Pratishabda vs. Italian

[pratishabda]

Ciao, tutti - I'm in the process of shoring up my (very weak) college Italian. For the past 3 months or so, I've been working through Assimil's Italian with Ease and am up to lesson 70. I think I'm progressing and am internalizing vocab, grammar, etc., but we'll see how I do when I get off the plane in a few months.

This is my second attempt at a language using Assimil (having had to end the first in order to start Italian), and despite the limitations of the method and the individual text, it seems to work pretty well. I worked through the passive phase and now am well into the active one. Any important vocab or major grammar points I get wrong in my second run-through are made into Anki flashcards to drill on. I've also been keeping a notebook where I write out all the exercises and translations, so it's easy to look back at my original translation, corrections, and vocab/grammar to drill.

As for the log, I'm thinking of updating weekly or so, just to see keep tabs on what I'm picking up... and what I'm not.

Any advice from more experienced learners or native speakers is always welcome, although it looks like pretty much any thread in the forum is full of that anyway.

[flippedsort]

Welcome to the forum!

[pratishabda]

Made it through lesson 77 and am keeping my nose to the grindstone as I can already see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I've also started up on lang-8, which seems pretty good. Some of my correctors contradict each other, but they always catch my main mistakes, which is my main concern where I am as a learner. Usually they're simple errors, but also help fix my word order (still slippery to me) or point out grammar I haven't learned yet.

My listening skills, I'm realizing quickly, are not so great, so I've been listening to RAI (radio, streaming news, radio dramas). As usual, I have good days where I can get the gist of most of the conversation, and others where almost everything is over my head. I'm also making myself be better about listening to my recordings without looking at the the text. I have over a month before we leave, so I know my passive skills will improve somewhat along with my active ones.

27 more lessons... not that I'm counting!

[IpseDixit]

Ciao a tutti

[emk]

My listening skills, I'm realizing quickly, are not so great, so I've been listening to RAI (radio, streaming news, radio dramas). As usual, I have good days where I can get the gist of most of the conversation, and others where almost everything is over my head.

Keep listening (and reading) and you should definitely see progress! After you finish Assimil, if you feel like you're getting stuck with radio, you might want to look for something with more "context", which will make it easier to puzzle out what people are saying and thereby allow your brain to link up sound and meaning. Personally, I made faster progress with TV than radio (because the pictures helped me), but radio can be good if the subject is very familiar.

Good luck with your project!

[pratishabda]

Ciao a tutti

I despise typos and bad grammar in my writing. Although I try to cut myself a little slack outside of English, I appreciate the correction.

Honestly, I can't figure out preposition use in Italian, so I'm just going to ride Assimil through to the end and see what sticks at the end. Today's lesson taught me that I can go (andare) "al macellaio," then "dal salumiere," then "in lavanderia" all in the same sentence.

[pratishabda]

Keep listening (and reading) and you should definitely see progress! After you finish Assimil, if you feel like you're getting stuck with radio, you might want to look for something with more "context", which will make it easier to puzzle out what people are saying and thereby allow your brain to link up sound and meaning. Personally, I made faster progress with TV than radio (because the pictures helped me), but radio can be good if the subject is very familiar.

Good luck with your project!

Thank you for the encouragement! I've only watched a bit of TV so far, and I hardly understood anything. However, that was almost two months ago. But I agree that it's going to be much better at creating the sound/meaning link, so it's clearly time to watch some more.

Edit: BTW, I'd be remiss to not say thanks also for the link to your cheating and consolidating method. Definitely worth a read!

[IpseDixit]

Today's lesson taught me that I can go (andare) "al macellaio," then "dal salumiere," then "in lavanderia" all in the same sentence.

Really? Andare al macellaio sounds wrong to me. I would say andare dal macellaio.

[pratishabda]

Last week was exceptionally busy and I wasn't able to study as much as I had wanted. Taking some advice from emk, I squeezed in a little TV viewing, but found that most of what was being discussed was over my head.

More than anything, I'm finding the Assimil active wave (at least the way I'm doing it) to be quite time-consuming. I'm now up to lesson 89, but between working through the new lesson, writing out and correcting the passive-wave lesson, redoing their rather loose English translations, and making flashcards takes me quite a bit of time. However, I only have to go through another 15 lessons and the workload will get much easier.

After seeing some of the videos on Forever Fluent, I tried out doing flashcards using images. It can be a little tricky finding images for words or phrases such as "therefore," "meanwhile," etc., but it seems to be helping with recalling vocab. I recently made a card for the word almeno ("at least"); and when encountering it in another text today, I not only recalled the meaning of the word, but also of the image and dumb backstory I used for it, so it must be working.

Despite not having met the subjunctive yet, I've also decided to try tackling Italian lit and got a copy of Ammaniti's Io No Ho Paura, with the goal of reading one page a day. It will keep things manageable, and will serve as a useful source of input that's designed for native speakers. I'm only two pages in, but I'm confident that it will help.

emk, thank you again for the link to your cheating/consolidating method. I'm realizing I don't have the desire to go on with Italian much beyond my Assimil course (there are so many other languages to learn or at least relearn properly!), but it's already light years ahead of where I was after college. My new reading plan is to take part of the plan that got you so far in French and take me that little bit further in Italian.

[pratishabda]

This week was almost as busy as the last. There were a couple nights where I just couldn't do Assimil, but I always got in time for Anki and my novel (Io No Ho Paura).

As for Assimil, I'm up to lesson 93. The subjunctive was finally introduced a lesson or two ago, which so far seems to be used in Italian a bit more frequently (consistently?) than in Spanish or French.

My daily Anki load is now around 60-80 cards a day, while adding perhaps 10-15 daily. The workload is picking up, but is still quite manageable. Even as I encounter important new grammar in my active lessons, I've been very good about not making flashcards. Rather, I make them only from mistakes I note from review of the old lessons, and consider myself to have more or less learned the rest. Direct and indirect object pronouns have never stuck with me, but they were finally covered in the last review lesson, so I finally have them in Anki to learn them once and for all.

The novel's also going well. I've read through page 14 and it's already starting to pull me in. The approach I'm now taking is to read the page first with no help, then use the (excellent) Italian dictionary at wordreference.com. After the first go, I understand about 2/3 of the text, getting the gist, but missing lots of details. After a second run with the dictionary, my comprehension seems to be about 95-98%. But there are already sentences that have made me laugh and cringe without needing the dictionary, so that's very encouraging to me!