So I picked up the textbook again, started flipping through it. It hit me just how much grammar content it has. When I compare it to the grammar reference I have, basically every topic in there is also covered by the textbook. And it's not like I had anything better to use, so might as well, right? So I started. But this time I went about it more thoroughly. I would copy out all the instruction and write out the exercises in full. I wasn't yet convinced that it would work, that I would absorb it all, but I thought it was worth a try. I kept this going for maybe 2 weeks. Every day I would sit down with the textbook for 2 or 3 hours and do this. I noticed that I got many of the exercises right. It gave me a sense of satisfaction. It wasn't as boring as I thought it would be. Doing this everyday I could breeze through a chapter in 3-4 days, 5 at most. Progress was quick. After just a couple of weeks I realized that I was happy doing this and I would do the whole book this way. After that initial period, my routine was firm, I never changed it after that. I'd grab the book and start going. After I had written 4 pages of handwriting (or 6 pages if I was feeling eager), I would stop. It would take me about 2 hours, sometimes more sometimes less. I gave myself free license to be distracted throughout. To check email, to read forums. When you're at work for 8 hours a day, you're not literally working the whole time, so same thing applies here. I'd do more or less the same amount of work everyday, but sometimes it would take more time, sometimes less. And that's totally cool. The routine was sustainable. My progress was quick enough that I never really got bored with this. And my retention was high. Whenever I would hit material that was tougher, I would slow down and do smaller doses. I would do a chapter over 5 days instead of 3, just so that I had a longer exposure to the topic. The textbook was a constant in my daily Italian. I always started with that, and after I would do other things based on time and preference. TIME COMMITMENT The whole thing took about 200 hours, over 3.5 months. That comes to about 2h/day. It completely trumps any other Italian activity I've done, and I think it was time well spent. During this period I used almost no other learning materials, just Assimil very sporadically. The rest of my Italian time was filled with passive learning. LIS TEXTBOOK - COVER These two are the ones you need. The textbook (500 pages, red cover) and the answer key booklet. 
>> Full size << LIS TEXTBOOK - EXAMPLE CHAPTER Here is chapter 10. You can see it begins with a dialog. The point of the dialog is to use all the new grammar that's taught in the chapter. The new grammar appears in italics in the dialog. At the bottom you have the vocabulary listing. These are all words new to this page, and you have this on every page in the whole book. 
>> Full size << 
>> Full size << Then comes the grammar instruction. As you can see, it's very sparse for explanations. The mode of instruction is to show you how the grammar works. The idea is that if the material is clear enough as is, you don't give an explanation. Otherwise it might be harder to follow for the learner (who doesn't know that much Italian yet). 
>> Full size << And here is how I would learn from the chapter. I copy the instruction more or less as printed. 
>> Full size << Here is the next page, with exercises pertaining specifically to the material that has just been taught. As you can see, the instructions for the exercises are very brief and I never had trouble understanding them. 
>> Full size << These I would write out in full, filling in the missing part. Once I had done all 10 of them, I would check the answer key booklet and underline in blue if it was correct, or correct in red if not. 
>> Full size << Towards the end of the chapter they have these exercises which are called "test", which just means they will quiz you on anything you've learned in the whole chapter. 
>> Full size << These I would do the same way. 
>> Full size << LIS TEXTBOOK - BIG STACK OF PAPER As you can imagine, by doing all this handwriting the paper would stack up. Here is the whole stack, it fills up my ring binder. 
>> Full size << 
>> Full size << Edited by numerodix on 10 January 2010 at 3:08pm 12 persons have 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 140 of 182 10 January 2010 at 3:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well then, back from my summary mode to the business of daily life. After I finished the last textbook chapter in December I've felt very lazy about reviewing. Since then I've only done three chapters of reviews. After the first half of the book I would review two chapters in a day, but now I've lowered the pace to one, or even spreading it out over a few days.
There is something about the psychology of "finishing" a task that makes me unwilling to go back to anything to do with that activity. So I have to push myself to get through these reviews. The thing is that they are useful for finding things I missed the first time. And as I mentioned in the review post, often moving forward makes you understand something in the past, so now I have the chance to look over the old material from a better vantage point. Anyway, I'm not being too hard on myself for this. I'll get it done eventually, the pace doesn't matter. In the bigger picture, I am actually approaching the ultimate conclusion of my Italian adventure. I have less than 100 hours left to complete. How time flies. All of a sudden I worry that I won't finish certain things that should be done by the end. 1 person has 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 141 of 182 10 January 2010 at 3:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm sustaining my opinion: I've finished the "same" study-book, only without the drawings.
You did a nice and worthful job !!! Congratulations !!! 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 142 of 182 10 January 2010 at 5:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks :)
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 143 of 182 11 January 2010 at 3:15am | IP Logged | ||
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I've been doing a bit of metathinking again. As you'll know I'm planning to start learning Dutch soon. At some later time I would like to tackle French. I'm currently leaning towards taking a break from starting up new languages for a while. If I did that I would have 18 months of Italian and 12 months of Dutch before I did anything else. I think that might be very useful to get a good footing in Dutch and solidify my Italian.
On the other hand.. is there anything to lose by starting French earlier? I'm not sure. Is there anything to lose by getting a grounding in French as I have already done with Italian? I am enjoying Italian heaps at the moment, now that I can read and watch movies. And I have a lot more to go before I reach some kind of fluent level. Then I'll have to reconcile that with Dutch somehow. Adding yet French would be a distraction from those two, probably more than a risk of any kind. 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 144 of 182 11 January 2010 at 2:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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So I finished Assimil today. Recently I've been going over one lesson per day, and today was the last one. They present a good slice of the language, I'm impressed. I haven't gotten that much out of it myself, I've used other things. But I don't reject the idea of using it for other languages. I'm not going to review it, because I don't think it's much benefit to review something I've used sporadically, better for someone to review it who's really gotten a lot out of it.
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