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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6785 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes  Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 33 of 182 06 October 2009 at 11:49pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Well, I've taken doviende's advice and started reading the shortest of the books I've acquired. I decided to go with Robert Ludlum, title is "L'ultima verità". I've read many of his books in English and I know his style well, so that should help me along. The language is not very complicated, but it does get a little political/diplomatic-ish, with a lot of formulations being impersonal and somewhat euphemistic. This is a real pain to deal with in Italian right now.
It's been two days and I've read about 10 pages in 2 hours. I hope it gets easier. I do get a kick out of understanding new words just because they seem clear in context, and that is also happening here. When you're learning a language people love to ask "so how much do you understand at this point, 50%"? I never know what to say to that, it's hard to quantify. But it's nice to read a paragraph like this and understand a lot of it: Doppiò gli ultimi gradini che portavano alla terrazza pavimentata di rustiche lastre di pietra, e vide che sua moglie era seduta con gli occhi aperti su una sedia a sdraio, e fissava l'acqua in lontananza, senza vedere niente di ciò che vedeva lui. Here's how much I can make of it. As you can see in part literal understanding, in part semantic. I didn't look anything up in this one. Doppiò gli ultimi the last (of them) gradini che portavano they brought alla terrazza pavimentata di on the terrace paved with rustiche lastre di pietra, e vide and saw che sua moglie era seduta that his wife was seated con gli occhi aperti with eyes open su una sedia a sdraio on a deck chair, e fissava l'acqua in lontananza and sipped? water while being distant (figuratively speaking), senza vedere niente di ciò che vedeva lui without seeing anything of what he was seeing. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5569 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 34 of 182 07 October 2009 at 4:49am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Improving rapidly, thanks to James Heisig and Anki. I am still working through the Hanzi/Kanji books, which I only discovered last month, and am finding most characters pretty easy to commit to memory. I am learning 50+ characters a day, right now just with the keywords Heisig has selected to represent their meaning, and later I will memorize the pronunciations of the characters I've learned. Understanding the meaning of so many characters is really giving me a lot of motivation to keep working on my Chinese and Japanese. For the first time I'm starting to get the gist of newspaper articles in Chinese. My Japanese is still as an early beginner level since I've just started, but I figure if I go in knowing all 2,042 general-use Kanji I can't fail. Edited by Levi on 07 October 2009 at 4:53am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Leopejo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6111 days ago 675 posts - 724 votes Speaks: Italian*, Finnish*, English Studies: French, Russian | Message 35 of 182 07 October 2009 at 10:48am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
You chose a difficult text! Even for Italians. Fissare qualcosa = to watch something (usually far away), but without really observing, more like lost in your thoughts. Tell me if you want a translation of the paragraph above. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6785 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 36 of 182 07 October 2009 at 10:29pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Thanks for offering, but you'd have to translate the whole book for me if I'm going to understand it completely :)
Well, it's a struggle. I probably read slower than I could be and still grasp the general plot, but these books are meant to be puzzles and I wouldn't be able to understand the finer points of the text without reading sentences sometimes even three times at a slow pace. I have to say it still surprises me how "idiomatically similar" (if that means anything to you) Italian is to English. I find words all the time that translate literally without skipping a beat (at least from my supposition, obviously am not certain at this point) or even expressions that do. I would expect to see them sometimes, but not as much as this. Perhaps it has something to do with this book being translated from English in the first place. Edited by numerodix on 07 October 2009 at 10:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6785 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 37 of 182 09 October 2009 at 9:30pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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So these days I've narrowed down my activities to two things. Textbook and reading.
The textbook so far is working for me surprisingly well. I somehow don't find it annoying or dull, which I'd expect from one. I also think the order of the chapters is sensible. Chapter 9 is my old friend indirect pronouns. So you do a lot of exercises on that. Then chapter 10 comes along, on reflexive verbs and the impersonal form. Which means effectively continued practice on indirect pronouns also. And today I started chapter 11 which is compound pronouns, so again the indirect pronouns are getting reinforced. Thus far I don't feel like there's anything I covered that I either missed or forgot. It seems to hold together surprisingly well. By far the best piece of material I've used to date. Then there is my book. It started out as a big struggle 5 days ago. After about 2 days and 10-15 pages suddenly it was going much better. Now the thing is that in every Ludlum book the ploy is introduced at the start, which will then guide the whole plot, so it's critical to sketch the perimeter of intrigue and stakeholders, but without giving away too much, because it is a puzzle. So I don't know if that's the reason why it seemed harder or whether I just managed to acclimatize myself pretty quick. Naturally, I'm coming across many expressions. There is one that I had to see many times in different places before I figured out what it means. And it turns out to correspond exactly, in my determination, to an expression in Polish. "rendersi conto" is to understand something, to appreciate the full significance of something. Which in Polish is "zdawać sobie sprawę". Sometimes I wonder if the expressions I pick up are authentic Italian or if the translator is trying to give the Italian readers a flavor of English. rompere il giacchio -> to break the ice hanno mosso cielo e terra -> they moved heaven and earth [to achieve something important] Here are some others I failed to fully understand. Stava cominciando a capire, ma l'immagine non era ancora bene a fuoco. I assume it means something like "the picture had not fully come into focus", but is "essere bene a fuoco" an expression? Signor Presidente, presumo che la sottocommissione, se funzionerà a dovere, danneggerà un sacco di gente. "funzionare a dovere", what does that mean? Dovevamo scoprire perché, ogni volta che si faceva il suo nome per una possibile candidatura, le reazioni erano tanto ostili. I think it means "when one mentions your name", but why this formulation? What precisely does it mean? Phyllis diceva che lui non affrontava mai una trattativa senza mettervi un impegno assoluto e aver compiuto un'analisi esauriente. Vi is the indirect pronoun for "you plural". What does it mean here? Ci porta direttamente nell'area delle nostre preoccupazioni. Is it like the English "which brings us to.."? And then there are those that just please me to understand without having to look them up. Mentre rispondeva, Trevayne guardò Hill, ma sentiva su di sé lo sguardo del Presidente. -> he felt the stare of the president Posso passare in rivista alcuni punti che ritengo salienti -> salient points, as in English 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Leopejo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6111 days ago 675 posts - 724 votes Speaks: Italian*, Finnish*, English Studies: French, Russian | Message 38 of 182 10 October 2009 at 12:48am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
yes. Literally fuoco is "focus" as well as "fire", and so it's like watching something with binoculars and trying to focus the picture. This expression is used very often figuratively to mean that you feel/see/guess something, but can't really get all the pieces of the puzzle together.
That's another idiom, meaning something working as it is supposed to do.
Yes, fare un nome just means "to mention a name" or "to bring forward a name", often used, as in this case, when people name possible candidates for some position. Another use is when a policeman asks a suspect to give the names of his friends-in-crime, or a drug user to name the drug-dealer's name.
metterci doesn't only mean "to put us", but also "to put there/in it/on it". In elegant speech you can use -vi in place of -ci.
I'd say you are right, though it depends on the previous sentence. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6785 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 39 of 182 10 October 2009 at 1:01am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Thanks a bunch!
> metterci doesn't only mean "to put us", but also "to put there/in it/on it". In elegant speech you can use -vi in place of -ci. I would expect it to be mettersi, though, because it's the narrator talking about the main character doing something. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Leopejo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6111 days ago 675 posts - 724 votes Speaks: Italian*, Finnish*, English Studies: French, Russian | Message 40 of 182 10 October 2009 at 12:48pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
These particles are confusing, aren't they? -si, as in mettersi, is uncontroversial, "to put oneself (somewhere)". Mettiti a sedere = "get yourself to sit" = "sit down!". mettersi nei guai = "to put oneself (to get) in trouble". Instead the -ci particle has two distinct meanings. The first one is the first person plural: "us" or "ourselves": vuoi metterci nei guai? = "do you want to get us in trouble?". mettiamoci al lavoro = "let's get (ourselves) working". But there is another meaning for the same particle -ci, that of "in/on it". So metterci qualcosa = "to put something in/on it". Your example was ... non affrontava mai una trattativa senza metterci un impegno assoluto... = "he never tackled a negotiation without putting on it (= on the negotiation) the utmost commitment". Finally, in elegant, mainly written, Italian, you can use -vi in place of -ci, when the meaning is this latter one ("in/on it"). P.S. I used mettere in all examples out of laziness, but this is valid in general. Edited by Leopejo on 10 October 2009 at 1:12pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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