Pratishabda vs. Italian

[pratishabda]

This morning I made it through lesson 100. Since the book has 105 lessons, I will have finally finished all active lessons by next week and will keep working through the text to complete the reviews of the last 50 lessons in the book. While I'm still enjoying Italian, I admit it feels like a big weight is going to slip off my shoulders next week.

The timing is perfect, since I'll be in Italy next month and will get to see how my Italian works in real life. I've been making few attempts to practice listening, since reading is where my my focus lies, but I've been streaming RAI newscasts in the background while I'm at work. Once in a while, I can grab a complete sentence. While for the most part the language goes over my head, I'm usually able to get the gist of what's going on.

It will also be interesting to see how important dialect is in modern Italian once I get there. I can understand slow, clearly-enunciated standard Italian, so we'll see how I do with Venetò or Romano.

Otherwise, I'm up to page 22 in my novel, and am following the same pattern. As always, there are good days where I understand the vast majority of what I'm reading, followed by bad ones where I struggle to understand much without the dictionary, but the good ones outweigh the bad.

Forza!

[pratishabda]

Today I completed lesson 105, meaning I'm finally completely done with the passive wave! Of course, I will keep moving through the active wave for the rest of the book, but it's a nice feeling that the amount of time I have to dedicate to Italian will drop considerably.

The plan is to continue reviewing through the active wave, and using Anki to keep making flashcards for whatever vocab or grammar has fallen through the cracks. Speaking of flashcards, I've jumped ahead and added cards to start drilling verb endings for the future, imperfect, subjunctive, and imperatives. (The trip's coming soon and I'll survive using my pidgin conditional anyway.) The novel continues, but at a slower pace. I only made it to page 25 this week, but it will generally be easier to read more in the weeks ahead.

There's a bottle of Italian beer I bought last week to celebrate when I got through the end of my course. Although it's still Sunday morning where I am, I think I'll crack it open. È certo che l'ho meritata!

[pratishabda]

I returned very recently, and I was happy that my Italian was generally strong enough to function. There were only a few times when it just collapsed, but virtually everyone there spoke English in some capacity anyway. Accents were less of a problem than I expected in either the Veneto or in Lazio. There was very little time for language study on the trip, but I've been getting back into the swing of things.

I'm currently up to lesson 70. It's becoming clear that I'm making more errors as the review passages get longer and grammar gets more complex. Usually they're not real (or at least serious) errors, and I make myself create circumlocutions for things I can't translate directly. They may not be elegant, but they still convey the idea.

My novel reading has also dropped off, but I'm up to page 38 and the plot's picking up. Even just trying to do a page a day is something I can manage.

I continue adding vocab and grammar to Anki. However, I'm noticing that I can have a hard time recalling words I've drilled dozens of times. Even then, I think that my practice of adding images to flashcards still helps more than hurts. As concepts and synonyms pile up, I've broken my rule and allowed myself to use English on the cards as a clue, particularly with cognates. So far, it seems that I'm able to recall and produce them accurately, and it's much less frustrating than constantly getting a card wrong because I chose the wrong synonym.

The next few months will be busier for me. While I may have to slow down a little, it was very clear to my after my trip that it's really important to do a little bit every day. Even if I have to do one lesson every other day, I will still finish the course.