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TAC 2011 - Team Ì - Italian - magictom123 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5593 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 9 of 53 08 January 2011 at 11:24pm | IP Logged |
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I've decided I won't write on here everyday, for the simple reason that I don't have
that much to say. Those logs where people just write 'completed lesson x' are so boring so I've decided I will only write when I have a little more than that to say. Suffice to say, I have been continuing on with Assimil and today was a revision lesson. In an earlier post I have written that I like to listen to a lesson's audio several times. Today I would just like to add to that something a bit strange. Sometimes I shadow the audio, other times I just listen. Either way I am normally stood in my kitchen where my cd player is located. To avoid the tediousness of just standing there or looking out of the window - I play with a yoyo. I have found this to be an activity that is not so demanding as to distract me from listening to the audio and at the same time it is something to do otherwise I do tend to become incredibly bored with anything in a short amount of time and if this where to happen when doing a lesson then I wouldn't get very far. Anyway, I've watched more RAI news and slowly but surely my listening comprehension is improving. Tomorrow in fact will be an opportunity to have a little bit of a self assessment as RAI sports are showing 2 hours of the Italian National Cyclo Cross Championships - and I plan on watching every minute of it and hopefully understanding/absorbing as much of it as I can. Speaking of assessments, before beginning to write this I took an online test to determine my language level - the result was A2. Obviously, there are many flaws with these kinds of test and this one was the norm in that it was just a list of grammar questions. What made is slightly different to others I have done in the past is that you start with a series of questions from the A1 level, and if you get over 70% right you continue onto A2 questions. My results from the test are below: A1 - 93% A2 - 90% B1 - 50% - did not pass! What's funny is that when you think of all the hours you put into learning a language, being on the second rung of the ladder so to speak is not very impressive, nor is it motivating. Anyway, I haven't started using Pimsleur yet just because of the simple fact that I have been lazy. Yes, I know that's no excuse but with the computer crashing I need to swap and sync various things to get the audio onto my laptop/phone and I haven't done it yet. Maybe tomorrow. I am in no panic because Pimsleur is mainly 'overtime' that I'll do when I feel like. Assimil is my main course. I am planning on going to the library on Monday. I did loan out a TY Italian book a while back and I'm thinking of getting it out again. This moment of inspiration/madness stems from having seen the Youtube link from another thread where a certain gentleman learn't Croatian to an impressive level using TY and the FLR method. I might give that a crack. I might not. I just want to remind myself of the book really but I think an additional grammar book might aide me somewhat as I am dubious over my powers of assimilation. In the name of fairness though, I've got to keep plugging on with Assimil. I am itching to reach the active wave. I think the reason a lot of people dislike Assimil is because the passive wave is really long (7 weeks) and in that time although personally I have felt like I have learnt a lot, some people need to test themselves for validation that they are learning and get bored waiting to reach the point where they can and so instead stop. Not me. Lesson 43 tomorrow. The active wave is one week away. Finally, I want to become a teacher and during the course of looking at Uni courses (I already have a degree), I noticed that one of the 3 universities in Liverpool has part time Italian courses, aimed spefically at each of the CEFR levels. They're generally 20 weeks long, once or twice a week for about 2 hours. They are not so expensive either. I might look into doing one of them after completing Assimil. As a warning, in future posts I might start introducing a bit of Italian here and there as practise. Ci vediamo presto! Edited by magictom123 on 08 January 2011 at 11:28pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5593 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 10 of 53 10 January 2011 at 8:18pm | IP Logged |
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Hello all. Another day, another update.
Today's post is quite an interesting one for me at least as last night - I DREAM'T IN ITALIAN! The thing is this has happened before but not on anywhere on the same level. In other dreams, the Italian in my dreams has been muddled words that I couldn't really grasp. This time, however, I can remember the dream clearly and know that in the dream I was speaking Italian clearly. The dream was this: I was sat in the audience of what I believed to be some sort of convention, taking place in a big hall. At the front, there was an announcer and a big 'overhead projector style' pull down screen. On the screen was a man who was a big cheese of some company. The announcer picked me out of the crowd to speak to the man on the big screen in Italian. We chatted for a minute or two. I didn't understand everything he said, and said so in the dream in Italian, as well as asking him to say things again. The funniest thing I remember was that I was still translating in my head from English to Italian - even in my dream! On another note, I did go to the library today and to my surprise and pleasure, amongst the increasingly small collection of language books was TY Complete Italian and also TY Perfect Your Italian. The first books says it goes from beginner to B2 level, whilst the latter says intermediate level to C1. Interesting stuff. I am going to try and acquire the associated audio and start to do these courses alongside Assimil. I now have a target that by May when the Giro d'Italia is run and so televised on TV, I want to be able to understand the vast majority of what I hear on TV. I did watch the Italian National Cyclocross championships but since I had company I couldn't focus on picking up any Italian. However, before this, I was watching RAI news when they cut to an interview with Franco Frattini, an Italian politician. I watched the interview and would say I understood the gist of everything that was said. This was a revelation for me and much encouragement that what I am doing is working - now it's time to pick things up a bit. Edited by magictom123 on 10 January 2011 at 8:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5593 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 11 of 53 17 January 2011 at 8:52pm | IP Logged |
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It's been a week since my last post so I thought I would write something today. My
studies are continuing on well. I have been watching quite a bit of Italian TV, which is definitely helping my comprehension of the language. I would say I am averaging maybe an hour a day of it. I have reached the active wave of Assimil! Finally. It has been enjoyable going through the passive phase but I am glad to feel like things are progressing by moving on to the active wave. The translation of the first lesson is now very easy of course. I made an error or so by adding a pronoun where there wasn't one but this doesn't bother me as it is a minor thing. In my last post I mentioned the TY books. I have read through the first chapter but I haven't been able to do much with them as I can't find the audio to go with them. This is a shame as I want to back up Assimil with something else. Some time in the last week I did an online test via a link posted in another thread. Whilst they are never accurate, this one does test reading, writing and listening skills so maybe it's a bit more worthwhile. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to obtain a B1 score in Italian. I did the same test in English a little while back and only scored B2 though so it goes to show it is not a precise indication of one's language abilities. Edited by magictom123 on 17 January 2011 at 9:28pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5593 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 12 of 53 20 January 2011 at 12:25am | IP Logged |
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Just a short post this evening as it's pretty late. I'm on lesson 54 and lesson 4
today in Assimil. Now, as far as going back and reviewing the earlier lessons goes, I decided that in order for this process to have some meaning, I will try and work out my translation accuracy each day. The rough way I am doing this is to do a quick count of the number of words in a lesson (and exercises) and using the number of errors I make, work out the percentage of correctly translated words. Today, with the fourth lesson, my level of accuracy was at 98%. It's slightly annoying to find you have spelt the odd word wrong when the early dialogues are now so simple to listen to but I am more than happy with the result so far. I only came up with this idea yesterday as an alternative to just thinking 'hmmm, that was alright' or 'that went well, apart from x'. Amazingly, yesterdays accuracy level was also at 98% - so good so far. Edited by magictom123 on 20 January 2011 at 12:26am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5593 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 13 of 53 24 January 2011 at 11:08am | IP Logged |
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I am now convinced of the usefulness of Assimil. Of course I have a long way to go
until I reach my goal but since I started this course in November, I can tell that my Italian has improved rapidly. Of course watching Italian television daily is having some affect on this but I feel that the TV is complimenting what I have I studied previously. My previous problem with Assimil was that I didn't do it 'with ease'. I have read of others who have come to the same conclusion and I feel it is often overlooked. The idea behind Assimil is to be a part time study course. Learning dialogues inside out or loading a load of words into a SRS program seems to work for a lot of people but not for me. Of course, along the way I could probably recite some of the sentences from the book, but I have tried to maintain a sense of relaxed study to prevent the burnout that occurred the last time I attempted this course. I think I have been successful in this and from now on this will be probably the only way I could ever complete such a course. A motivating factor for me has been the decision to keep a record of my translation accuracy from the second wave of Assimil. I only started this from lesson 4 and haven't included the revision lesson as the content to translate is much reduced. A quick note: This is not scientific in any way due to how I have decided what constitutes an error. As we all know, Assimil is not perfect with it's translations and so sometimes I have written something that differs from the English translation but I believe to be right. In future, I will post the results as a weekly block but here are the results so far: Lesson 4: 98.11% Lesson 5: 96.95% Lesson 6: 98.04% Lesson 7: Revision Lesson Lesson 8: 96.79% As you can see, the accuracy of my translations is pretty high. I am really happy with the results so far whilst understanding that I am translating the easy beginner lessons for the moment. The errors I have made have been simple mistakes such as spelling errors or the use of a capital letter in an inappropriate way - small things that don't concern me at all at this stage. As a guide to how this translates to errors per lesson, I counted 156 words for yesterday's lesson and made 5 errors (2 in the title - derrr hahaha). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| canada38 Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5495 days ago 304 posts - 417 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Japanese | Message 14 of 53 28 January 2011 at 2:22am | IP Logged |
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Where did you take the A1 and A2 tests online? I would really like to try myself. I hope
your studies are going well! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5593 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 15 of 53 28 January 2011 at 2:20pm | IP Logged |
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Hi Canada,
Here is the link to the online tests: http://www.italian-test.com/index.htm Also, you may be interested to know that there are some official CEFR past papers available on the net here: http://www.telc.net/en/what-telc-offers/italian/ I plan to print out the sheets and download the audio and do this as a proper timed test once I have completed Assimil. I believe the answers are at the end of the paper, so it is the closest we are likely to come to an official test without actually sitting one. Ciao, a presto! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5593 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 16 of 53 29 January 2011 at 1:19pm | IP Logged |
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I have just noticed that it was 4 weeks yesterday since I started this language log -
so here's an update: This weeks translation accuracy from Assimil's second wave: Lesson 8: 96.79% Lesson 9: 96.18% Lesson 10: 96.71% Lesson 11: 95.95% Lesson 12: 94.55% Lesson 13: 98.53% I am very happy with these results. Moving on, I am going to sort out Pimsleur today so that I can start using it. Now I'm on the active wave with Assimil, I think it would be good to back it up with a few other things. If I start Pimsleur now, I should finish it around the same time as Assimil. I am also going to go over MT again. I went to the library a few days ago and got another couple of language books out on loan. I need to find the audio for TY Complete Italian and TY Perfect Your Italian. Finally, I have been watching a lot of Italian television. Some days I understand more stuff than other days - I suppose it depends on how tired I'm feeling as well. Overall, I am happy with the way things are going and can see an improvement in myself. I just need to find a regular outlet for my Italian speaking and then I'll be really happy. I am thinking of joining the growing trend of posting language related video's to Youtube. It's not ideal but I'm sure I'll receive plenty of critiques there hahaha. One of these days I'll post something more insightful, but not today - ciao ciao! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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