Italy or bust (2016 Italian mission)

[tastyonions]

Buongiorno a tutti.

So I decided to make a special log just for Italian. I feel like a focused log would be more fun and satisfying to write and possibly to read than the kind of diffuse, random notes I had been doing. A few remarks on my current status with respect to the language:

I went through Assimil's Italian With Ease once without doing the active wave but was really inconstant in my study, often missing two or three days in a row, and I let too much slip by me. As of a few days ago I restarted about halfway through -- at lesson 50, where the active wave starts -- and this time I am making sure I catch everything in terms of comprehension. I am also using a combination of Assimil's active wave and Anki to kick words, grammar, and expressions into my productive vocabulary.

My receptive and productive abilities are super lopsided (in favor of the former) thanks to already having good French and decent Spanish. I have taken three lessons so far with a new Italian teacher on italki. So far it has been very textbook-based, which is sort of understandable given my very poor productive ability, but I let her know that I wanted to focus more on conversation.

In 2016, probably in the fall, my wife and I will go to Italy. We don't have any definite plans about where to go yet, apart from (of course) Rome. In this log I will write commentary on my studies and probably a bit about our future trip.

Arrivederci!

[tastyonions]

Like French, Italian uses both the verbs "to have" (avere) and "to be" (essere) as auxiliaries when forming the "near past" or "past perfect" (passato prossimo) tense. For those who already speak French, one of the interesting and kind of tricky things about the Italian system, as a recent lesson reminded me, is that when you have verb + participle + infinitive (ex. French "je n'ai pas pu venir" or "je suis allé voir [qqch]"), the auxiliary must match not the participle but rather the infinitive that comes after the participle! Examples:

Non sono potuto arrivare in orario. (I was not able to arrive on time). "Arrivare" takes "essere" => sono.
Non ho potuto chiamarti. (I was not able to call you). "Chiamare" takes "avere" => ho.

Much like French, pronominal verbs take "essere," and when "essere" is used as auxiliary the past participle must accord in gender and number with the subject.

[Tristano]

In bocca al lupo

[Sarnek]

In bocca al lupo

[tastyonions]

Grazie, Tristano e Sarnek.

Thoughts on Anki

I stopped using Anki for a long time but started again a few days ago. Some people are really down on single word cards but I find that I actually enjoy them. Right now I am just adding a bunch of English word to Italian word cards and I find that it is getting them into my head pretty well. One neat thing about them is that since English is the language I hear the vast majority of the day, I notice myself being reminded often of Italian words when my English prompt words come up.

I used Anki similarly for French some time ago and found that it worked well then, too. And I did not find then that this caused much if any trouble with forever being stuck in "translator mode," contrary to a theory that I read often on language learning sites. Of course, as always, different things will work better or worse for different people.

---

My conjugations in Italian are weak, but I never really drilled those much for either French or Spanish and found that they simply fell into place over time. I think Italian may be the most difficult of the three, though, having the difficulty of both doing gender and number accords with past participles (which French has and Spanish lacks) and two subjunctive tenses rather than one (present in Spanish but not in [oral] French). Also, just like in Spanish, there is no "blending" of the verbal persons or moods due to dropped endings.

Today was lesson 5 active, lesson 54 passive in Assimil. Nothing too tricky. I seem to have hit the card addition limit for Anki today. Time will tell if I'm being overzealous and should ease up a bit.

I thought that this book looked interesting, especially because it says that it features accents from different regions of Italy: http://www.amazon.fr/Coffret-Se-perfectionner-italien-livre/dp/2266212117/

[garyb]

Good luck with Italian!

It's interesting that you're finding the Italian verbs harder than the Spanish ones, as I'm finding the opposite! The Italian past participle agreement was fairly easy to pick up after French, and while the lack of it in Spanish makes things simpler, it's still a little unnatural to me after being used to two languages that do have it. But like everything it should become more natural with exposure and practice. Spanish verbs just seem to have more complicated rules and more exceptions, plus the simple past is used in everyday speech so it has to be learnt productively rather than just receptively.

This may well just be a "grass is greener on the other side"-style psychological effect though! I probably struggled just as much with the Italian verbs, but now that they're familiar the rules and exceptions seem simpler while the Spanish ones are more new and unknown so they seem more complicated.

[tastyonions]

Anyone care to help me out with some audio? I am doing intensive listening to a radio program (1) and still can't make out a word after many listens.

Audio: https://www.dropbox.com/s/brti09uos22s6ch/excerpt1.mp3?dl=0

Here is what I transcribed so far: "La bellissima e sorprendente terra di Lucania è protagonista di un documentario che oggi "Radio Doc: Le storie raccontati via etere" a deciso di ___ agli ascoltatori."

What verb goes in the blank? :-)

(1) Link to radio program: http://www.wr6.rai.it/dl/portaleRadio/media/ContentItem-ee9eef99-8980-4b22-9578-ab2407e80814.html

[dampingwire]

Anyone care to help me out with some audio?

"La bellissima e sorprendente terra di Lucania è protagonista del documentario che oggi "Radio Doc: Le storie raccontati via etere" ha deciso di riproporre agli ascoltatori."

[tastyonions]

Grazie, dampingwire!

I had an excellent session with my Italian tutor this morning. No textbooks this time. I spent the whole hour describing my vacation in Mexico and a hot air balloon trip I took last weekend, using some photos that I screenshared, getting corrections and vocabulary help along the way. Plenty of stuff to put into Anki.

[tastyonions]

I think I am going to use French as the base as much as possible now to learn Italian. This presents some inconvenience, since my beginner Assimil is in English, but there are simply *so many* parallels, "true friends," and easy associations to make that I can't let myself pass them up. Just citing a few from the past couple days:

après-demain: dopodomani
depuis toujours: da sempre
réussir à (faire qqch): riuscire a (fare qualcosa)
jusqu'à: fino a
se réveiller: svegliarsi
se gonfler: gonfiarsi

Anyway, in my experience, connecting two sister languages actually helps prevent interference rather than causing it. Switching to French->Italian now should also make the transition to "Perfectionnement Italien" a little smoother.

Lessons 9 and 58 in Assimil today.