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Gary’s TAC 2012 - The Romantics | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 105 of 167 23 July 2012 at 11:44am | IP Logged | ||
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I got plenty language practice on Friday night - first I went for a beer with four
French people, then off to the dinner where I indeed got to speak some Italian and even a wee bit more French, not to mention taking advantage of what is by far my most useful language skill - some passive understanding of Spanish. I hear Spanish pretty much every day now so I'm starting to develop an ear for it, and the more Italian I learn the more cognates I recognise in Spanish. I find that I can generally understand Spanish when it's spoken relatively slowly and clearly in a quiet environment, but as we all know, that generally isn't how Spanish tends to be spoken. Haven't had a chance to try out the pronunciation improvement idea for French. I've watched a couple of French films recently, well, one and a half: Paris Je T'aime - a couple of good stories but mostly style over substance, and too much English - and L'Appartement - so far better than I expected from the description although I'll reserve judgement until I've seen the end, and a breeze to understand without subtitles. I also caught up with Bref; it's certainly gone downhill in the second series but I thought that the last few episodes were very well done. And it definitely feels easier to understand than it used to. My Italian still needs a lot of work but I definitely feel that it's improved significantly just in the last three weeks since I started making efforts to go out and use it - I'm certainly seeing some of my passive knowledge become activated and I'm becoming more comfortable using the language. My pronunciation is a bit off sometimes but it tends to just be small mistakes as opposed to being fundamentally incorrect as was the case with my French for a while, and my accent isn't always good but it's hard to have a good accent when you can't get the words out fluently, so both should improve with practice. Of course my progress is still being limited by lack of conversation opportunities, but even the two or three short conversations per week that I'm managing now are leading to noticeable improvements. Also, some of the lack of opportunity is my fault: I have a couple of Italian guys' numbers now but I was too busy drinking/partying/recovering at the weekend to get in touch with them. All in all I'd say that by the CEFR descriptions my Italian is comfortably at B1 now; B2 is still far away in terms of both understanding and speaking ability, but if I keep up the study and practice then I should be able to reach it by the end of the year as per my goal. I have nothing else on so I think I'll go to Language Café tonight - I've not been for a while so it'll be good to catch up with the regulars if nothing else. Edit - can't forget this part: Italian Super Challenge Films: 10 done, 90 to go. Speaking hours: 12 done, 88 to go. Edited by garyb on 23 July 2012 at 12:29pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 106 of 167 25 July 2012 at 11:52am | IP Logged | ||
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No Language Café after all - the weather was awful and after getting soaked through on
the two mile cycle back from work I had no desire to leave the house again. My logic was that if I, a Scot, thought the weather was too bad to go out, then there would be little chance of anyone from France, Italy, or Spain wanting to leave their house either. Instead I watched the rest of L'appartement. Good film, well made, but... strange. Surely there must be some happy medium between the Anglophone "boy meets girl, boy lets girl walk all over him, boy chases girl into submission until she realises that she is in love with him after all" unrealistic romantic comedy nonsense and the European movies with all their complicated affairs and love triangles and people sleeping with each others' best friends' partners or their son's bride-to-be or their maid? It can be a bit hard to get my head around these sorts of stories, especially in another language, and I often find myself looking up a plot summary afterwards to clear up some points. Yesterday evening I had a Skype chat with two Italian metal fans. I've been getting a lot of responses on Conversation Exchange recently, and there tends to be a snowball effect because every time you log in you go to the top of the search results so more people contact you in turn. Of course we were joking that we all had practically a phone-book of Skype contacts yet very few of them are ever online. My Italian practice seems to very much be going the way of many little chats with lots of people as opposed to longer conversation with a few people - at the moment that's good as I'm getting plenty chance to master the basic small-talk stuff, but in future I'm sure that slightly deeper conversation will be more useful. Every half-hour counts: Italian Super Challenge Films: 10 done, 90 to go. Speaking hours: 12.5 done, 87.5 to go. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5210 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 107 of 167 26 July 2012 at 12:56am | IP Logged | ||
That made me laugh. Here's a French word I recently added to my Quizlet list: diluvien /diluvienne (adj), e.g. les pluies diluviennes. In English: torrential. English also uses the word "diluvian", which the OED defines as "of or pertaining to a deluge; esp. of the Noachian Flood". (Folks may know the term "antediluvian", the world before the Flood -i.e. Noah's flood.) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 108 of 167 26 July 2012 at 1:54pm | IP Logged | ||
I don't think I had heard that one before - thanks, I'll be sure to use it to impress a French person soon! I went for a drink with my French friend last night. He's learning English very quickly, and I saw why: he takes every possible opportunity to practise it and get chatting with random people. A five-minute walk from one bar to another turned into an hour: he started talking to a guy and a girl who were giving out flyers, and then a couple who were sitting drinking a bottle of wine on the street. And it wasn't just him that got some practice that way: it turned out that the flyer girl was French - I had no idea at first because she spoke English perfectly and was well on her way to developing a Scottish accent, not to mention using the slang well - and the couple were from Naples. I think the couple were slightly confused: with my mistakes it was obvious that I wasn't Italian (a couple of beers can make it easier to speak, but also easier to speak incorrectly because you tend not to think before you speak), but nobody expects anyone from the UK to speak a foreign language, especially one like Italian. We meet two random groups and both happen to have people who speak one of my target languages - what are the chances of that? Like I say, I know that the people and the opportunities are there, and I just need to find them. Later on in the night, when the bar was closing, there was a guy outside who was obviously Italian. Inspired by the earlier events, I considered just starting chatting to him, but then I noticed that he was clearly busy entertaining some eager-looking young blondes and I didn't want to interrupt. I'm looking forward to next month when it'll our big tourist season and I'll be off work for a couple of weeks: I'm sure I'll be going out to bars a lot and accosting any groups of people who I overhear speaking French or Italian. With all these short exchanges and bilingual conversations I'm developing the skill of being able to switch between languages quickly - in the past I've said that I felt that it took me a while to "warm up" and that I could only speak well after half an hour or so, but now I seem to be able to do it in a sentence or two for French and a few minutes for Italian. It's an extremely important skill IMO and one that doesn't seem to get much discussion on this forum. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 109 of 167 06 August 2012 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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Right, now that the forum's back, normal service in my log shall resume. I'm quite sure
I lost a couple of posts - I guess the site was restored from a backup that was a few days old - but no big deal. The main thing I remember writing is my thoughts on in- person language exchanges and how they don't work well because of the inequality - the other person is already living in the country and can pretty much practise their English as much as they like without having to exchange anything, whereas for me it's a rare opportunity since I'm not living in the country where my target language is spoken, and that's why I've been getting messed around so much and having so much trouble finding and keeping exchange partners. Italiano I'm still doing well from Conversation Exchange. My Skype contact list is continuing to grow and I've had a few more chats with people who seem quite keen. After all my complaints about not being able to find people to speak to, I'm now having the opposite problem - I sign onto Skype and two or three Italians all want to talk to me! Can't complain of course. Online exchanges are definitely turning out to be the way to go for Italian. I suppose you could say I'm profiting from Italy's current poor economic situation - lots of young people who can't find a full-time job and so have plenty free time on their hands and are keen to learn English to improve their prospects. Also, there aren't a whole lot of English speakers learning Italian so I'm a bit of a hot commodity as far as exchange partners go. I'd rather talk face-to-face with a person in front of me, especially to help pick up the all-important body language, but apart from the bi-weekly Italian meetup I've all but given up on that idea. The one Italian girl I did meet seems to have been too busy and disappeared - a shame, but I saw it coming, especially with the massive imbalance between our respective levels. So in the last couple of weeks I've definitely racked up a few more speaking hours. Unfortunately, between the forum data loss and me not really keeping track, I'm not sure how many hours I'm up to now so I'm just going to have to estimate. I've also done a reasonable bit of text-chatting on Skype but I'm not going to count that as "speaking". I went to the meetup again last Monday, where for once there was a mixture of expert and non-expert speakers. I was quite tired so I appreciated the slower pace. Overall, I'm still definitely seeing improvements - there really is no substitute for going out (or staying in on Skype, in my case!) and doing the practice. I'm falling behind a bit with Assimil - it's now pretty much become my backup plan for if I can't find someone to talk to on a given day. Italian Super Challenge Films: 11 done, 89 to go. Speaking hours: 18 done, 82 to go. Français A few Skype chats - I found another Skype contact but like most they're not online very consistently. Also a few real-life conversations they were quite brief. I finally met up with the French girl again - she still seems keen on the exchange idea but she has a job with unpredictable hours so it's difficult to make plans. Lastly, there was the meetup last week, which was quite good but again there were no actual French people. I'll be off work for two weeks starting from next week; I probably already wrote that in one of my lost posts. Obviously I plan on getting plenty language practice in, amongst other things. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 110 of 167 10 August 2012 at 12:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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Right, I admit it, speaking Italian is HARD. The verb system and the agreement of
adjectives and determiners are far more involved than in French, in which many of these things are written differently but pronounced the same. In je parle, tu parles, il parle, ils parlent the verb is pronounced the same, unlike parlo, parli, parla, parlano; similar for past participles like allé, allés, allée, allées compared to andato, andati, andata, andate. The two types of adjectives in Italian also confuse me - the ones that end in -o/-a for singular and -i/-e for plural, and the ones that end in -e for singular and -i for plural. I usually think of -e as the feminine plural ending, since that's how nouns and the first type of adjectives tend to work, so I get mixed up when saying things like persone interessanti. And it gets all the more awkward with the English-speaker tendency to reduce an unstressed /i/ to something that sounds more like an /e/. All these rules aren't particularly complicated, as evidenced by the fact that I can describe them fairly well in one paragraph, and I learnt them all right at the start. But when you're actually in a conversation it's a whole other matter - so many things that you need to constantly think about that it's quite a mental workload until you get used to it. I suppose it's like the difference between knowing the rules of a sport and being a good player of the sport, or the difference between reading a book on driving and actually driving a car competently. Also, Italian pronunciation is a hell of a lot simpler than French, and I find that there's more similarities with English than you get in French, so they're about on a par in terms of overall difficulty in my opinion. I'm not complaining of course: this is all continuing to improve with practice and I'm still making relatively fast progress; I'm just pointing out the amount of speaking practice that is really required just to master the basics. There's a reason I set myself 100 hours for the challenge. Skype may have had its share of technical problems recently but I'm still eternally grateful for it. I also started watching the film Divorzio all'Italiana. I initially got excited when I found Italian subtitles for it online, but after some time trying to get them to sync correctly with the film, it seemed like trying to understand it without subs would be far less effort. I'm understanding most of it but there are a few difficult parts. Italian Super Challenge Films: 12 done, 88 to go. Speaking hours: 19 done, 81 to go. Holiday plans I'll be off work for 16 days starting tomorrow. My goal for that time is to have at least one conversation, watch one film or TV episode, and do one bit of studying in each of my languages every day. In practice I'll be happy if that's on average as opposed to consistently every day, since I'm sure I'll end up busy with plenty other stuff. For Italian the studying will obviously be Assimil, and for French it'll be conversational material on Fluent French Now and similar. Edited by garyb on 10 August 2012 at 12:28pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 111 of 167 14 August 2012 at 1:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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So I'm off work now, but to be honest I've not done much more study than usual because
I've mostly been partying. One of the nights was with French people though. I'm keeping up with Assimil but as the texts get more advanced and specialised it's getting harder to maintain interest. Last night I went to Language Café for the first time in a while, which was the usual - not much language practice opportunity but a chance to meet some nice and interesting people. Then I headed to Italian meetup, which turned out to be quite difficult because I was still very much recovering from the night before and my brain wasn't quite working at full capacity - following the conversation isn't usually a problem for me but it wasn't easy this time round. I think I'm going to a Spanish party tonight, so my passive understanding of Spanish will no doubt come in useful. But if it's at all like most of the Spanish parties I've been to, tomorrow probably won't be the most productive day ever. EDIT: forgot to mention, I also met an Italian guy for an exchange yesterday, just as I thought I had lost hope in the in-person exchange idea. Italian Super Challenge Films: 12 done, 88 to go. Speaking hours: 21 done, 79 to go. Edited by garyb on 14 August 2012 at 1:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5208 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 112 of 167 17 August 2012 at 7:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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My Skype Italian exchange partners are dropping like flies, just like the real life
ones - several have now started ignoring my messages or have deleted me, even ones who things seemed to be going very well with. The couple of weeks of having too many people to talk to and not enough time for them all did seem too good to be true; that's just how exchanges go though. So the search continues. Meanwhile I'm still getting the weekly offers for help with Spanish should I decide to take it up, and I'm wondering more and more if Italian was a bad decision; maybe the grass just seems greener on the other side. But I've got so far now that I want to keep it up, at least for a few more months which should be enough to get to the point where I can converse quite easily if I can keep up the motivation and practice. I did meet the guy from Monday again and we had a long chat. I seemed to be making tons of mistakes, which I attribute to tiredness and lack of much practice in the couple of weeks. Hopefully we'll get in a few more conversation sessions before he goes back to Italy next month, and by that point there might be more prospects as University starts back. I'm still slightly optimistic. Italian Super Challenge Films: 13 done, 87 to go. Speaking hours: 22 done, 78 to go. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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