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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 4883 days ago 152 posts - 210 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Persian | Message 33 of 38 08 June 2012 at 3:38am | IP Logged | ||
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Work is still busy, BUT I finally took and passed the tests I had, so I've been able to focus more on languages.
This has been a test of wills, since I am the sort to dive head first into a "new" obsession/hobby and ride it for several months then move on to something else. I had a suspicion that I might have been making excuses on being busy when in fact my language bug had simply moved on. Gladly, that seems to not be the case. I think it's really sticking with me! It was definitely a good idea to start with Italian because I was able to get it to a useable level before I approached burn-out. And the ability to use it motivates me to continue studying it as well as Chinese. It's simply great to be able to sit down and read a book or listen to the news in a foreign language. Even with something like Italian, whose country arguably has news that is readily accessible in the Anglosphere, I've noticed that it's easy to find new perspectives and stories using this other language that I wouldn't encounter just in English. THAT I think is the entire point of all of these efforts. So, I continue to learn both, albeit more slowly than when I was in hyper-drive for Italian before my Italy trip. I may be taking a test in Mandarin in a couple of weeks. I hope that I can successfully test to an A1/A2 level in listening skills (reading is as yet hopeless). I finished the Michel Thomas first course a while ago, and I've been focusing on Assimil since then, off and on as time allowed. Now, it's an Assimil cram session with 2 or more lessons each day and I listen to the lessons on repeat during my commute until I have a really good passive grasp of them or can parse the meaning while listening in real-time. I also still follow the self-talk in Italian method as well as reading. I will be going to an Italian language meetup this weekend where there promises to be a good opportunity to use it. Anyway, that's my rambling update for now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hendrek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4883 days ago 152 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Persian | Message 34 of 38 09 August 2012 at 6:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's been a while now since I posted here, but I'm still at it. I'm away on a trip for work and so mainly it's been reading in my spare time. Mostly Italian work for now, but still productive as much as possible. Still in the TAC.
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 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5210 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 35 of 38 10 August 2012 at 5:46am | IP Logged | ||
Glad to hear that, fellow "Romantic"; Bonne continuation! (Do they use an equivalent expression in Italian?) Edited by songlines on 30 August 2012 at 4:40am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hendrek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4883 days ago 152 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Persian | Message 36 of 38 13 September 2012 at 8:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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Songlines,
Thanks. I don't know that phrase as a particular phrase in Italian or if there's another way of saying it, but "buona continuazione" should be the literal translation. Unless I'm just plain wrong. Which happens... still too often for Italian :) I like Mandarin and want to continue to study it, but there has recently been a change in what my employer would prefer... so I'm going to head back to Persian a little as well. I studied it for almost a year several years ago, and originally found this site while searching for study methods for it during a resurgence in effort. Then I switched to Italian and left Persian behind. Well, I'm working through Mace's book now and also have Thackston's for reference and some audio. Once I get through one of these, I will look for other things. I would go with Assimil as a start, but they don't offer an English language Persian course and I'm not sure getting the French one would be that useful since I don't speak French (still debating if anyone has an opinion). I would LOVE it if there were a Michel Thomas course for Persian, but alas not possible. I believe that MT was the single best material that I used for Italian, as it allowed the inflective grammar to be put into "automatic" mode much more quickly and then I could read much faster for understanding. I wish there were a Persian version. I may check the Pimsleur tapes out from the library again and re-accomplish them to get the audio and spoken part more fresh in my mind. I completed them a while ago. For Italian, I broke down and bought a Kindle a few months ago and have been reading the Harry Potter series and using a built-in pop up dictionary (SUPER helpful for vocab acquisition). I'm almost finished with book 3 now. Also, I'm reading Italo Calvino's "Il Barone Rampante" simultaneously. So far it's a good book, but I'm reading the hard copy and missing my pop-up option a bit :( Still, I can get through it without much difficulty as long as I'm OK with not knowing every word I see. Incidentally, Kindle's regional rules piss me off, because I can't download Italo Calvino in Italian with my US-registered Kindle, though I can buy a hard copy all day long. Anyway, hopefully everyone else's TAC is still going well. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hendrek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4883 days ago 152 posts - 210 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Persian | Message 37 of 38 16 November 2012 at 9:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm not sure how active the TAC still is. I know I see and read garyb's and songlines' updates not infrequently.
My updates: Mandarin is completely on hold for now. Persian is now my primary study focus, with Italian being maintained (and improved) through native materials. It's still challenging balancing 2 languages, even with one being pretty strong. I don't have any idea how the folks who study several at once make any progress in them. Biggest change: I purchased an iPod touch recently and have been exploring how to use it effectively for increasing study efficiency and portability. I have to say that it is extremely helpful! - The most obvious use is probably Anki. I never could use Anki effectively on my computer, because I hate sitting at my computer while at home. With it portable, it's no longer an issue and I can take a few minutes to review whenever they become available. I'm reviewing the Persian vocab for Mace and Thackston with this as well as some Italian. - Podcasts are another obvious use for it, as well as music (I'm just now trying listening to music in Italian, and I like it). - I purchased Assimil's Le Persan Sans Peine (decided the french wasn't too much of a barrier and I can't afford to wait for the Italian version) and have loaded all of the audio onto it. This is after I passed each one through the Hokusai app to speed it up by 25% making it more useful for listening practice. Now I can review the written lesson in the morning to learn the meaning and listen to the recording as I have time throughout the day with ease. - I have the DLI and FSI materials loaded on my google drive and can access the PDFs and audio simultaneously with the iPod via the GDrive app. I just have to align the audio and text better with bookmarks to make it more useable. - The Dict box app is very useful - The kindle app allows me to read all of my kindle books with a touchscreen popup dictionary (Amazon doesn't support arabic script yet, so this is for Italian). - Google translate app is pretty useful too. So, basically this was a great language learning tool to invest in. My goal with Persian is to get to a good B2 level by May, but this is a difficult task. Never underestimate the usefulness of cognates!! It really is true that one can start a romance language from English with a leg up because of the shared vocab. This is the biggest hurdle for me with Persian, because I can't really guess at the meaning of words using my English or Italian. Everything has to be learned. This is one reason why I've decided that Anki is a must this time around. Italian, I could get away with passive learning at a good pace, but with Persian, I have to hammer the vocab into my head. I am still using Mace to some degree... though it's slow-going. Thackston is just not very useful to me because of the incredibly thick grammar terms (I don't want to learn that language!). A book that actually is pretty useful is Colloquial Persian. I just like their parallel text style. The downside is that there is only transliteration, no Persian script. Still, because Persian is pretty phonetic, this isn't a huge hurdle. Anyway, I'm still slogging away at this language stuff. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4890 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 38 of 38 11 December 2012 at 7:28am | IP Logged | ||
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My iPhone has been an amazing tool for the same reasons - it's been liberating, and is
probably the reason I can juggle multiple languages. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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