|
 |
Splog’s Birthday Italian | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| conroy Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5072 days ago 36 posts - 51 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 9 of 22 13 February 2012 at 12:18am | IP Logged | |||||
Does Assimil Using Italian exist? I can't find it anywhere. Nice idea by the way, it'll be interesting to see how you get on. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5667 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 10 of 22 13 February 2012 at 12:23am | IP Logged | |||||
Actually, you are probably right that an English version doesn't exist. I am going to use the French-based Assimil books for Italian. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5667 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 11 of 22 13 February 2012 at 12:39am | IP Logged | |||||
|
Thank you for the kind birthday wishes to everybody.
I have just finished the 1st lesson of Assimil Italian. During the first 10 minutes, I typed the lesson into LWT. Since this was the first lesson there were, of course, no "known words" in the LWT database from earlier lessons, so I spent most of the remaining 20 minutes going through the text very slowly, clicking on every word, and finding a reasonable looking translation for it. This, however, left almost no time to try to make sense of the overall text. I had less than a minute to give a quick read through before my half hour was over. I felt an extra ten minutes would have been a great help, but I want to remain strict with the time limits. Presumably the translation phase will speed up in later lessons, allowing me more time to look at the bigger picture. More positively, I did notice that in the final few minutes of the half hour I could understand quite a lot of the recording. Certainly a lot more than at the start. This is presumably because the first lesson is pretty trivial, so I will not celebrate just yet. I will return to this log in a week, by which time I should have finished 7 more lessons, and hope to have something more substantial to report. Edited by Splog on 13 February 2012 at 12:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5667 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 12 of 22 19 February 2012 at 11:17am | IP Logged | |||||
|
It is time to report on my first week of Italian.
I remained disciplined and spent, as planned, 30 minutes a day on this, doing one Assimil lesson per day. Yesterday (lesson 7) was different from the others since every 7th lesson in Assimil is a review, so I used the half hour to read the review material for that lesson in the book and also reread the previous six lessons using LWT. It is still early days, but here are my discoveries: 1: At first it took 10 minutes to type each lesson in, and this was eating heavily into my 30 minutes. I thought I would have to extend my daily time limit, but this is something I didn't feel comfortable doing. However, by the 5th day it was only taking me 5 minutes to type lessons in. Partly this is due to finding the accented letters faster on the keyboard, but primarily it is because I didn't have to keep rechecking spelling. On the first day, I was rechecking every word, but the fifth day I find I was rechecking only about 1 in 10 of them. Given this speed-up in typing I am happy to stick to the 30 minutes time limit per day. 2: At first, as is normal with new languages, it all sounded like a long stream of babble. I was surprised that by the end of the very first lesson I could already hear the individual words. This, of course, is largely down to Assimil having slow and precise dictation. I think it is also due to repeated listening, since I listen to each lesson approximately 10 times during the 30 minutes. 3: By day three I was experiencing the "din in the head" where at random times throughout the day Italian words, sentence fragments, and full phrases would come pouring into my head fast and furious. This was encouraging, and quite unexpected so early. 4: Sometime around day five or six I realised that I was spontaneously generating small sentences. Nothing particularly complicated, but for the past couple of days I have found myself randomly combining bits and pieces from the various lessons. Obviously, I cannot say much at all, but it was surprising to me that this is happening so early. Now, I am still in the "honeymoon" period, where things are happening quickly and it is all very exciting. Plus, of course, I am very much at the "A0" complete novice stage (LWT tells me I know 291 words), so there is a long road ahead. What I can say, though, is that things are happening in my head much earlier than I had anticipated. Lesson 8 tonight, and I will report back in a week. Edited by Splog on 19 February 2012 at 11:28am 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5667 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 13 of 22 23 February 2012 at 9:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
I keep forgetting to mention one frustrating aspect of the Assimil Italian course:
The font used is poorly chosen, since the upper case letter I and the lower case of the letter L look identical. This makes it very difficult to work out at times how a word is spelled. After a week with the language, my guesses tended to be correct, but during the first couple of lessons it was frustrating. I cannot be the only person to have been caught out by this, and am surprised a well established company like Assimil has not used a font where all letters are distinct. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5667 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 14 of 22 26 February 2012 at 5:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
|
Today is lesson 15 of Assimil Italian, and also represents the end of my second week of combining Assimil with LWT, limited to 30 minutes per day.
I have some good news, and some bad news: The good news is that I still have the din in my head, with words and phrases flying around at random times throughout the day. Plus, my ability to combine fragments is improving. In this sense, the strategy seems to be working. Now the bad news. The number of words in each lesson is increasing. Earlier lessons had only around 60 words, whereas the most recent lessons have over 100. This means that my typing time has slipped back to over 10 minutes. In one case just typing the lesson into LWT took 12 minutes. This left just 18 minutes that day for working with the text and audio. This leaves me frustrated. Just two weeks into my experiment, then, I feel that I have to change my strategy. I want to be able to devote the whole 30 minutes each day to actually working with the lesson, and not waste any of that time merely typing. Starting tonight, then, I will spend about one hour every Sunday simply typing the following week's lessons into LWT. Each day's 30 minute session will then no longer be frustrated by typing effort. I am slightly disappointed by this additional one hour per week, but I think it is an essential step to make the actual study time productive. I will report back next week on whether or not this helps. Edited by Splog on 26 February 2012 at 10:27pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5667 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 15 of 22 09 March 2012 at 11:10am | IP Logged | |||||
|
Time I gave an update:
I am still doing a chapter a day. Typing all the lessons for one week ahead of time proved to be a good move. Now I focus on the actual lessons rather than dreading the typing session each day. The language is starting to sound less "foreign". Of course, I am still an absolute beginner, but the sound and rhythm of Italian is starting to settle in. I still have the din in my head, and still find short spontaneous outbursts of phrase-combining, which I take to mean it is working. The only thing I would say is that my head is full of questions, and sticking just to Assimil is slightly frustrating in that my questions are not answered immediately. Maybe, though, this will just increase my brain's hunger, and hence increase satisfaction when (hopefully) my nagging questions are answered in due course. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Adrean TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member France adrean83.wordpress.c Joined 6166 days ago 348 posts - 411 votes Speaks: FrenchC1 | Message 16 of 22 09 March 2012 at 11:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
This is a problem of mine too with Assimil. I don't know where I would be if I had not done Michel Thomas as a prelude who put so many things clearly but there are a host of things which he did not get to. I somehow don't think our questions will be answered by the end of the book, but I'm happy to be able to understand each dialogue as a start. I can tell you as well that the dialogues become much harder, I've found from about lesson 50 and in my experience 30 minutes a day was not enough, especially if you are are doing an active wave lesson. I'm sure your aware of all this though :-) 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
