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Italian - 1000 Hours | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Oasis88 Senior Member Australia Joined 5708 days ago 160 posts - 187 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Italian | Message 17 of 152 22 November 2010 at 10:41am | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you!
I just finished working through the entire Ultimate Italian book copying out every chapter and doing all of the exercises in full. It was quite a simple book so it only took me 42 hours. I might write a review for this considering that there was not a lot of information available to me when I was thinking about buying it in the first place. Having finish Michel Thomas and Ultimate Italian my main resources will now be Assimil and La Lingua Italiana. I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to approach the textbook... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Oasis88 Senior Member Australia Joined 5708 days ago 160 posts - 187 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Italian | Message 18 of 152 23 November 2010 at 1:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hours are starting to build up -- currently sitting at 140.
Prepositions are annoying me somewhat. Why do we have... Claudio va a teatro. BUT Claudio va in biblioteca. To me, these are both places and should use the same preposition. Is this just a simple case of an exception to the rule? I thought that I was beginning to understand the differences in usage between the prepositions "in" and "a" but these sentences have made me second guess myself. Can anyone shed some light on this? P.S. I am also quite happy that I managed to change the title of my journal. 14% of my goal complete. Edited by Oasis88 on 23 November 2010 at 1:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6786 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 19 of 152 23 November 2010 at 1:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's not an exception, it's just a fact that some prepositions go with some words, others
go with others. al mare but in piscina. Not only a/in but also that mare takes the definite article and piscina the indefinite. Articles are quite difficult to explain in Italian in any case, they're not used as they are in English. For example you would ask "ce l'hai la macchina?" - "do you have the car" to ask if someone owns a car. It's just the way it is, you'll start to remember them once you see them enough. Edited by numerodix on 23 November 2010 at 1:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Oasis88 Senior Member Australia Joined 5708 days ago 160 posts - 187 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Italian | Message 20 of 152 02 December 2010 at 4:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've been working really hard on my Italian and I seem to be making a lot of progress.
At the moment I'm sitting on 176 hours so I'm edging every so closely to my overall goal of 1,000 hours of comprehensible and concerted Italian study. I'm still in my "passive stage" (whatever that means), so here are the resources that I'm using and my current approach: Assimil - I just started the active stage so I will experiment with how I'm going to work this. For now I'm simply translating the English into Italian and then checking for errors. If there are any words which I forget then I add these to Anki. I normally work through 2-3 lessons per day and listen to the recordings on repeat while driving. The other day I noticed a marked increase in my listening comprehension which was really exciting (after only 170 hours). Even passages of spoken Italian that I don't understand don't bother me because I can normally tell when each word begins and ends. Anki - I'm still spending a steady 20 minutes a day on this. I'm feeling quite comfortable with the use of flashcards after a slight paradigm shift in my understanding od how they should be used. I now see flashcards as a way to help me quickly touch base with the meaning of a word in order for it to enter my short-term memory. I see Anki as a way to accelerate my reading to a point where I know enough words where I can quite easily guess its meaning from the context of the passage, or have enough words where I could do without immediately knowing its meaning. Intensive Reading - YES! I've started reading Italian in earnest and I'm rather excited. I've started with Harry Potter which I am very familiar with having read it a number of times in English and Spanish. Things are starting to click. Here is my reading strategy. I read through one chapter and highlight every word that I can not easily determine from the context. At the end of the chapter I go back over these words and look them up in the dictionary; adding the most useful/diverse ones to Anki. I believe that adding ONLY this demographic of words will help to increase my overall vocabulary because it introduces me to more diverse families of words. For example, if I know the meaning behind tendere, I wouldn't add distendere. I would only add words from completely different word families to increase my overall understanding. My goal is to get to a point where I can logically deduce the meaning of everything I read (passively). My reasoning is that this can be done by accelerating my learning of the words that I struggle with the most, and not worry about the others. After amassing a substantial passive vocabulary the goal will then be to continue reading allowing it to assimilate (hehe) and spill over into the active. Extensive Reading - Here I read anything that is at my level. At the moment I am enjoying Diaro di una studentessa matta (http://melissamuldoon.wordpress.com/). It's not so much that the content overly excites me, but more so that the vocabulary that the author uses is accessible given the fact that she is a learner herself (although very formidable one must admit). I also read Italian forums, blogs, youtube comments. My only rule is that there is to be no dictionary used! La Lingua Italiana - Reading through more grammar at this stage is a bit overkill since I understand the use of all the tenses and can describe the purpose behind many of the grammar constructions. For me, reading through this book in Italian is a good review. Funnily, the book also serves as a kind of reader due to the slow introduction of more and more words. I'm not doing any of the activities but rather spending 10-20 minutes a day working through it at my own leisurely pace, being assured that nothing in it is overly new to me. So that's about it really. I would like to begin thinking about introducing some native style audio into my Italian diet, but I think it would be wise to focus on my reading fluency as well as finish Assimil. Then I'll really turn up the heat and absorb as much Italian as I can once I'm free from the shackles. Thanks for reading. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Oasis88 Senior Member Australia Joined 5708 days ago 160 posts - 187 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Italian | Message 21 of 152 03 December 2010 at 10:36am | IP Logged | ||
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179 hours
Err.. I've just began to notice after lesson 50 of the old Assimil Italian Without Toil that there is now almost constant usage of the voi form as a replacement for tu. This edition was produced during the 50s. Is this a problem? Do Italians commonly address each other in the voi singular form? I didn't even know it existed up until now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6786 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 22 of 152 03 December 2010 at 1:29pm | IP Logged | ||
No, the voi form is archaic. I have actually never seen it outside out literature that is set a good 100 years ago. The contemporary form is the lei form. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| staf250 Pentaglot Senior Member Belgium emmerick.be Joined 5700 days ago 352 posts - 414 votes Speaks: French, Dutch*, Italian, English, German Studies: Arabic (Written) | Message 23 of 152 03 December 2010 at 9:05pm | IP Logged | ||
Nowadays it is no more in use, maybe in expressions. "voi" for singular form is past. Interesting question! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Oasis88 Senior Member Australia Joined 5708 days ago 160 posts - 187 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Italian | Message 24 of 152 04 December 2010 at 4:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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185 hours
That's a bit of a let down and adds to some of the other misgivings I am currently having with Assimil. I'm still enjoying it, but some things like this are taking away from the fun. I guess I will just have to "block it out"... In other news, I started reading The Linguist in Italian. A very interesting read - and interesting guy. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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