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Hendrek’s Italian TAC - The Romantics | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Hendrek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4880 days ago 152 posts - 210 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Persian | Message 1 of 38 16 December 2011 at 7:36pm | IP Logged |
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I've been learning Italian for around 5 months now and I aim to take myself into a solid C1 range by the time 1 year rolls around (July) and maybe even C2 by the end of TAC, though I will probably add a language once I'm confident in Italian. I imagine that I'm around the B1-ish level now, given that I can understand a decent part of radio broadcasts, most normal Skype conversation (I find this easier than radio... probably because folks naturally speak more clearly for me), and that I'm working on reading my second novel right now (first was with L-R), which I can more-or-less do without a dictionary... knowing enough to infer the meaning of unknown words from the context, and only looking up the ones that really pop up a lot. I've been conversing at every chance with Italians on Skype, but not nearly as often as I'd like with the time zone difficulties! I would say that I've put in about 400 solid hours to date, but I haven't been logging it.
Which brings me to the next part: I'll be in Italy over the holidays in Sicily enrolled at a language school and all-around traveling and having fun. I'll be trying my hardest to speak only in Italian while there, and will consequently not be producing any logs in English for the duration of my trip, but I will try to use this venue as a way to practice writing in Italian on a near-daily basis... probably as an overview of things learned in class and things I've seen and done on the trip. The real challenge for me will be maintaining a degree of immersion despite my wife's likely efforts to sabotage it (this is tongue-in-cheek of course). She has not been able to study nearly as much as I and is still probably at the A1 to (maybe) A2 level, and it will be difficult to speak with her solely in Italian, and she will naturally be her social butterfly self with fellow classmates who will probably speak English better than Italian, thereby drawing me into English-speaking situations at every turn! But it's alright, because we'll be having a great time on vacation, all language learning aside. I will be keen to keep track of the efforts of my fellow Romantics, especially the Italian logs, where hopefully I'll be able to offer some help here and there. ... I just realized that another benefit of writing in Italian is that my usual obvious tendency to be overly wordy will probably be kept in check! :) Ciao a tutti! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Hendrek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4880 days ago 152 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Persian | Message 2 of 38 21 December 2011 at 12:21am | IP Logged |
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Oggi è stata una buona giornata per i miei studi... almeno finora.
I spoke with someone on Skype today for about 45 minutes switching between English and Italian. I also chatted with a few via text in Italian. Chatting via text has become pretty easy for me, but speaking still poses a little bit of a challenge. I am getting good at circumlocution though since my vocabulary is lacking and I seem to detest flashcards (or at least I can't make myself study them). Ieri sera ho visto i film "Giorni e Nuvole" e "La Scorta" in Italiano. I only have netflix streaming, and they only offer English subtitles unfortunately, and don't even give the option of turning them off in most cases. Also, the selection of Italian films is pretty sparse, and some of them seem to have been done in the regional dialects... some films that I've tried watching were actually in Napoletana mostly (Gomorrah comes to mind), which I cannot understand at all. Today, I did a bit of re-reading with LR on "Uomini che odiano le donne". I've looked up the meaning of most of the unknown words and now use the LR method to recognize them more readily in spoken speech. The reader for this book actually speaks very quickly, which is helpful, as I've noticed that my understanding of spoken Italian has been improving immensely since I began the LR method. The Assimil dialogues now seem incredibly slow to me, whereas before LR they often seemed much too fast to understand. Now I can hear each word, I just may not know the meaning of each. I've also tried a version of Scriptorium today with Michel Thomas. I listen to the advanced review CD where he says one of his impossibly tense-contorted sentences and then pauses for approximately 2 seconds. I've been trying to think of, say out loud, and write simultaneously the Italian response during these 2 or so seconds. It's difficult just to write that fast, let alone think of and translate, but I think the time constraint is forcing me to think in Italian a bit more quickly. Sometimes I still have to use the pause button for something like "I would have done it for you if I had known that you had wanted it that way" and so forth (L'avrei fatto per te se avessi saputo che l'hai voluto così). I still find that it takes me a while to get into my "Italian mind", but once I've been practicing Italian for a while, it becomes more fluid. ...I think that's enough for today. Ciao 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Mani Diglot Senior Member Germany imsprachendickicht.b Joined 4903 days ago 258 posts - 323 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Swedish, Portuguese, Latin, Welsh, Luxembourgish | Message 3 of 38 21 December 2011 at 8:41am | IP Logged |
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Interesting! You did your LR with "Uomini che odiano le donne"? I'm planning to do my first LR with "Les Hommes qui n'aimaient pas les femmes", too. Even though I'm exposed to French every day (and learning some strange legal vocabulary due to working at a law office) I could do with some improvement of spoken French beyond office and legal talk.
Good luck with your language school and have a nice time in Sicily. Edit: Forgot a verb. Edited by Mani on 21 December 2011 at 8:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Hendrek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4880 days ago 152 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Persian | Message 4 of 38 22 December 2011 at 7:16am | IP Logged |
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Mani, thanks. I highly recommend the L-R method. I was skeptical at first, but I think it really has improved my ability to understand... I still have a long way to go though.
Oggi ho fatto molte cose, ma sopratutto ho trasferito i miei CD sul mio computer, usando Audacity. Given that I was beginning to find the Assimil lessons a bit slow-paced, I transferred all of my Assimil CDs to the computer and did the suggested clean up on them: I eliminated the spoken lesson headers, I removed the pauses in between the sentences and I sped up the lesson by 15%. It sounds to me like the speed I hear on a radio broadcast now, so I think that means it's true to life. I also checked out "All Audio Italian" from my library to give it a shot. It seems to be made by the same folks who did Pimsleur, because the actors' voices are the same. This course gives a lot more in-depth information and actually gives grammar lessons as opposed to Pimsleur, but there was entirely too much dead space, so I cleaned them up. They advertise 6 hours, but I think it comes out to only about 45 minutes total. Audacity is easy to use, and once you get the rhythm down, it's actually a pretty quick process as well. I'm counting it as a little Italian practice because I had to listen to each of the lessons a few times to edit them... I haven't yet finished and will continue tomorrow. My ultimate goal is to get everything on my ancient iPod, since it's a little more portable than my walkman CD player. I also did a 3-way Skype exchange with 2 Italians for about an hour. I didn't know it was possible to do this with Skype, but it turns out two of the Italians I've been speaking to happen to know each other separately, so we've started doing this. I can listen to spontaneous conversations and ask questions when I don't understand something this way, which is helpful. Finally, I just finished watching "Caos Calmo" on Netflix. It was a pretty good movie, but I really REALLY wish there were a way to have Italian subtitles (or none at all) because the English on the screen keeps diverting my attention from listening. I think I will have to bring some cash with me to Italy dedicated to purchasing movies, books, and audiobooks. Buona notte! Vado a leggere un po' prima di dormire. Edited by Hendrek on 22 December 2011 at 7:20am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6618 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 5 of 38 22 December 2011 at 8:37am | IP Logged |
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I find listening-reading very helpful too. And the faster it goes, the easier it is to understand in many cases. When the reader speaks quickly, your brain doesn't have time to get distracted by unfamiliar words.
I don't know so much about the technical aspects of this, but DVD's in Europe are coded for region 2, and in the US they are coded for region 1. So you should probably find out if you can play them or not before buying them. I think there are ways to do it, but I don't know. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lianne Senior Member Canada thetoweringpile.blog Joined 5113 days ago 284 posts - 410 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Toki Pona, German, French | Message 6 of 38 22 December 2011 at 4:40pm | IP Logged |
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You can hack DVD players to ignore region codes, though I'm not sure how exactly that's done. But certainly you can play them on computers using an open source media player like VLC.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Hendrek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4880 days ago 152 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Persian | Message 7 of 38 16 January 2012 at 9:47pm | IP Logged |
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Buon giorno a tutti,
Il mio intento, come ho detto sopra, era scrivere qualcosa ogni giorno (più o meno) in Italiano e solamente in Italiano durante il mio soggiorno in Sicilia. Allora, la prima parte non è stata un successo, come ovvio, ma almeno la seconda è stata fatta perché non ho scritto niente su questo sito durante le mie vacanze. Il problema era che non avevo internet! :P So, I will update the first two weeks in one post after-the-fact. I spent about 20 hours each week in one-on-one sessions (and some sessions with one other learner) with a native speaker teacher. In addition, I read only in Italian and attempted to practice whenever I could by speaking to random people. I also watched some TV, though we were usually out and about. Unfortunately, I was right about not avoiding English. I was pretty much with my wife every moment of every day except during the actual classes, and we were speaking in English for the most part... though I did try to have one-sided Italian conversations when I could since she can mostly understand it from her Spanish, but it's not an easy thing to do. I did not take a test after the course, but the teacher placed me as a good B1 speaker and was fairly impressed with the progress I've made... 0 to B1 in 6 months. My wife was indeed still in the A1 range, but amazingly enough could understand quite a bit from her intermediate knowledge of Spanish. There were some cases where she actually understood what someone was saying and I didn't because she could listen for the "gist" while I was actually trying to hear the words completely and would miss something. I discovered that understanding is still quite difficult for me "a tutta birra". When I'm part of a conversation, it's actually much easier. But listening to a random dialogue or conversation doesn't seem to reveal the context as much, which seems to be the critical difference. Although, now that I'm back in the US and listening to the Italian radio station again, I have clearly made A LOT of progress which is heartening. I did want to buy movies while there to help with comprehension, but they're just too expensive, so I will have to search for a way to download them... unless I find a way to stream more than the 15 or so that Netflix offers. I can and have successfully read novels now, and actually find it becoming almost painless (and I bought about a dozen used books in Palermo for the future). I have just begun the complete Narnia series which I've not yet read in English, so I am interested to read the first book (not counting Il Piccolo Principe... pretty good little book) in only Italian. The rest have been re-reads from the original English. I wonder if it might give me a slightly different understanding of the story to read it only in a different language. The reading has certainly given me a fairly strong passive vocabulary and thus the ability to more quickly move words onto the active side. Speaking still involves a great deal of umming and pauses and such, but I am confident that I could successfully communicate just about anything after a little thought. I even managed to successfully speak to various hotel clerks and such over the phone, which is difficult. Holding a full conversation without relying on a lot of patience on the part of the listener will still take a good bit of work though. In sum: probably about 50 actual hours over the last 2 weeks, while in an immersive environment (though never fully immersed because of the ever-present English). But at least I got the background noise, right? Besides, Sicily was AWESOME! I would whole-heartedly recommend my particular course: culturforum.it in Cefalù for anyone who might be interested. The teacher was very good and the city is beautiful, though very quiet during the winter. It was the best time I've had in years, very relaxing and a great time spent with the wife as well. The only downside: I will really REALLY miss the coffee culture (Starbucks can't even compare to your average gas station coffee bar in Italy). Also the cannoli were great, but hopefully I'll learn to make those. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Hendrek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4880 days ago 152 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Persian | Message 8 of 38 23 January 2012 at 10:39pm | IP Logged |
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One week later:
~5 hours "Practice and Improve your Italian +" audio dialogues during my commute times. I recommend this, since the dialogues are pretty much full speed and colloquial, but with corresponding transcripts and vocabulary and grammar lessons. ~100 pages (4 hours?) of Narnia, finished "il nipote del mago" and have begun "il leone, la strega, e l'armadio"... didn't find as much time to read as I would have liked this week... was still recovering from the jetlag and going to sleep early. ~1 hour relistening to "Uomini che odiano le donne" audiobook. This was the one I originally LR'd. I wanted to see how much easier it is now. Answer: MUCH easier. In fact, I was thinking I might put it into audacity and speed it up 5-10% to make it more native-like. ~1 hour on Skype with a native. I was lamenting that I still feel like my speaking ability is woefully inadequate, though I pretty much understood everything he said easily. He said he notices a marked improvement after my trip. I've always spoken with a clear accent... easy to understand (so I've been told), but he said my increased speed and ease with phrases and tenses and usage of more advanced vocabulary was fairly obvious. I usually manage to log a few hours of Skype each weekend, but this was a home-improvement project-filled weekend. This week, I plan to finish converting all of my Assimil lessons with Audacity. I actually, interestingly enough, stopped using Assimil at lesson 75 back before my trip. But, I was feeling the urge to take it up again after I returned, only to find that every lesson is now painfully slow. So, I'm cutting all pauses and speeding it up by 15%. I plan on burning it all to 1 or 2 discs for the car and uploading it onto my iPod for the gym. I realized that I've been wasting the gym time by not listening to Italian during my daily workouts... so I'm dragging out the original model iPod I still have. We'll see if it still works with iTunes. Also, tonight, I'm going to an Italian language meetup group. These are hit-and-miss as far as whether natives are present, but still fun to try to practice... mostly it ends up being me teaching things, which is helpful for retention and realizing what I still don't know. I just discovered that my university library carries a fair selection of Italian films! Now commences a much better experience than English-subtitled Netflix. E come al solito, accendo la radio ogni mattina al mio lavoro per ascoltare di più. Diventa molto più facile di capirla ogni giorno. Alla prossima Edit: cleanup Edited by Hendrek on 23 January 2012 at 10:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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