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Hendrek’s Italian TAC - The Romantics | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4887 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 17 of 38 07 February 2012 at 9:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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uh oh ... I just checked out JLU and GLOSS for the first time. uh oh 'cause I'm at work
and will need to resist the temptation to play around on those sites all day. This is the first I've heard of them, so thanks for the links! 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 18 of 38 14 February 2012 at 4:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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A day late again... which may as well mean that my weeks start on Tuesdays here now.
This past week has been a mixed bag of results. I've done quite a bit of studying, but this sort of studying that I've been doing makes it hard to gauge progress. Since I've been pretty actively using the 6WC twitter bot, I'll add up the hours there as my official study time: 6 hours, 40 minutes of reading** 9 hours, 25 minutes of podcast listening (during commutes, gym, walking dog) 45 minutes re-listening to my audiobook 1 hour of writing 4 hours of JLU time (I must have forgotten to log some of this because I'm sure I've spent more than 4 hours) 1 hour, 15 minutes of Skype (I had a refreshingly easy time conversing in Italian) 1 hour, 10 minutes using lingro / reading news For a total of 24 hours and 15 minutes last week... which means that either the twitter bot hasn't kept up with all the tweets (which is true), or I'm double-counting Monday from last week's post of 17 hours and this week's post of 24 hours, or both. Either way, my total for the 6WC so far is just shy of 40 hours, which I suppose isn't too bad for also working full-time. It's amazing how much "down-time" one has, such as commutes, errands, chores, etc, where an iPod can be used to continue studies. **Sadly, a language-learning semi-tragedy has occurred: I was getting my car worked on and had my Le Cronache di Narnia book with me (never waste down-time!). I then proceeded to leave the book in the store and didn't realize it until that night. Alas, it has not been found and likely never will... this is a decent blow to my efforts, since I was 1. enjoying the story (I've never read Narnia, and it's pretty good) 2. really getting into the translator's style and being able to pick up the meaning of new words very quickly, which has been helpful with my extensive and intensive listening periods. Whoever decided to "borrow" the book is in for a surprise when they realize "hey, this isn't in English... or Spanish". Now I have to switch to a different book, and have picked up Italo Calvino's Il Barone... but it just isn't the same yet. Edited by Hendrek on 14 February 2012 at 4:57pm 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 19 of 38 14 February 2012 at 4:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Kanewai:
JLU and GLOSS are both great. I emailed the GLOSS folks requesting some Italian material. The issue is a confusion on whether the DLPT5 is out for Italian yet. My testing office says I'm taking that version, but the GLOSS folks think it doesn't exist... so we'll see what happens. This is relevant because GLOSS bases its available materials on the new test. Still, I'm sure this could be very helpful for your Arabic studies. They even have different dialect-specific materials. JLU unfortunately has its actual materials behind a login wall. The publically available stuff is mostly phrase-book military oriented it seems... and nothing for Italian at all... though behind the wall is some greatly useful stuff. 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 20 of 38 22 February 2012 at 3:38am | IP Logged | ||
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OK, it's that time again.
Per my 6WC log, I studied another 21 hours or so this past week, which I think is pretty good. Again, it's been primarily passive stuff, though I did do a bit of translation and some Skype time. Today I read through corriere.it stories and one was a bit difficult with me having to use lingro to get through tough sentences. The others though, I breezed through having to look up only 1 or two words. It's funny how there's a magic number of unknown vocabulary words that makes a text go from challenging to just darn near impossible. I have less than one week left before my test, so it's crunch time for sure. This coming weekend, I will be busier than usual with work, so I doubt I'll be able to pull off another 21 hour study week, but I shall try. 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 21 of 38 28 February 2012 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Ho appena superato il mio esame oggi con un livello 3/3!!!
I can say that this whole teach-yourself thing definitely works if you put in the requisite effort. I went from a working knowledge in Italian of only the names of some pastas and the Starbucks menu to passing the first-level DLPT with the highest score in less than 8 months. I told the lady after the test: "if you tell me that I scored a 3/3, I'm coming around that desk to give you a hug", and that's what I did. I feel this is a justification now for all of the effort I've put in. My wife even congratulated me saying "you should try a really tough language now". Far from being the end-goal, though, this result just pushes me on more since I've now found something (finally) that I enjoy, am good at, and earns me extra cash. I think I'm going to take the approach of switching to production in Italian (more Skype partners and self-talk) after this passive skills blitz of mine. I still have a goal of attaining a C1 by the end of the year. In addition, I may begin to dabble in Mandarin, as that's been calling to me recently... don't really know why, but I think my approach will be to use Mandarin learning materials printed in Italian, that way I get practice with both. At least I can do that with Assimil. Pimsleur is too expensive, so I'll use the library version which is of course in English. Beyond that, a summary of last week: Around 25 hours of Italian practice all logged through the 6WC. I managed to get into 5th place for a short time even! It's a lot of time, but clearly it worked. The test took roughly 6 hours to complete, but I'll count it as 4 hours of "solid" Italian, which it definitely was. That should bump me up a little on twitter. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Hendrek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4880 days ago 152 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Persian | Message 22 of 38 03 March 2012 at 10:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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OK, so I'm still working on Italian as I know that I still have quite a bit to learn. I need to improve my vocabulary still and begin to focus on my production skills. I'm pretty happy with the progress I was able to make in listening comprehension and reading ability. When I was in the school in Italy, the teacher pointed out to me pretty clearly that listening was my weakest link. Now, I have reached the point where I can be listening to the news on a podcast in Italian and actually forget that it's in Italian and not English, because I'm just able to understand it. Of course that doesn't happen all of the time, but I have specifically made that realization. Interestingly enough, my favorite podcast to date is actually broadcast from Australia on SBS radio in Italian. So, I've been learning a lot about the goings-on of Australia.
I have also decided that I am beginning Mandarin studies. I have ordered the Michel Thomas course, Assimil, and remembering the Hanzi. I've also checked out Pimsleur's Mandarin level 1 from the library and have begun it. I have begun using FSI and LearnChinesePod as well. Basically, with the exception of remembering the Hanzi, FSI, and the early podcasts, my approach will begin with the same method that I think was the best for Italian: pronunciation first, then basic grammar studies (MT), then assimil passive, then some L-R, then extensive reading and listening and Skype exchanges. I've already decided it will be best to learn the characters as soon as possible, so Hanzi will be taken on from the start (as soon as the book arrives). I'm not interested in pinyin beyond the initial stages, and if I want to L-R I obviously need to get the characters down sooner than later. Whether that will work for something as diverse as Mandarin, I don't know. I may find that I need a lot more focus on the basics and pronunciation for instance and not even hit assimil and beyond for several months. What I do know is that it will take me much longer to get to a functional level in Mandarin... I can already tell the vast difference in difficulty from the Pimsleur lessons (although to be fair, Italian seemed like a tongue-twister when I first started, too), as the tones are difficult to reproduce for now. Of course throughout all of this, I still plan on practicing and improving my Italian to a full C1 level (including active skills) by the end of this year. I don't know how you all who study several languages at once manage to do it. I need a certain quick-satisfaction on par with reaching a confident level for Italian in 8 months, and I just don't think that is possible if the effort is spread between 2 or more languages below intermediate level (for me). 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 23 of 38 07 March 2012 at 5:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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A day late again!
So, last week I definitely pulled back on the reins a bit, and didn't get 20+ hours, but I did log a decent amount: around 18 hours. However, this is now split between Italian and Mandarin (mostly Italian still). In case anyone out there had any doubt: Mandarin is significantly more difficult than Italian. And that's just to figure out how to approach the language. Then comes the actual learning process. Yikes, and I've only been doing it a week. For instance, I don't think I'm yet *ready* for Pimsleur in Mandarin. This might seem odd since Pimsleur is a true-beginners course. However, I've tried the first two lessons, and I just don't have the requisite ability to follow and reproduce the phonetics and tones accurately yet, even after repeating each lesson a couple of times. Instead, I'm going with FSI and Remembering the Hanzi (RTH) for now. MT and Assimil have not yet arrived. I've only done the first two lessons of RTH, but I must say, it's a great system so far! I have no trouble recalling any of the first 30 or so characters from the keywords after around an hour of actual study time. We'll see if that pace is kept up. I want to step into the characters as quickly as possible, since I know that reading was such a useful way to get everything cemented in my mind for Italian, especially L-R for the speech patterns and oral understanding. FSI seems helpful, but those tones and phonetics are just going to take quite a bit of effort to get right. I want to get them right from the start since they are so foreign to my English speech patterns. Italian phonetics was relatively easy to adopt, but this is a beast. I think with Mandarin I'd be pretty happy to get to a B2 level in 2 years, where it took me only around 8 months in Italian. However, that B2 is in passive skills primarily, as my production ability is still lagging behind a bit. Speaking of this: my conversation partners on Skype are getting less reliable. So am I, as spring is here and I have a lot of work to do outside the home on the weekends, which are also the only good time to talk to someone in Italy usually. I keep trying to start a solid self-talk process, but I could use some advice on how to make it more effective. Has anyone solidified a process for self-talk to improve oral fluency? Any ideas? I keep having the vague idea to "self-talk the Assimil lessons", sort of like trying to describe the assimil lesson using the same vocabulary but without memorizing. It's been hard to get the hang of it though. How else might one improve oral fluency without a speaking partner? I've tried what I think is meant by "shadowing", but if it really is repeating just behind the recording, then I personally can't even do that in English very well, so I don't see how to do it in Italian. Edit: also, what I mean by oral fluency isn't the ability to produce the sounds quickly and accurately (that I can do fine), but activating all of the passive vocabulary and grammar forms in a rapid-enough manner for casual, pause-less speech. Edited by Hendrek on 07 March 2012 at 5:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5205 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 24 of 38 08 March 2012 at 1:20pm | IP Logged | ||
This is my main interest right now as well, particularly for French - I understand it very well so my passive knowledge is obviously good but I'm struggling to reach that level of oral fluency, not least because of lack of opportunity to practice speaking, so I've been giving a lot of thought and effort to trying to improve it. So I feel your pain. I've seen Arekkusu's self-talk exercise recommended a lot (scroll down the page a bit to find it). I've been doing some work like that and I plan to do more. I think it's a good idea to do it with a variety of different material - newspaper articles, videos on various subjects, events in your life, etc. - recently I've mostly just been talking about my day or my previous evening, which has made me good at talking about these particular things, but paraphrasing and giving my opinion on a newspaper article or a video is a lot more challenging so I plan to do more of that. Seems like good training for conversations as a lot of conversations involve explaining something (a story, an event, whatever) and giving thoughts on it. Shadowing (mostly Assimil lessons) certainly seems to have helped my speed and accuracy when I know what I want to say. It's just a case of repeating straight after the speaker like you say (I hope I'm doing it right at least!), trying to mimic their intonation. It's difficult at first but you get the hang of it. There's also the psychological component - if I feel relaxed and at ease then my speech tends to be significantly more fluent. Anyway I still have a lot of work to do myself in this area and I'm very open to other ideas! As usual I'll write about anything that's particularly useful to me on my log. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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