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TAC 2011 - Team Ì - Italian - magictom123 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5584 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 1 of 53 01 January 2011 at 9:00pm | IP Logged |
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Hello one and all,
I am a bit late in starting this log because my old laptop decided to crash beyond repair over the christmas holidays and I've only just got a new one. Anyway, on to the language learning. Here I am going to outline my plans for the next year - or part of it anyway. My main goal is to reach level B2 on the CEFR scale in Italian. To do this I am going to continue to use Assimil with ease whilst watching Italian televsion and reading any books I come along on the way. I also have the complete Pimsleur Italian course and will be using that occasionally when I want to spend more time per day doing language related studies. The reason I have set B2 as my goal is because that is the level that Assimil say that their with ease courses will take a person to once they have completed the course. I am currently on lezione 35 oggi, which is a revision lesson. I actually received my assimil book a year ago as a christmas present and started to use the course. With hindsight, I now realise that I was using the course in the wrong way for me. I think I was spending too much time on each particular lesson and as the lessons became more complicated it was difficult to take the full content of each lesson in and so I became disheartened and eventually was swayed away from the course in favour of starting up some French, having a peek at German and doing a bit of Esperanto. This year, my intention is to stick solely with Italian so that I can reach what I perceive to be a pretty good level. I did look at the exact dates last week but I can't remember them now but I should complete the passive wave of assimil at the end of January and complete the course at the end of May. I have a satellite dish aimed at hotbird so I can receive plenty of free to air Italian channels, which I watch quite a bit most days. Also, as an incentive to follow through on this course, it just so coincides that the Giro d'italia, a 3 week cycle race, is run for 3 weeks through May. Whilst I normally watch the news in Italian, I hope to be able to understand large parts of the commentary by the time we get to May. I am a big cycling fan and so it being televised means I am likely to sit and watch a few hours a day of the race coverage whereas with other programs, my interest may sway depending on the topic. Right, I think that's covered everything for now in a long winded way. My immediate incentive with the language is to continue through to the active wave of assimil (2 weeks tomorrow) with the same enthuiasm as I have had so far and see if the active wave is where the 'magic really happens' a presto, Tom Edited by magictom123 on 01 January 2011 at 9:11pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5584 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 2 of 53 02 January 2011 at 5:00pm | IP Logged |
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Today I want to write a short description of how I have been using Assimil so far. I
have watched plenty of youtube polyglot video's but one person I keep going back to is loki2504 - aka felix. I guess most people who are active on this forum are aware of him and in one of his video's he described how he learns languages via Assimil. One thing he mentioned is listening to the audio for each lesson 15 or 16 times before opening the book. This is what I have adopted for myself as I go through Assimil. I find that the constant repitition of hearing the audio means that I am mentally absorbing the spoken language better than if I were to listen once or twice to the audio and then go straight to the book. It's only a small difference but I feel it is being incredibily beneficial to me. I find that listening to the audio so many times means that on occasions I dont do everything in one go. Today for example, I have of yet to open the book and look at the lesson and read the notes. I have however listened to the audio maybe 10+ times and after writing this I will go back to my book and continue the the lesson with the book. Anyway, 2 weeks today and the active wave begins. On the plus side today's lesson of Assimil was relatively easy to understand after a few play throughs so I am happy with how things are progressing. One interesting thing I learnt in the last few days relates to modal verbs. If I take one as an example, normally the past tense of dovere would be ho dovuto. However, this changes when a preceding verb forces agreement of the auxilary verb. in other words ho dovuto would become sono dovuto andare because andare requires the usage of essere. Ok, my poor explanation aside I am happy to be learning things like these and at the moment I have a good retention of this sort of stuff. I use sharedtalk alot and although I mainly text chat, I think once I begin the active wave of assimil in 2 weeks time I am going to start looking for language partners to chat with. I have done this before and it was pretty good but it is difficult to find a suitable partner and to avoid the session becoming one sided if one of the participants is better in their target language in contrast to the other person. Anyway, enough waffle for today, back to assimil. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| canada38 Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5486 days ago 304 posts - 417 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Japanese | Message 3 of 53 02 January 2011 at 10:41pm | IP Logged |
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I like your idea of watching something in Italian that interests you (cycling). I'll
definitely have to try watching some Italian shows that I would normally watch in English. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| JPike1028 Triglot Senior Member United States piketransitions Joined 5388 days ago 297 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, French, Italian Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic (Written), Swedish, Portuguese, Czech | Message 4 of 53 04 January 2011 at 1:09am | IP Logged |
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For native listening materials in all languages, you may want to try www.radiotime.com
They have radio stations from all over the world and in a variety of genres. I find it really useful. Good luck! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5584 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 5 of 53 04 January 2011 at 11:28am | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the info JPike. I will check that out. If if is of any use, there is an app
for most smartphones called wunderadio that allows you to stream radio from all over the world - you can sort by genre, country etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Oasis88 Senior Member Australia Joined 5696 days ago 160 posts - 187 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Italian | Message 6 of 53 04 January 2011 at 3:19pm | IP Logged |
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It's nice to see someone else focusing on Italian. At this stage I'm around beginner-
intermediate and have found the Michael Thomas and Assimil versions of Italian to be very useful. Make sure you check out http://www.rai.tv/dl/RaiTV/homeTv.html where you can get access to a whole bunch of goodies to suit your tastes. I see you have a satellite dish, so this might be redundant. I'll be closely following this log. Best of luck with your studies and your goal of reaching B2. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5584 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 7 of 53 04 January 2011 at 5:19pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the link Oasis. Whilst I do have RAI's satellite channels, the site is
still useful as sometimes films and the like are scrambled and not available outside of Italy. I have found on the site though that there are films available and to have them on demand is useful. As for today's activities, As I write this, I am sat in my living room, watching RAI sports 2. There's skiing on but that not important. The main thing is that for hours a day I can watch Italian TV without the hassle I previously had of having to fire up the laptop, keep the battery charged, connect the laptop to the tv etc. I would recommend to anyone learning a foreign language to look into a free to air satellite kit. I got mine from ALDI for £50, although I have previously seen similar offers from LIDL and B&Q (these places don't seem to have the kits constantly on sale, and in the case of LIDL and ALDI they are usually part of their sunday special sales). Depending on the language you are learning will of course determine which satellite you aim for in the sky. I am lucky that a satellite called Hotbird has a load of Italian channels but also channels in many different languages. These include Spanish, French, German and so on. These other channels will be useful for future languages I attempt. I have felt a real increase in speed in todays Assimil lesson and probably for the first time it seems as if the audio is being spoken at the same speed as I am hearing on the television. Therefore, today is was harder to pick up all the words despite repeated listens. My tongue gets tied when I try to talk at the mach 3 speed as well but theres plenty of time to improve on that. I visited sharedtalk today and spoke with a woman called Gladys for about 30 minutes. It was only text chat but it was a good mixture of Italian and English. One problem with these sort of encounters if that they usually cover the same ground over and over. By that I mean, you find someone to chat to and they ask you all the same questions. I need to find a regular language partner to break out of this and start heading into specific subjects where we could both learn new vocabulary. Finally, I have a load of time on my hands and so I think from tomorrow I will restart Pimsleur Italian - from the beginning. I did race through to about lessons 25 on level 1 in about a week when a restarted Assimil 38 days ago. This time I will do 1 lesson a day in hope that such a small amount of time will not allow the boredom to build up. A domani. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| magictom123 Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5584 days ago 272 posts - 365 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French | Message 8 of 53 05 January 2011 at 11:15am | IP Logged |
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Since deciding to stop messing around flicking between languages and to concentrate on
only one until I reach some sort of fluency is one of the smartest moves I have taken with regards to language learning. I spent a while on French last year, dabbled with some German and had a crack for a few weeks on Esperanto. The problem with all of these was not the language, but the nagging feeling that all the time I had previously spent on Italian would be wasted as I gradually lost what I had learnt. Upon reading the same message from a few different polyglots, i.e. learn one language at a time, I decided to go back to the language I knew most about and stick with it until I reach a high level. Since then, restarting Assimil, tackling some of Pimsleur, watching a lot of Italian TV and reading Italian news site online such as Italianotizie.it, gazzetta.it and yahoo.it ecc has given me the nice feeling of satisfaction that I am moving along nicely after a year of stagnantion. Of course there is a long way to go still but just from watching the news, I can see that my level of comprehension is increasing on an almost daily basis. Today is lesson 39 in Assimil. After yesterday's difficulty in understanding the lesson, it was a pleasant surprise to note that after maybe 2-3 run throughs of the audio I had an almost complete understanding of the lesson. One of the pleasing things I have taken from language learning is learning something new through context, as was the case today. The last few lessons have talked about going shopping and buying presents, with un berretto being mentioned a few times. Today, one of the lines is 'un berretto con fasce blu' or something like that, and I realised that this might mean with blue stripes (which it did). It's little things like this that make the long haul of language learning seem more like a daily pleasant stroll. Edited by magictom123 on 05 January 2011 at 11:18am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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