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A Vocabulary/Grammar Balance | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Legend Newbie Australia Joined 5310 days ago 38 posts - 41 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 1 of 14 18 August 2010 at 4:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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The difficulty of learning Italian (or similar Romance languages) for me, as I'd imagine it is with all natively English speakers, is esablishing a fluency with the fundamentally different construction of verbs. It has not taken me long to conjugate future tense in Italian (avrò, avrai, avrà , avremo, avrete, avranno), but taking it from a grammatical understanding to fluent application is a bridge I'm having trouble crossing.
How can I immerse myself with an understanding of vocabulary for fluent sentence structure, while balancing it with grammar? I'm getting some help with my Nonna but her Italian is rooted in the Calabrese dialect rather than standard Italian. It's exciting to see myself gradually understanding some written Italian I see, but struggling with unknown words is offputting and overwhelming. I mean, I could move on to other tenses (e.g. the conditional) but my knowledge of future tense conjugations isn't near totality. Thanks in advance, everyone. Alex. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5792 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 2 of 14 18 August 2010 at 5:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think Michel Thomas handles this excellently -- his course works you through conjugations one by one (and by one, I mean one person in one tense, not a table of the whole tense) so that you don't think through the list, but associate the individual form with its own meaning.
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| Legend Newbie Australia Joined 5310 days ago 38 posts - 41 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 3 of 14 19 August 2010 at 10:26am | IP Logged | ||
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That sounds interesting and I'll look into it, thanks.
Could you begin to place particular importance on grammar or vocabulary over the other? Alex. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5792 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 4 of 14 19 August 2010 at 12:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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At the beginning, I always place importance on grammar.
Vocabulary is an endless task, whereas there is a limited amount of grammar in any language. You also can't predict what vocabulary (both in terms of words and phrases) you're going to need. Are the people you meet going to be "how are you?" people or "how's things?" people? You don't know. But you can predict the basic grammar they're going to use. Knowing grammar also helps you to learn new words, because you can see the link between certain words, and the grammar in the sentence provides context for the vocabularty. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5000 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu | Message 5 of 14 19 August 2010 at 5:13pm | IP Logged | ||
May I disagree with you and not cause offence? I found that what worked for me when I found out I was being sent to work in Germany and I realise there are different learning styles, I basically memorised a phrase book at the rate of 30 - 50 phrases per day and additional relevant vocab at perhaps another 20 - 50 per day for two weeks which was all the time I had. I found this was enough to get me to a basic communication state..... I then went into immersion status to improve. I absorbed the grammar as I went along 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Legend Newbie Australia Joined 5310 days ago 38 posts - 41 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 6 of 14 20 August 2010 at 3:13am | IP Logged | ||
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That's an interesting disparity.
I've been teaching myself the grammar in hope that the vocab will follow and I can see the results happening. I'll be looking to increase my study and we'll see if I can find that balance. Alex. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5430 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 7 of 14 20 August 2010 at 8:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think it's important to learn the very basics of grammar (the basic sentence structure, the common structures) first, then focus a lot more on vocab.
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| Legend Newbie Australia Joined 5310 days ago 38 posts - 41 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 8 of 14 23 August 2010 at 5:57am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm trying to move from Future Tense to The Conditional now, but as has been a common concern recently, I have been doubting whether moving through the tenses this quickly will make me forget what I've learnt, or make me struggle to learn the conjugations of other verbs in future.
I will try to maintain everything I'm learning as I move forward into more tenses with the knowledge that only a small amount of study should refresh my memory enough anyway. Here goes it... Alex. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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