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Gary’s TAC 2012 - The Romantics | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5019 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 129 of 167 11 September 2012 at 11:20am | IP Logged |
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I had an evening at the Italian meetup with an Italian guy and my two favourite
conversation group characters: the woman who doesn't seem to understand the term " [Language X] meetup" and speaks English the whole time after struggling to get out a couple of half sentences in Language X, and the guy who goes on and on, slowly and with many basic mistakes, about subjects that I have no knowledge or interest in. I'll let the guy off - it's not like he deliberately chooses the few subjects that I have little to say about, even if it often seems that way; to his credit he definitely makes an effort; and I can hardly talk when it comes to making basic mistakes, especially since I'm always out of practice. He even made a point of always replying in Italian when someone spoke English, for which he gets my respect, but he was fighting a losing battle. No such forgiveness for the woman though - it's perhaps hypocritical of me to criticise her since I advocate early speaking, but it completely ruins the evening for the rest of us who come for the rare opportunity to converse in Italian, so I can't see it as anything other than utterly inconsiderate. And of course the Italian guy had no problems indulging her since, well, he doesn't exactly need to practice his Italian. I'm not taking a shot at beginners here - I know what the beginner stage is like, and as I say I'm all for trying to speak early on in the process. I'm not even saying that beginners shouldn't come to meetups - you need to start somewhere, and I respect it when someone comes along and makes an effort even if they're clearly struggling. My problem is that she was barely even trying, and immediately switching to English at even the slightest difficulty, making the whole thing a waste of not only our time but hers as well. And if she just wanted to hear the language, she'd have done better to stay home and watch a damn film. So yes, I was quite disappointed and I felt like I wasted an evening, but up until now the Italian meetup has always been great so hopefully that was just an exception. And meetup.com lets you see who's going, so I'll know to avoid it if she's coming ;). If it happens again I'll have to speak up and point out that I've come because I'm serious about practising Italian and I don't like my time being wasted by people who're not willing to make an effort... I'm sure I'll come across as a condescending arsehole but still, it has to be said, I'm really getting sick of people wasting my time. I just remembered that Yakety Yak, the conversation group that I used to go to for French but then decided wasn't worth the time and money, also does Italian sessions. I think I'll give that a try tonight and see if their Italian sessions are any better; to be fair the French ones were often useful when I was more at the intermediate level. I suspect there'll be the same issue with beginners, but they might take it a bit more seriously since they're paying money, and if enough people are there then they should split it into beginner and advanced groups. I think I'll give Italian a couple more months, and if the situation hasn't improved by then I'll probably just decide to cut my losses and give it up. My level isn't quite as high as I hoped it would be by now, but still, I can converse although not particularly smoothly, and if I were to land in Italy tomorrow I doubt I'd struggle to get around. I'd love to learn it to fluency but maybe that's just an unrealistic dream. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5019 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 130 of 167 12 September 2012 at 12:04pm | IP Logged |
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So I've calmed down a bit after yesterday's rant. I went to the group yesterday evening
and it was good - one of the benefits of learning a semi-obscure language is that there aren't that many other people learning it (ah Italian, the language that everybody wants to learn but nobody actually does) so the group size is quite small. As I had hoped, I was put in the more advanced group with just a tutor and one other learner who was also quite comfortable conversing, so it worked out fairly well. As is usual for that sort of group, the tutor didn't correct mistakes or do much other "teaching", his job was just to keep the conversation going and give everyone a turn to speak. It's essentially a case of paying to have people to talk to; it costs £7, but when I consider that at a normal exchange I'd probably spend half of that on a drink and the other half is a very small price compared to all the effort and hassle I've spent trying to find people to talk to, it starts to seem very reasonable. Also it's on a Tuesday evening, which is the one evening of the week when I tend to consistently have some time to spare. So if I start attending that regularly then that's hopefully a guaranteed hour of conversation per week, but we'll see - if learning Italian has taught me one thing, it's to not be too optimistic. Also, self-talk, the exercise that I always praise but then forget about. I think it could be particularly helpful at my current level where I have a reasonable knowledge but need to do more work on activating it. Even if I can fit in five minutes in the morning, that's something. In my experience with French, I also found that native speakers didn't really take me seriously until I reached a more advanced level, and it was things like conversation groups and self-talk that helped me get there. So there is hope. I was just saying that you have to gear your learning methods to your situation, and Italian is not Spanish, I'm not going to bump into friendly native speakers who're keen to help me at every turn, but there are other ways. Having a learning strategy that relies on other people is a bit stupid really unless you're in a situation where other people are actually available - the other thing that learning Italian has taught me is that the vast majority of people are unreliable and don't stick to their word. On the French front I've been finding Anki useful for learning expressions. I actually think that SRS is the sort of thing that gets more useful as your level increases: I don't see much need for it at the beginner-to-intermediate stage, where repetition of what you need to learn is already covered by courses, conversations, and native materials, but as you get more advanced and want to learn and retain expressions that don't necessarily come up every day but are nonetheless useful in certain situations, it starts to come in useful. For finding expressions, as well as being more attentive to films and conversations, there's some very good online resources: everyone's favourite Vie de Merde, a wealth of colloquial language but edited so you know it's correct, and also Topito, a "top lists" site with humour and interesting facts similar to Cracked. The content on Topito isn't very original, I definitely got some déjà vu and I'm sure that a lot of it is just translations of popular English humour articles and Internet memes, but it's very well written and very advanced: almost every sentence has a word or expression that I've never seen before. Whenever I come across an expression that I could see as being useful in conversation, I take a note of it and it goes into Anki. My conversational French is already pretty competent, at least on a good day, so my goal now is to polish it up and make it more elegant and varied. I like the idea of always having the right expression for the situation. Overall point of this post: while chatting to native speakers may be the pinnacle of conversational language learning, it's not the only way to do it, and it's not the only thing you need to do. Italian Super Challenge Films: 21 done, 79 to go. Speaking hours: 28.5 done, 71.5 to go. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5019 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 131 of 167 18 September 2012 at 11:37am | IP Logged |
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Once again I seem to have almost no spare time. In a typical week my social life will
either be busy during the week or at the weekend, but in the last few weeks it's very much been both. September's always a crazy month though, when everything starts moving again after the summer. I seem to be slowly learning to chill out a bit and stop getting worked up over all the ups and downs - at the end of the day there's no point in wasting emotional energy and getting stressed over it, especially when it's something I'm just doing for fun. If I accept that my ability's not going to be consistent instead of getting annoyed and resisting it, I'll be more relaxed which of course helps me speak better. I'm also trying to remind myself as always to slow down and think more before speaking so I make fewer stupid mistakes. I suppose the frustration is one of the things that really drives me to work harder and keep trying to finding better methods and more practice opportunities, so to some extent it's a good thing, but I can't let it actually get me down. I put up another ad for language exchanges in my city, this time making sure to emphasise what I have to offer as well as what I want. I've also replied to a couple of other ads. I'll see how that pans out over the next few weeks; my hopes aren't exactly high after all my past experience but still, one-to-one conversation with a native speaker is pretty much the pinnacle of language practice for me, especially compared to the usual listening to mistakes and bad accents at meetups, so finding it is worth a certain amount of hard work and being messed around. If nothing else, it helps me grow a thicker skin. Français The more active study I've been doing recently seems to be starting to pay off - some of the expressions I've picked up and put into Anki are beginning to make their way into my speech. So far so good, especially for the minimal time investment: the daily review only takes a couple of minutes and I pick up the expressions during reading which I'd have been doing anyway. I also think that my accent is finally improving, although I've done very little specific pronunciation work recently; either my past work is finally paying off or it's simply improving with the amount of practice, exposure, and attentive listening I've had recently. It's still something that takes some time to "warm up" though, and of course I still don't think that it's "good" as much as "not as bad". Italian Brief conversation yesterday evening, and I've been doing more self-talk, which seems to be doing its job of keeping the language fresh in my mind. I'll try the conversation group again tonight. I didn't manage to watch a whole film last week - my current goal of two films per week per language really isn't realistic unless I have a particularly quiet weekend. Edited by garyb on 18 September 2012 at 11:39am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5019 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 132 of 167 19 September 2012 at 12:27pm | IP Logged |
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As planned I went to the conversation group last night; this time I had mixed feelings.
The level in the more advanced group didn't seem particularly, well, advanced, and the other people didn't seem particularly serious - there was a lot of joking around and switching to English. On the other hand though, it was a good laugh, they were nice people, it was a small group so I still got to talk, and this time round the teacher did a bit more actual teaching with corrections and explanations. At Kerrie's suggestion I've been looking into online tutors - paying somebody for conversation practice is really starting to look more and more attractive compared to spending time and effort trying to set up language exchanges that rarely work out and going to language meetups that are dominated by other non-native speakers. Italki looks interesting - it makes the distinction between formal lessons and informal conversation practice, with the latter often being cheaper. The prices are good too - £5 an hour is typical, which is less than the conversation group I was talking about, so for one-to- one practice it's a no-brainer. I'll probably give it a try soon and report back. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5019 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 133 of 167 23 September 2012 at 8:40pm | IP Logged |
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I've had an unexpectedly good weekend for Italian practice: yesterday I had a Skype
conversation, then met an Italian woman for an exchange, then had another Skype conversation with someone from Italki (an exchange, not the paid stuff I was talking about). And today I met a girl from Viterbo. All the conversations yesterday went pretty well, but the one today was difficult: I had a lot of trouble understanding her accent, and by that point I was tired and I think I was all Italian-ed out after the previous day, so I was having to ask her to repeat herself after every other sentence and I felt a bit stupid. I suppose now I know how people feel when they first hear my Scottish accent after being used to English and American ones. I also tried to meet another guy for an exchange earlier today, but he didn't turn up and I've not heard anything from him since. Overall though it was great being able to speak so much after all my recent difficulties. However, we'll see whether any of these new exchanges actually last; I'm not getting my hopes up just yet. My French, on the other hand, has been a bit neglected. I did go to another film night where we watched "Chacun cherche son chat"; concentrating on the film and not being distracted by how hot Garance Clavel looks in it was quite difficult but I managed. There was the usual conversation after the film, but again people seemed a bit hard to talk to. Edited by garyb on 23 September 2012 at 8:56pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5019 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 134 of 167 25 September 2012 at 11:15am | IP Logged |
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I had the usual every-second-Monday dilemma of whether to go to the Language Café or the Italian meetup. In the end I did both, since the Italian meetup is on the way home from the Language Café. I was slightly disappointed by the Italian meetup again - same problem of people talking very enthusiastically about things I had no interest in and nothing to contribute to - and so I wasn't particularly sad that I couldn't stay for long. But it was still an opportunity to practise Italian a bit, and beggars can't be choosers. The Café was good however: there were several French people there, so I should have just stayed there. Often better to stick with the sure thing than to leave it for a possibility.
My French does indeed still feel out of practice, and my accent is still terrible, but I'm hoping that if I can get into the habit of slowing down and thinking more about what I'm saying instead of trying to keep up with native speed then I should be able to retrain the accent a bit and speak a little more accurately. I'm going to try to do daily self-talk exercises to work on that: with speaking it seems to be important to keep up the daily momentum, even if it's just talking to myself. I'm still optimistic that even if I'll never sound like a French person I can get a decent accent, despite the poor results of all the work I've done on it already... I have enough determination and willingness to try different things. I think I need to basically retrain my French speaking from scratch as opposed to modifying what's already there; I might even see if I can find a tutor or suchlike who specialises in pronunciation and accent, if such a person exists, so I can get started again on the right foot. Now, to find the time for all that... I did say it's a busy time of year already! On a perhaps positive note, realising just how much work I need to do on both my Italian and French has completely killed the wanderlust I was feeling for Spanish. I want to be a lot more fluent in French and a lot more conversationally comfortable in Italian before I even think about starting anything else, and that's going to take at least the rest of this year if not much longer. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5019 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 135 of 167 28 September 2012 at 6:24pm | IP Logged |
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Busy week so not much language work. I even missed the Wednesday French meetup. My weekend's looking fairly quiet so I should be able to do some catching up.
I realise I'm a bit late to the party with this, but I was reading some AJATT the other day and I discovered the idea of context cloze-deletion flashcards. For most of what I've been putting into Anki, this seems like a better idea than the traditional sentence cards. I like the way it gives you input (reading the rest of the sentence) and output (filling in the gap) at the same time, and it seems good for drilling tricky prepositions and verbs as well as vocabulary items. If I feel that it's working well then I might start doing it for Italian as well - with Assimil getting more and more advanced and specialised, I think it would be sensible to stop trying to learn it all using the Luca method and instead pick and choose what I want to learn using SRS. The Luca method seems great for working through more basic material in which every sentence is useful to know, like a beginner Assimil book and the first 33% or so of an advanced one, but as the material gets more advanced it becomes unnecessary work. Also it's probably good to step away from translation-based methods at the more advanced level - while I don't believe in the whole idea that translation makes you worse at thinking in the target language, I doubt it makes you better at it either, at least beyond the beginner stage. Another idea that I liked from AJATT was that of giving yourself short bursts of exposure very frequently. I can't remember which article it was from now. That's something I can do quite easily at work, with access to online radio stations. I'm trying to arrange more exchange meetings for this weekend. I've not heard back from the Viterbese yet which is a shame as I was quite looking forward to another hardcore listening comprehension challenge: if I could understand her then I could probably understand anyone. There seem to be quite a few Italians studying for the IELTS at the moment, and so looking for exchanges, so hopefully I can take advantage. In some ways I'm wishing I had just decided to focus on French for another year instead of starting Italian - I completely underestimated the absolutely massive difference between almost-fluent and fluent. Too late though, you live and you learn, and all things considered, being able to understand and converse in Italian isn't a bad trade-off for not being as fluent as I had hoped in French, and I think it has given me some useful insights which have helped me with French. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5019 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 136 of 167 30 September 2012 at 8:16pm | IP Logged |
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Forgot to update this the last few times:
Italian Super Challenge Films: 24 done, 76 to go. Speaking hours: 33 done, 67 to go. Italiano Met two Italians today: the woman from last week, and a guy from Rome. The first conversation was fairly difficult and I found myself pausing, looking for words, and making mistakes quite a lot; the second went well and the guy was very impressed, and said the only thing I really needed to work on was my pronunciation - weak point as ever. The meeting with him was good as we were correcting each other's mistakes, giving advice and teaching expressions, so it was a bit more of an exchange as opposed to just a conversation. I know I should be used to it now but I still find it amazing how much my language abilities vary from day to day, or even on the same day like today. It's like the Scottish weather... when I met the woman in the morning it was raining, and when I met the guy it was nice and sunny, I wonder if there's a connection? :) I also had a fairly long text chat with a Sardinian from Italki. Apparently that's another place where using the passato remoto in conversation isn't unheard of; like in French, I can generally recognise it although I'd have a hard time producing it. While I prefer voice chat, text definitely has some advantages too - I now have a nice transcript of a conversation with lots of useful expressions and corrections of my mistakes which I can look over and even copy sentences from for Anki. On the subject of Anki, I started an Italian deck, I'll see how that works out. Admittedly about half my current cards are cloze deletions for magari as that word is practically a vocabulary in itself and I'm still trying to incorporate it into my speaking. I watched Il Cuore Altrove a few days ago. Good film, even though drama/romance isn't generally my thing, and I understood it pretty well without subtitles, although I had difficulty with a few characters. The main character was a very well-spoken Latin and Greek teacher so he was a breeze to understand, but his father's strong Roman accent was hard to decipher at times. The roommate from Naples was also sometimes tricky, and the characters from Bologna could be tough when they speeded up. It was certainly interesting to hear the differences between accents typical of Northern, Central, and Southern Italy. Français Not much success with finding speaking opportunities yet, but I might be able to do some Skyping later this evening. I watched Ne Le Dis A Personne yesterday, which I managed to find French subs for; I don't think I'd have had much trouble without subs, but it did help me focus more on the language. Edited by garyb on 30 September 2012 at 8:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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