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JohannaNYC
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4450 days ago

251 posts - 361 votes 
Speaks: Spanish*, English*, Italian
Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Arabic (Egyptian)

 
 Message 33 of 50
31 January 2013 at 5:11am | IP Logged 
Kerrie wrote:
JohannaNYC wrote:
@Kerrie it's a good thing you live in the
US. If I'm not mistaken you can turn on
the close captioning to most Spanish shows. There's also the SAP option for a lot of
shows. Have you been able to find any Croatian subtitles for Croatian shows??


We don't even have cable, so I have no idea about Spanish captioning. There's plenty of
stuff on the internet, though. :)

I haven't found ANY subtitles for any of the Croatian shows I've found. It's rather
disappointing, to be honest.


According to my Croatian friend there's no such thing as Croatian closed captioning. In
Croatia they only have subtitles for shows/movies in other languages :( So the only way
to find them would be if someone decided to take it on as a personal project.
1 person has voted this message useful



JohannaNYC
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4450 days ago

251 posts - 361 votes 
Speaks: Spanish*, English*, Italian
Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Arabic (Egyptian)

 
 Message 34 of 50
31 January 2013 at 5:14am | IP Logged 
Hendrek wrote:
Johanna, thanks so much for the thorough review. I will keep Paul
Noble in mind if and
when I start French (longer term plan). I personally found the Italian MT course to be
helpful, but primarily once I got to the review discs. I would put them on loop during
my commutes and answer in the brief pause provided until I had them down pat. These
are
the CDs where it's just MT saying the word or phrase in English, about a 1 second
delay,
and then him giving the correct Italian version. Trying to say everything within that
brief pause eventually trains it to be automatic, which helps a lot in conversation.


Thanks for reading that long review. I'll see which MT CDs they have in the library.
I'm listening to the Arabic MT again and this time I'm finding it a lot easier to "talk
over" the students when it's time to answer.
1 person has voted this message useful



JohannaNYC
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4450 days ago

251 posts - 361 votes 
Speaks: Spanish*, English*, Italian
Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Arabic (Egyptian)

 
 Message 35 of 50
31 January 2013 at 5:21am | IP Logged 
Amerykanka wrote:
Hi, Johanna! Where are you in Assimil Italian with Ease? I
have only finished three lessons (I am
supposed to be doing another one tonight - who knows if that will happen, though :) ),
but so far I really like
the book. I am so glad I bought it!


I'm actually all over the place with Assimil Italian with Ease. I'm using them in
random order for Scriptorium. But I will restart doing the audio in order this Friday
when I start the 6WC with Italian. Are you following the instructions or making up your
own? How much are you able to understand without the translation?
1 person has voted this message useful



Amerykanka
Hexaglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5169 days ago

657 posts - 890 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish, Polish, Latin, Ancient Greek, Russian

 
 Message 36 of 50
02 February 2013 at 4:37am | IP Logged 
I'm mostly following the instructions, but I don't have any qualms about changing things up every now and
then. :) I understand pretty much everything without looking at the English due to my Spanish and my Latin,
so I just use the translation to clarify specifics.

Good luck with the 6WC (and the rest of your studies, too, of course)! :)
1 person has voted this message useful



JohannaNYC
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4450 days ago

251 posts - 361 votes 
Speaks: Spanish*, English*, Italian
Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Arabic (Egyptian)

 
 Message 37 of 50
11 February 2013 at 6:45pm | IP Logged 
If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much are three graphs worth?

I seem to be unable to check in every week as I originally wanted to do. But in this
case it's a good thing because I get to compare what I did before the 6WC started
(which I'm doing with Italian) and what I'm doing during. The results even surprised
me! I'm glad I spent the time doing these graphs as they really drive the point home, I
need to take care of my hard languages and worry less about my 6WC score.




I'm making progress in Arabic, but slowly. This has a lot to do with not having a
regular speaking partner and the ones I've tried on Skype haven't worked out so well. I
need to get started on those italki lessons soon to correct this problem. I haven't
worked on the script in almost three weeks (since 1/23). I'm having a hard time taking
time out to improve my Arabic script when my schedule is so tight and my priority is on
speaking and understanding Egyptian Arabic. So we'll see what happens with that.

I'm still very happy with the material in Colloquial Arabic of Egypt and the way
it's presented. So much so that I decided to try the series for my other two languages.
More on that later. With Michel Thomas the students are still annoying, but it's
getting easier to talk over them. Listening to the entire course (except the first 2
CDs) a second time is proving very helpful and there are even a few tracks here and
there that I don't remember listening the first time around.





Having someone to speak-to in person on a regular basis was great, but now he's gone so
it's back to Skype. Like in Arabic I'm really loving Colloquial Croatian &
Serbian
. All the recordings and the entire book are in ijekavian and it's not
grammar light at all, but they explain things in a very down-to-earth manner. It also
has three main dialogues per chapter one with a tourist traveling to Croatia, another
dealing with everyday situations and a love story where we get to learn more informal
and intimate words. I wish I had started with this book instead of Teach
Yourself
, too bad I don't have a time machine.




1/28 - 2/3 (Total: 12 Hrs & 1 min)
2/4 - 2/10 (Total: 24 Hrs & 41 mins)

I tried Colloquial Italian but based on completing the first chapter I don't
think is gonna be as good as the Arabic and Croatian versions. I'll complete another
chapter before deciding whether to drop it or continue with it. I'm very happy with
Pimsleur and Assimil, but since I'm mainly doing Assimil as an
audio course I also want to have a textbook.

I'm spending a lot of time reading Twilight since the challenge started and once
again I have to say it may not be great literature, but it's a great learning tool.
Having the same words repeated over and over again definitely helps me learn them. Of
course as I'm just reading them I'm not sure how to pronounce the longer words that are
completely different than Spanish. I'll see if I can get the audio book for it, if
there is one.

I am very comfortable speaking in Italian. I can't remember what last week's
conversation was about, but yesterday we talked about the latest movie I watched (Pan e
Tulipani), the archaeology documentary my friend watched and even about mythology,
hubris and whether the gods are only good as Plato claimed. I switched topics so many
times during the 85 mins conversation that my friend said I did 'voli pindarici'. I
feel like I'm going straight from A1 to B2. Of course I had to ask 'come se dice?' and
had my pronunciation corrected many times, but I've only been learning Italian since
December and until last week not even intensively, so that's to be expected.





Edited by JohannaNYC on 11 February 2013 at 6:51pm

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 38 of 50
12 February 2013 at 4:24am | IP Logged 
Johanna, I am jealous of your ability to just pick up Italian! It took me around a year
before I could read at the level of Twilight. I suppose it's the Spanish that helps a
lot?

Anyway, if you want any other practice with it, here's a good site which gives
transcripted video, where the videos are intended to teach the language. But, it's the
very fast "real speed" stuff, like movies or TV would be, which may be enough of a
challenge to give you worthwhile practice.

http://www.initalia.rai.it/
2 persons have voted this message useful



JohannaNYC
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4450 days ago

251 posts - 361 votes 
Speaks: Spanish*, English*, Italian
Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Arabic (Egyptian)

 
 Message 39 of 50
13 February 2013 at 4:28am | IP Logged 
Hendrek, I'm still looking up new words in the dictionary and writing them down even when
I have an idea what they mean. This morning I came across the word 'gioioso' which sounds
just like the English 'joyous', but I still looked it up to make sure. So English helps
about 5-10% of the time and the rest is all Spanish and weekly help from native speakers.
Doing the 6WC with Italian also allows me to binge-read guilt-free, which has also helped
me a lot.

Thanks so much for the link. It's nice having the text on the side so I'm not compelled
to read it the way I am with subtitles.
1 person has voted this message useful



JohannaNYC
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 4450 days ago

251 posts - 361 votes 
Speaks: Spanish*, English*, Italian
Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Arabic (Egyptian)

 
 Message 40 of 50
21 February 2013 at 6:24pm | IP Logged 
Woohoo!! I finished Twilight in Italian!! I don't think I've ever been so happy to
finish a book in my entire life. Can't wait until I can say the same about a book in
Croatian.


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