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Gary’s TAC 2014: Spanish, Italian, French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5006 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 33 of 138 29 January 2014 at 12:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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Good point about the free excerpts, agantik!
Reading I finished La Peste. Overall I enjoyed it for what it was; like L'étranger I'm sure it wouldn't be everyone's thing, but I found it interesting and relatively easy with some wonderfully written parts. My favourite Camus book is still La Chute though, and I'm tempted to read it for a third time sometime soon. For now though I fancy a bit of a change for my next French book, but I'm not sure what. Part of me wants to go for something modern and useful but part of me wants to try a classic like Candide or Les Fleurs du Mal. In Italian I started Città invisibili. So far it's kicking my ass with lots of descriptive and semi-obscure vocabulary. The pop-up dictionary on my Kindle isn't quite perfect: normally when you choose a conjugated verb, plural noun, etc., it shows you the entry for the "normal" form... but it seems to be half-finished and sometimes, particularly for more obscure words, it just says "plural of xyz" or "past historic of abc", which is a fat load of good as you then have to view the whole entry and select the word again. The book is very descriptive and not at all conversational, so I think it's another one for the "entertainment rather than input" category. But it's short and people say great things about it so I think it's still worth a read. Italian conversation I had a chat with the Skype partner I mentioned before, the one who speaks French and Italian and corrects mistakes. I realised that I make quite a few simple mistakes in Italian that have gone uncorrected up until now. A few examples from my notes: should be "quello che ho fatto durante il week-end", not "al week-end"; "in un posto" not "ad un posto" (I think I often use both...); "è da tanto tempo che..." is better than "è molto tempo che...". Much more useful than the usual kind but insincere "wow you speak perfect Italian!", although I suppose it's just a different thing, intensive rather than extensive speaking practice. My French used to be a lot like that, I expressed myself well enough but made lots of little mistakes, and working through Grammaire progressive du français, niveau perfectionnement last year was the main thing that helped me tidy it up and speak more precisely and correctly. I do have what I think is a similar book for Italian, Grammatica avanzata della lingua Italiana, but I've been ignoring it and focusing on things that I feel are higher priority like pronunciation and conversation. I suppose my philosophy has been to learn to speak and express myself first and then tidy it up with grammar study later, which is something a lot of people seem to agree with. I know people who generally speak English very well, can talk relatively fluently about practically anything, and even have C1 certificates, yet still make a lot of basic grammatical errors that are obviously influenced by their native language. I suppose that goes to show what's more important at the end of the day. Although, just like for accent, the standards are different per language and I think English speakers are more tolerant than most. As always it's a question of priorities and deciding what's more important to focus on for the moment: being able to use the language to get my point across versus using it correctly versus pronouncing it well. Right now I still want to focus on pronunciation for another wee while but after that it might be time to fix up the grammar. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5006 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 34 of 138 03 February 2014 at 11:44am | IP Logged | ||
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Vendredi soir je suis allé à une fête française, organisée par le groupe Meetup. Pour une fois il y avait pas mal de français, ce qui était à la fois un avantage et un inconvénient : beaucoup d'occasion de parler avec de « vrais » francophones, mais comme je l'ai déjà dit dans mon journal de l'année passée, j'ai du mal à m'entendre avec la plupart des français. Je ne sais pas exactement à quoi c'est dû, peut-être à des différences culturelles ; j'avais pensé avant que c'était un manque général de compétences sociales de ma part, et je crois que ceci était en partie vrai il y a quelques années. Mais maintenant je me suis beaucoup amélioré à ce titre, et même s'il me reste encore beaucoup à apprendre et à améliorer, maintenant ce genre de problème m'arrive presque seulement avec les français et non pas avec les italiens, les espagnols, etc. Je n'aime pas faire des généralités mais je trouve la culture française vraiment fermée et je n'arrive pas à comprendre comment faire pour m'y intégrer.
À la fête il y avait une française que j'ai trouvée belle, et encore mieux, sympathique aussi : pas la jeune française typique qui se la raconte ( dont il y en avait aussi, bien sûr ! ). À l'évidence je n'étais pas le seul à penser ça : presque tous les mecs essayaient de la draguer de façon très évidente. Il y avait des français, des espagnols, des italiens... face à une telle concurrence que puis-je faire ? ;) Anyway I'm still ill, and going to that party and staying late was decidedly a bad idea especially considering I didn't exactly have a great time. But the sore throat's a lot better, and I've started doing a bit of pronunciation work again. After a couple of weeks off I actually feel like I'm better than I was before. I suppose it's good to take a break from semi-intense work like that and give the subconscious mind a bit of time to process everything. I'm also trying to start going back to the gym again, which gives me a bit of time to listen to Notes in Spanish again. I did lesson 40 of Assimil this morning. Assimil's great like that: you do a bit every day then suddenly you realise you've made a lot of progress. I also did some Spanish conversation at the weekend, mostly just listening but also joining in when I could. At my current level, group conversations with several native speakers are far too difficult, but listening to them is great for input and just the fact that I have easy "access" to them is amazing. These days I don't have much trouble understanding as long as I pay attention. At the weekend I watched a couple more episodes of Engrenages and Destinos and the film La grande bellezza, which was enjoyable if a bit strange. I'm quite a fan of Toni Servillo from what I've seen (Le conseguenze dell'amore, Gomorrah). Edited by garyb on 03 February 2014 at 11:45am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5006 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 35 of 138 07 February 2014 at 11:15am | IP Logged | ||
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I finally fell off the Assimil wagon after having managed 40 lessons in 40 days. Which I'm pretty proud of really; I'm amazed I managed that many. I'm going away this weekend so I'll miss another few days, after which I'll try to get back on track. But while January is a relatively busy month, February is a crazily busy one, so I'll be happy if I can manage, say, 4 or 5 per week.
While I've had no time for study, I have managed some practice. Went to the language café on Monday but as soon as I arrived I realised I was really tired and simply not in the mood and not up to dealing with a noisy bar full of people. I didn't stay long, but it was long enough to chat a little in French. On Tuesday I had a Skype chat with an Italian friend, but I felt pretty out of practice: recently things have been a bit strange and I've been speaking a lot of French and little Italian. Wednesday I had an English/Italian Skype chat that went a lot better, and last night I met up with the French guy who I do exchanges with and we had an interesting conversation. I'm happy to be doing all these exchanges, especially considering how difficult it's been to find the people, but I still don't feel like I'm getting the most out of them. All the people I speak with are extremely talkative, and while I can be chatty if I'm in the right mood, it's been hard recently with the tiredness and illness so they've been more of a listening exercise. Still, I'm convinced that one minute of a native speaker talking to you is worth about half an hour of TV or radio listening; the brain seems to take it a lot more seriously and remember things much better, perhaps because it's more personal. I'm trying to keep up with reading too. Le città invisibili isn't getting any easier. I can tell it's a great book, but it's hard to get into and enjoy when almost every sentence has unknown words. Some of the vocabulary is so specialised that often my sub-standard Kindle dictionary doesn't have the translation, or it does but I don't even know the English word. I reckon you'd need to be about a C2 level to read it comfortably. A parallel text would be useful... In French I've started reading Les fleurs du mal. Poetry from over a hundred years ago is of course next to useless for improving your ability to speak a language, so I suppose it's yet another one for enjoyment rather than practice, although I reckon it's worthwhile from a cultural perspective. But still I think I should read something useful next, in both languages. If all else fails there's always the good old option of Harry Potter translations. Edited by garyb on 07 February 2014 at 11:20am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5006 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 36 of 138 11 February 2014 at 11:03am | IP Logged | ||
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I spoke a fair bit of Italian at the weekend, then I had a few hours to kill in an airport so I finished Le città invisibili and started Uno, nessuno e centomila, one of the bargain Amazon purchases I mentioned before. After the first few chapters I still haven't decided whether I like it or not, so I'll continue for a few more.
My speaking in French and Italian has been a bit messy recently from tiredness, and my Spanish progress is much slower than I had hoped because I don't have much time to dedicate to it. Even 20 minutes per day for Assimil is hard to find, so I suppose I'm going for the "slow and steady wins the race" approach whether I like it or not. Progress is coming to a bit of a halt for the moment, as is social life (including language meetups and seeing Italian friends); for now I'm trying to focus on music and work and of course on sorting my health and sleep out. So things might be a bit quiet for the next wee while. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4688 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 37 of 138 12 February 2014 at 11:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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I loved Città invisibili - but I can see how it would be hard in the original. Too
bad; I was thinking it would make a nice first-novel to attempt in Italian! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5006 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 38 of 138 21 February 2014 at 11:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Quick update: I'm still alive, just busy.
Recently my language study has been progressing at a pace which would be best described by Cavesa's wonderful drunk snail metaphor. One episode of Engrenages/Cesaroni/Destinos per week, a bit of Assimil every other day, some background radio, a few pages of my books, and some conversations which are feeling pretty difficult since I'm tired and out of practice. I'm hoping things will calm down a little next month. I have met even more awesome friendly Spanish speakers though, so I've had the chance to practice that. I'm still making awful Italian-influenced mistakes, although different ones now. At one point I said finido instead of terminado, which is a bit inexcusable - the logical part of my brain knows very well that finir doesn't exist in Spanish, but try telling the conversational part that. Plus a current "favourite" is di instead of de. I even had some reverse interference the other day: I was speaking Italian and at several times I almost said mucho instead of molto, and catching myself just before it came out. I'm not sure whether all this is just "growing pains" or if it's signs that I'm being completely stupid by trying to study three languages. I'll give it another month and see how it goes, then decide whether to keep going or to drop one of them. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| suzukaze Triglot Senior Member Italy bit.ly/1bGm459 Joined 4401 days ago 186 posts - 254 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, Spanish Studies: German, French, Swedish, Japanese | Message 39 of 138 26 February 2014 at 11:10am | IP Logged | ||
I think the problems you mentioned are bound to happen when you study two closely-related languages like Spanish and Italian at the same time. If it helps to make you feel better...I had the same problem when I studied Spanish back at university. That was one of the reasons why I dropped Spanish in favour of German during my Master's degree. No chances of Italian-influenced mistakes there ;) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5006 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 40 of 138 03 March 2014 at 10:54am | IP Logged | ||
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Things are finally improving a bit. Touch wood. My physical and mental health wasn't great for the last few months but in the last week or so I've been starting to feel a lot better. Maybe just because the weather's getting a bit warmer and the days are getting longer again. And that's had a big effect on my language abilities. The difference between my speaking in the last week compared to a few weeks ago is absolutely night and day.
I had my first free weekend in a while, which became an unexpectedly language-filled weekend. There was a language exchange event on at the university on Friday evening, and I had no plans so I went along to check it out. It was supposed to be a "speed practising" type thing, similar idea to speed dating where you change conversation partner every five minutes, but as is usual with those sort of things the organisation was a bit of a joke. Still I got to talk to lots of people and practise every language with native speakers, and in particular there were a few fun conversations in Italian. Also there were a couple of proper "polyglot" types there who had studied dozens of languages and were happy to chat about them in technical detail. Not really my sort of thing but it's still really cool to see that there are enthusiasts like that in my city as opposed to just in some forum or Youtube video. I also went to the Uni meetup on Saturday since again I was free, but it wasn't particularly inspiring. Hearing the same old conversations about the politics of Francophone regions, complete with about three grammatical mistakes per sentence, loses its novelty fairly quickly. It's an interesting subject and all, but really... there are other things to talk about too. That evening I went to an Italian house party. Obviously I spoke a lot of Italian, but like any party worth its salt there were also some Spanish people, and even a few French which is a lot more unusual. I didn't actually speak much Spanish; I was there to socialise and chat rather than to work on languages, and my Spanish certainly isn't at the level where social usage comes easily. But it's good knowing that I could have spoken it if I had wanted. With Spanish you can afford to be a bit picky about speaking opportunities, unlike with French for example where you have to grab all you can get. And even if I didn't speak with the Spanish in their language, being able to understand them speaking to each other was incredibly useful. Listening comprehension is easy to take for granted since (relatively of course) it's the "easy part" compared to speaking, but the utility of being able to understand and know what's going on around you isn't to be underestimated. Being at a party where several languages were being spoken and being able to understand almost everything was pretty badass. Well, until people started speaking Greek... Of course it didn't all go smoothly. There were more than a few points where I made a bit of a figuraccia due to my imperfect knowledge of Italian. Not too many speaking mistakes, but more situations where I came in halfway through a conversation or I hadn't followed it 100% and I said something a bit stupid or out of context. But of course as a foreign speaker you get away with it and... I really didn't care. That night I also had the strangest reaction I've had yet to speaking a foreign language. A girl overheard me speaking Italian, asked me "Italiano?", I said (in Italian of course) "no, Scottish", and she looked really confused and was like "...but you speak Italian... but you're not Italian...?" and it went on like that for a good minute or so. She just didn't seem capable of believing that a non-Italian could speak Italian. Not even in an impressed sort of way or whatever; it just seemed like her conception of reality was being threatened. After that she just stared at me like I had arrived from outer space for a few seconds and then left the room before her head exploded. Then a bit later on both of us were in a conversation and a Spanish guy who had done Erasmus in Italy and spoke the language extremely well joined us. She gave him the same incredulous look for a few seconds, and then something seemed to suddenly click with her and she finally accepted that yes, non-Italians can indeed learn Italian. From then on everything went as normal. Strange reactions from Italians when they found out you're learning their language are quite common and understandable, but this was something else. On Sunday I had lunch with a couple of Spanish people and a few other people who spoke varying amounts of Spanish. Again I didn't speak much myself but my listening comprehension came in useful. On the TV side of things, I watched a couple of episodes of an Italian sitcom, Boris, that a friend recommended. So far so good: it's genuinely funny, quite easy to follow, and the episodes are ~25 minutes so it's much easier to fit one in than with the 50 minute episodes of the other shows I'm watching. I think I'm developing a much more chilled attitude towards language learning. I still have my enthusiasm, but if I don't have time for my Assimil lesson or I don't take advantage of a potential speaking opportunity or I make some stupid mistakes, it doesn't bother me. It's certainly a good thing. Edited by garyb on 03 March 2014 at 2:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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