Italian and French at the same time (Advice Center) Language Learning Forum

Italian and French at the same time
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34 messages over 5 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 Next >>

Enrico
Diglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
Joined 3756 days ago
162 posts - 207 votes

Speaks: Russian*, English
Studies: Italian, Spanish, French

Message 17 of 34

31 August 2014 at 5:53pm | IP Logged

tarvos wrote:

You can do two, but that means you need to have some serious time management skills.

It's not so hard for me to find the time for an audio course or podcast or audiobooks as I spend much time on the
way somewhere, driving, walking, in subway etc. That's where I've found the time for English. Even with Assimil, I
have uploaded Assimil book and audio to my smartphone and I can read lessons at least in subway or in a line. It's
not so comfortable of course as just audio alone but it's an opportunity to learn on the go at least sometimes.

So I could try to listen Italian going to one part of the city and listen to French or Spanish going back and try to live
somehow with this "upside down mix" :-))
1 person has voted this message useful

emk
Diglot
Moderator
United States
Joined 5543 days ago
2615 posts - 8806 votes

Speaks: English*, French^B2
Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian
Personal Language Map

Message 18 of 34

31 August 2014 at 6:12pm | IP Logged

Serpent wrote:

I don't recommend French as a "casual language". AFAIU, it has a somewhat steeper learning curve, and the very early stage can be more difficult than with Spanish or Italian.

Sometimes I think that Serpent likes all the Romance languages except French. :-)

French really isn't too bad as a casual language. But if you want to do it, I recommended training your brain to deal with the weird link between spelling and writing as early as you can. Basically, all you need to do is spend some time working with parallel French text and French audio. Two good choices are Assimil and Listening/Reading. Even if you only spend 30 minutes per day with Assimil, you'll have the hang of the silent letters, etc., within two months or so.

The saving grace of French is that once you get used to it, you can pronounce pretty much any French word correctly without looking up the pronunciation. There are exceptions, but they're actually pretty rare.

Edited by emk on 31 August 2014 at 6:33pm
3 persons have voted this message useful

Enrico
Diglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
Joined 3756 days ago
162 posts - 207 votes

Speaks: Russian*, English
Studies: Italian, Spanish, French

Message 19 of 34

31 August 2014 at 6:18pm | IP Logged

Serpent wrote:

Avoiding boredom. I recommend you to start an Assimil course in your "main" language and do one lesson per day
for two weeks, which would be two cycles of 6 audio-based lessons+1 book-based revision lesson. Then see
whether you want to start one more Assimil course, and if so, how much time you can devote to it. Be realistic - if
you know that more than, say, 4+2 lessons per week will be boring (4 Italian, 2 French, for example), don't force
yourself to do more. Instead, use the multitrack approach to spend more time with the language and continue
enjoying it.
Also, compared to going from Russian to English, I think you'll find the Romance languages surprisingly easy. This
doesn't mean you can learn them effortlessly, but the words should be easier to remember, and the grammar is
more similar to what you're used to in Russian.

Yeah, I hate boredom very much :-) and I like to use only not boring approaches because one do not learn
languages overnight and if this process will be boring it will be more likely to give up somewhere in the middle or
earlier.

I already see some similarities between Russian and Italian, in constructing questions, word genders, many
conjugations and even exactly the same sounded words like "Литература" and "Letteratura" :-) It seems to me
that English is much easier :-)

And even some funny examples like in Italian "Tu puoi" (You can) sound the same like Russian "Тупой"
(Dumb/Goofy/Stupid) so if someone says "Я наверное ТУПОЙ, я не смогу" (I'm probably stupid, I won't can" ) in
Italian he says at the same time that he is definitely will can :-)))) "Like you are definitely smart you will can" :-)

Edited by Enrico on 31 August 2014 at 7:01pm
1 person has voted this message useful

Enrico
Diglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
Joined 3756 days ago
162 posts - 207 votes

Speaks: Russian*, English
Studies: Italian, Spanish, French

Message 20 of 34

31 August 2014 at 6:32pm | IP Logged

iguanamon wrote:

Enrico, at first your profile said you were in Italy. Now it says you are in the Virgin Islands, like
me. Is that true? This place is very small, which island are you on?

Hello, Iguanamon, I very appreciated your posts on this forum and they helped me a lot in learning languages (I was
"in the passive way" in this forum for several months) but I'm just fooling around, I just do not like how inscription
"Russian Federation" is looking next to my name, may be "Russia" would be better all the more so according to the
constitution these names are equivalent :-) and Russia sounds more softly or something, in a good way.

But of course I would really like to live sometime in Italy and on Virgin Ilands :-) .. to drop by for a visit Richard on
Necker :-) and so on :-) I like to travel so it would be interesting to change this parameter every time I'm in a
different place. :-)

Edited by Enrico on 31 August 2014 at 6:35pm
1 person has voted this message useful

Enrico
Diglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
Joined 3756 days ago
162 posts - 207 votes

Speaks: Russian*, English
Studies: Italian, Spanish, French

Message 21 of 34

31 August 2014 at 6:51pm | IP Logged

emk wrote:

Sometimes I think that Serpent likes all the Romance languages except French. :-)

So do I, but I'm trying to overcome it. :-) Besides those words and sentences I can produce and read now sounds not
bad for me from pronunciation point of you like "Je voudrais visiter Saint-Tropez et Monaco" :-)

emk wrote:

French really isn't too bad as a casual language. But if you want to do it, I recommended training your brain to deal
with the weird link between spelling and writing as early as you can. Basically, all you need to do is spend some time
working with parallel French text and French audio. Two good choices are Assimil and Listening/Reading. Even if
you only spend 30 minutes per day with Assimil, you'll have the hang of the silent letters, etc., within two months or
so.

The saving grace of French is that once you get used to it, you can pronounce pretty much any French word
correctly without looking up the pronunciation. There are exceptions, but they're actually pretty rare.

I do not know where from but I can read some combinations of letters in French including some silent ones, maybe
because of the one self-study book of French I've read when I was a child (not the whole one only around 1-10
lessons but perhaps it affected). Besides for some reason I've picked those French book as a child. It means even
then I was interested in French for some reason. So maybe I'm supposed to finish this way :-)))

And yes Assimil seems very good for learning French at least like a source of parallel French texts and audio. Thank
you I will definitely try it if I will this way.

Edited by Enrico on 31 August 2014 at 6:56pm
1 person has voted this message useful

Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6608 days ago
9753 posts - 15779 votes

4 sounds
Speaks: Russian*, English, Finnish^C1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish

Message 22 of 34

31 August 2014 at 7:33pm | IP Logged

emk is right, but I leave that behind when I give advice. I really think that even if I liked French, I'd have learned far less by watching football and fooling around with GLOSS, Destinos/FIA, lyricstraining etc than I did in Spanish and Italian.
2 persons have voted this message useful

Enrico
Diglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
Joined 3756 days ago
162 posts - 207 votes

Speaks: Russian*, English
Studies: Italian, Spanish, French

Message 23 of 34

31 August 2014 at 7:40pm | IP Logged

Serpent wrote:

emk is right, but I leave that behind when I give advice. I really think that even if I liked French,
I'd have learned far less by watching football and fooling around with GLOSS, Destinos/FIA, lyricstraining etc than I
did in Spanish and Italian.

Yeah, I definitely like Spanish songs more than French ones :-) French is interesting for me to be able to travel along
the Mediterranean coast of France an read literature.
1 person has voted this message useful

iguanamon
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Virgin Islands
Speaks: Ladino
Joined 5273 days ago
2241 posts - 6731 votes

Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French)

Message 24 of 34

31 August 2014 at 7:52pm | IP Logged

Enrico wrote:

Hello, Iguanamon, I very appreciated your posts on this forum and they helped me a lot in learning languages (I was "in the passive way" in this forum for several months) but I'm just fooling around, I just do not like how inscription "Russian Federation" is looking next to my name, may be "Russia" would be better all the more so according to the constitution these names are equivalent :-) and Russia sounds more softly or something, in a good way.

But of course I would really like to live sometime in Italy and on Virgin Ilands :-) .. to drop by for a visit Richard on Necker :-) and so on :-) I like to travel so it would be interesting to change this parameter every time I'm in a different place. :-)

Thank you Enrico. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but why not just be honest about where you live? People will think you are living in an English-speaking country when you are not, really.

1 person has voted this message useful

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