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Italian the lazy way | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4100 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 1 of 53 20 December 2014 at 1:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Welcome to my log! I want to be able to look back at my progress, but don't want to start and maintain another blog, and a simple file on my computer does not make me feel accountable, so here we are.
I am a native Swedish-speaker, living in Brittany (France). When I am not working on my French, I am mostly working on my Breton. This log isn't about either of those languages, though. It's about Italian. Italian and me I have never been particularly drawn to anything Italian - not the language, not the food, not the culture. I have a degree in Classical Archaeology, but I guess that you could say that went to great lengths to avoid specialising in anything remotely Italian. My exception was a fascination with the Etruscans. My other Italian exception was Il Gattopardo. I read it in translation in 11th grade, and it instantly became my favourite book. I told myself, non-committally, that in my old age I might read it in the original Italian. Five years ago, my husband and I started watching French films together in preparation for moving to France. This opened us up to world cinema in general, including a lot of Italian cinema. Over the years, we have really enjoyed Italian films, but more importantly we both really enjoyed seeing how much Italian one can understand drawing only from French, and how much Italian comprehension improves alongside French comprehension. As a result, I have been more and more drawn to a number of things Italian. Goals and methods My main language goals are improving my French to a native-like level and achieving a strong and comfortable fluency in Breton. I am busy enough without adding Italian to the mix. So, my goal with Italian is to have fun. I might one day give myself a more specific achievement-based goal, but not right now. I suppose you could say that my goal is still to read Il Gattopardo in the original in my old age (I just turned 30, so I have some time). I don't intend on having a schedule. I don't intend on picking a method and going with it. I'll do what I feel like, and what I feel like I need at that time to progress with something fun. Yes, that might involve doing two lessons of A here, a lesson a B, there, reading blogs before even doing a single lesson of anything, and probably watching a lot of Buffy l'Ammazzavampiri (I bought season three on Amazon), maybe even in a subs2srs context. I'll be lazy, I'll be cheap, and I will learn an uncertain amount of Italian. 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4100 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 2 of 53 20 December 2014 at 5:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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There is nothing quite like that initial excitement when you start a project, is there?
This afternoon, in the forty minutes I had to wait for some dough to rise, I signed up for DuoLingo and got acquainted with some Italian pronouns and verb conjugation, most importantly the present tense of "to be".  I would rate DuoLingo as moderately fun. It seems to operate on the basis of massive repetition with slight variation. The whole "game" aspect of earning points and being able to compete against others is probably motivational to some, but being a lazy learner I doubt I'll stick with it for long. I also spent a couple of minutes importing and formatting subs2srs cards for Anki. Thanks to emk's tutorial it took absolutely no time at all. I haven't started going through the cards, yet, but I opened up the deck just to see that it worked. This was one of the first cards that popped up, and it's one that I understood straight away:  From first glance it appears that I will be deleting a lot of cards where the audio doesn't really correspond very well with the subtitles. This is unsurprising as I bought a dubbed series, which means that the subtitles both correspond best with the English audio. That's the route I chose, though, because I know Buffy the Vampire Slayer like the back of my hand, which boosts comprehension, which boosts the fun. If anyone is curious why I chose season three, instead of season one, it's quite simple: season one is shorter, so it has a lot less language for your money. Season two probably is my least favourite season, and from season four and onwards the dialogues are not nearly as frequently about normal teenager things. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Via Diva Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation last.fm/user/viadivaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4235 days ago 1109 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German, Italian, French, Swedish, Esperanto, Czech, Greek | Message 3 of 53 20 December 2014 at 5:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I had just the same situation with Italian, drawn by it a little, but not too much. It was an experiment I failed
but can resume anytime. Good luck with your studies! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| liammcg Senior Member Ireland Joined 4605 days ago 269 posts - 397 votes Speaks: English* | Message 4 of 53 20 December 2014 at 5:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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As a fellow beginner in Italian, I wish you the very best of luck and good fun! Great to
see a fellow Celtic language learner btw :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4100 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 5 of 53 20 December 2014 at 11:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, thanks Via Diva, for that very discouraging encouragement! (Just kidding, thank you for real.)
Thank you, and best of luck to you too! It seems there are actually quite a few learners/speakers of Celtic languages on the forum, at least given the size of the languages and their secondary nature even in their home countries. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4100 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 6 of 53 21 December 2014 at 1:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
While waiting for my husband to wake up this morning, so that we could have breakfast together, I spent a couple of minutes with Lyrics Translate, creating bilingual subtitles for an Italian pop song that I've previously understood a fair bit of just by listening (Dall'inferno by Marco Mengoni). If you have never created subtitles before, this may sound like a lot of work, but it really isn't for something as short as a song (it's also Italian practice). I simply copy-pasted the lyrics into my software, and then I played the MP3-file, entering the times for each line into the software.
 When I had replaced the Italian with an English translation and saved a second subtitle file, I ran both the MP3 file and my subtitle files through subs2srs, and then simply imported everything into a new Italian music deck for Anki. The cards themselves are not much to look at because I couldn't be bothered styling them, but they play the line from the song while showing the Italian lyrics, and when I turn the card over I get the translation. That's all they need to do.  Simple, quick and fun (especially for flashcards). I'll definitely be doing more of this with both Italian and Breton songs! 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4100 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 7 of 53 21 December 2014 at 9:45pm | IP Logged | |||||
Today, as a reward for finishing my Breton and French flashcards, I let myself start looking at the Buffy l'Ammazzavampiri flashcards. There is a certain degree of repetition...
 I also added two more Italian songs to my music deck and spent a little too much time levelling up on DuoLingo. Over the past year, I have been saving potentially useful bookmarks in a "one day, when I decide to learn Italian" folder. I decided to start reviewing the contents of that folder. Even though they are monolingual and I literally just started playing a bit with the language yesterday, the sketches on RAI Cultura: Italiano (Livello A1) aren't exactly too hard to follow. They're just cheesy and no fun at all. Delete. La Mappa Misteriosa from the BBC follows the same general idea, but looks a bit more interesting. Unfortunately, only lesson 12 appears to be working. Will have to check back later. L'Italiano in Famiglia is yet another sketch-based series of lessons. I'm of two minds with this one. On the one hand, it was somewhat fun looking at the first video and seeing how well I understood it. On the other hand, the content is on the dull side. In the end, it's not something I am going to look forward to looking at so I'm deleting it. Learn Italian with Lucrezia seems to be everyone's go-to channel on YouTube when it comes to learning Italian. I'm actually not very interested in the standard lesson videos, but I really liked what I saw from her Italian vlogs and some of the less standardised lesson videos (e.g. when she walks around her grandmother's kitchen garden, teaching new vocabulary). Lyrics Training is an excellent concept, it's easy to do a quick song or two when in the mood, and it's fun. I don't expect to use it much in the beginning (I can kind of guess how words are spelled at this point, but since I often don't understand them it's a bit of a pointless exercise) but I'm already looking forward to using it! That's it for today. Back to my French (originally German) novel about murder-solving sheep! 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 53 21 December 2014 at 10:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
Hah! Those cards are marvelous. If nothing else, subs2srs is a very amusing way to create earworms. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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