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Starting out Italian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| LanguageSponge Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5768 days ago 1197 posts - 1487 votes  Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Slovenian, Greek, Italian | Message 1 of 10 06 April 2009 at 1:59am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Hello,
I've decided that it's finally time for me to learn Italian. My reasons are largely personal ones; my father's family is Italian, they all speak it, and despite my being able to speak a few foreign languages fairly proficiently, I have never gone into Italian, which is perhaps the one I should have started with after my native English. On this, I have several questions about various aspects of the language. My vocabulary consists almost entirely of words for various members of the family - I always call my uncle Tio Emilio, my grandfather Nonno, and so forth. Firstly, I have found throughout my language learning, especially with German and Russian, that using children's stories to enhance my vocabulary is a particularly useful exercise. I realise that I may already understand a lot of Italian because I understand a lot of French and some Spanish, not to mention that my father's family always spoke Italian around me when I was younger. Unfortunately, I was never encouraged by my father to engage them in Italian conversation, and now I am very much regretting that rather bad decision made on my behalf. Can anyone provide me with some reading materials, both simple and fairly complex? I can obviously look on Italian news websites and watch the Italian news at university through satellite, but it's also nice to hear your recommendations, as your insights may be different and more extensive than my own. I don't have access to foreign news outside of term time. Although I am likely to soak up grammar very quickly, I would feel more comfortable if I had a reference grammar. Is there one which springs to mind which you consider to be up to the job? I would be confortable with it being in English, German or French. Also, if there's a particular website with a nice grammar overview, then I'd love to hear about that as well. Several hours ago I emailed various members of my family, who are scattered around both England and various parts of Italy, asking about Italian films and music. My grandparents, aunts and uncles aren't likely to mention the more modern films, musicians, authors and such like, so if anyone could chip in with their suggestions on books, music and film, I'd be really grateful. For the purpose of learning words and getting used to (or hearing more of, in my case) the sounds of Italian, it doesn't matter much to me what genre the music and film belong to. Thanks for all your help. Any further suggestions on aspects of learning that I haven't thought of are also welcome. Jack Boni 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| AnneNedjma Newbie Norway Joined 5701 days ago 9 posts - 10 votes Speaks: English Studies: Spanish | Message 2 of 10 25 April 2009 at 9:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Hello! I suppose you have already found some material by now, but anyway, I thought the course Teach Yourself Italian would be a good start for you. I just got through the same book in Spanish (no casettes, paid 20p for it in England and thought I'd see how far I could get with just the book and the help of the internet. I speak French at home with my husband and also read through an Italian beginner's textbook a couple of years back, sounds like you've got a similiar background. Italian seemed pretty easy to pronunce, and you won't have the silent letters as in French. Good luck, do let us know about your progress!
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| Lizzern Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5911 days ago 791 posts - 1053 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 3 of 10 03 May 2009 at 11:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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You could try Assimil's course, I'm a bigtime Assimil fan myself (used it for Hungarian, and Spanish review, and I know others who have used it for Chinese and German) and just started their Italian course, it seems like quality stuff so far...
Just ordered Ragusa's Essential Italian Grammar, and Soluzioni, today, but really I'm a newbie at Italian just like you are, so I'm still scouting around for the best resources. Beautiful language, isn't it? :-) All the best with it, and let us know how you go - and if you find any good resources! Liz Edited by Lizzern on 03 May 2009 at 11:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| JBI Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5693 days ago 46 posts - 67 votes Speaks: Modern Hebrew, English* Studies: Italian, Mandarin, French | Message 4 of 10 04 May 2009 at 5:18am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Grammar is tricky. There is a very good new textbook out from the University of Chicago I believe called Salve (http://www.amazon.com/Salve-Audio-Carla-Larese-Riga/dp/1413 015166/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241406190&sr=8-1), which is a bit expensive, but is a fantastic intro to Italian, if you stick to it. Tapes may work, though I think at first Grammar drills work better, since, judging by your profile, you don't speak something like French or Spanish yet, so getting used to the way the Grammar and word order is used may be a better place to start. The Rosetta Stone, Michel Thomas, and even the Pimsleur, to me, seem rather crummy, if you really want to learn the real language. Enough words are similar, that is far better to work with text, rather than recording, I find, and then top things off by watching movies in Italian with Italian subtitles on, and writing down words you don't understand.
Something like music may help, but I personally find anything classical, like opera, is almost always too difficult to make sense of. For me, reading something like Italo Calvino's Città Invisibili is a great way to boost adjectives and nouns, and working with easier texts first, like Salve, and then children's classics, things like The Little Prince and such really help to get you used to things. The Pronunciation is rather simple, and the language is quite phonetic, so that isn't much of a problem, but really getting the grammar and the vocabulary can be challenging, so my way that I go about things, is to really make flash cards with sentences on them in English, and then translate them into Italian, and check my answers against a real sentence of Italian from a book. That way, you get the real way it would sound, rather than just a literal translation from English, so you learn a little bit of the practical aspects. It is very easy to get to the point of being able to get around Italy without needing much English. But if you want to get to the point, where you are able to down books, and have meaningful conversations, to me at least (I've been formally studying Italian for over a year now), you need to work harder with vocabulary. For me, I stick mostly to Fellini films, since I think he has a natural feel for things, and a strong Roman flavor to his characters, which makes what they say useful, but I wouldn't recommend the Pimsleur or the Michel Thomas, as I feel they don't really get at much, beyond basic "I have a friend named Giovanni." 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 5 of 10 04 May 2009 at 7:44pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Whereas I'm well known for my support of Michel Thomas, and I'd recommend it to anyone, because it doesn't go anywhere near "I have a friend named Giovanni". What Thomas does is teach the core grammar very quickly without getting bogged down in topics and phrases (so there's no "Introducing yourself", there's no "at the airport"). Thomas is only a start, but it's a massively useful one, particularly given that it takes up less than a day of your life in total. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| JBI Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 5693 days ago 46 posts - 67 votes Speaks: Modern Hebrew, English* Studies: Italian, Mandarin, French | Message 6 of 10 04 May 2009 at 9:33pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
In truth, you are right about the speed thing, which is perhaps a bonus, but from an economic perspective, is it really worth it? His pronunciation of even English isn't fantastic, so there isn't much of a bonus there, and one could probably, if they understand grammar, pick up the grammatical aspects pretty easily on their own through going through a grammar booklet, so even that doesn't seem to work well. When we look into Italian grammar, I think we can agree to some extent that present indicative is probably the easiest to understand, after you absorb all the exceptions, then perhaps the imperative, which is quite easy as well, once you understand how pronouns work. And perhaps the future is quite easy as well. But when you get beyond that, you realize the future isn't just the future, it is also denoting probability. And when you get to the past tense, you will need to switch between a perfect present participle (passato prossimo), a perfect past participle (trapassato prossimo) and the imperfect, and somehow figure out how they all relate to each other. I don't think a method of grammar, like Thomas's really teaches you how to approach something like that. And that isn't even considering most compound tenses, the conditional, or the subjunctive. Think about when you start mixing all that together - it would seem useful to know exactly what you are looking at, especially if it is on paper, rather than a recording. So in truth, you may learn a few basics in 8 hours, but really, it is just a few basics. You still will need to enhance vocabulary, learn the idiom, and even understand how things fit together. Not to mention learn nuances in both pronouns (direct and indirect) and prepositions (which really, I would think, cannot be understood relative to English), and also incorporate all the exceptions for each conjugation. So, perhaps the £68.50 for the Foundation, and the £50.00 (source: http://www.michelthomas.co.uk/italian.htm) for the Advanced could be better spent - mainly, something like 20$ for a good grammar book, that introduces vocabulary too, something like this one: http://www.progettolingua.it/EccoItalianGrammar_en.htm for instance, which isn't too pricey, though there are probably better ones for the same cost, would probably be far more economical, and useful in developing grammar than you can use for all phrases, not just the ones recordings put forward. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 7 of 10 04 May 2009 at 10:28pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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JBI,
Yes it's the basics, but these are basics that most courses consider advanced and won't let you even get a sniff of until you've been studying three or four years. One of the things about Thomas is that you get the bigger picture for every word you know, rather than getting it strait-jacketed into just one or two tenses as so many courses do. As a first step, this means I can see the whole sentence, even if I can't understand it. A lot of people here talk about inferring or inducing meaning from what you know in the sentence -- the more you know of the sentence, the easier this is. You've got the framework on which you can hang the subtler shades of meaning and how they interact. Most courses (and grammar books) tend to compartmentalise too much and things that are essentially the same are repeated three or four times just for one subtle difference. You cannot learn everything perfectly first time, but you can get a rough cut that you can refine at a later stage.
I consider the accent thing a red herring. For one thing, I have never met a language teacher who teaches in a native accent -- even native speakers take on an ex-adge-err-eight-ed "learnerese" accent when they speak to learners, or dismiss real native accent features as "just dialect". For another thing, a beginner cannot hear the sounds of a foreign language -- just as we give learners simplified examples of grammar to learn from (they can't understand it all in one go), he starts the student making the necessary distinctions in sounds consciously, which very few teachers do.
Depends who "one" is. I'm only now starting to get the knack for that myself, so I'm fairly confident your average beginner is not going to be able to do that.
What do you know already? English. When you want to say something, what's your reflex? To say it in English. Thomas ties what you should say (target language) to what you want to say (native language) and forces you to notice the differences between the native and target languages. If you don't do this, you can get a lot of students who will produce perfect English in classroom exercises, but will revert to poor translations of home language in relaxed conversation.
Well exactly. The point is to start off with the stuff that can be related to English productively, and then move on to something else afterwards. I don't know what Thomas did in his schools, but I'm guessing that after the first week of learning they wouldn't be doing what's on those CDs. In fact, maybe week 2 of Michel's classes was rubbish, but the fact is that the 16 CDs he produced give you an awful lot in a very short space of time.
Now I'd advise anyone to shop around and not pay full price if they can possibly avoid it, but a grammar book is a grammar book. Some people can teach themselves from grammar books, others can't. With the MT course, you're paying to be taught and to be taught quickly, and it is not a high price compared to many other commercial language courses. And as for "developing grammar than you can use for all phrases, not just the ones recordings put forward"... !!!! Spanish is the only language I have mastered the subjunctive in. I learned it from Michel Thomas, and did a bit of book-work to revise it afterwards. The point of Thomas's method is that it is not about phrases, it's about learning the "Lego" of the language that can be reconfigured into any shape you like. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| TheBiscuit Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 5925 days ago 532 posts - 619 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Italian Studies: German, Croatian | Message 8 of 10 05 May 2009 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I think this is where many miss the point of MT's teaching. He teaches what is most useful and most generalisable, making grammar easy to absorb and more importantly, retain. He only introduces exceptions long after the most generalisable rule has been established and internalised by students. In this way you construct your own thoughts in the new language without relying on remembering a phrase from the 'at the airport' section of various other books - truly the most bizarre way to learn a language. What's more MT's method has been shown to be successful with virtually any student. Having used the 'at the airport' method for years in the classroom, I can honestly say that it really doesn't work, yet it's the most common method found in schools and universities. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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