Eternal Sunshine of the Italian Mind

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jackb
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Re: è un po che non ci vediamo

Postby jackb » Sat Jan 22, 2022 5:09 pm

So, what I'd like to do going forward is to create one deck per book, add the unknowns from a particular book into it's own deck, and when I finish learning all the words in that deck go back and reread the book. I think that will give me a sense of accomplishment - not only will I actually get to finish and delete decks but rereading a book after learning new words pulled from the book should hopefully help me to feel like my effort is actually resulting in an improvement because the 2nd time around the book should feel a lot easier.


I’ve been thinking a lot about this too. I’m not a big anki user, but I can see the utility in the tool. My biggest problem with it is that if I do it everyday, the workload is ever increasing. Remembering stuff somehow turns into never forgetting stuff. I think there’s a point where cards can be ‘known’ and deleted. Organizing it by book is a great idea. An idea I had is to do reviews for a month or so and let the reading take care of cementing the words in my head. If it matters, I’ll see it again. If not, why am I doing reviews on this word I’ve only seen once? It’s those reviews that pad the number and make me not want to do them.
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lusan
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Re: è un po che non ci vediamo

Postby lusan » Sat Jan 22, 2022 7:37 pm

wrote: So, what I'd like to do going forward is to create one deck per book, add the unknowns from a particular book into it's own deck, and when I finish learning all the words in that deck go back and reread the book. I think that will give me a sense of accomplishment - not only will I actually get to finish and delete decks but rereading a book after learning new words pulled from the book should hopefully help me to feel like my effort is actually resulting in an improvement because the 2nd time around the book should feel a lot easier.


A lot of work, indeed. No need to delete them at all because after a 6-8 passed repetitions the words will show up 1+ year. They drop by themselves.

wrote: I’ve been thinking a lot about this too. I’m not a big anki user, but I can see the utility in the tool. My biggest problem with it is that if I do it everyday, the workload is ever increasing. Remembering stuff somehow turns into never forgetting stuff. I think there’s a point where cards can be ‘known’ and deleted. Organizing it by book is a great idea. An idea I had is to do reviews for a month or so and let the reading take care of cementing the words in my head. If it matters, I’ll see it again. If not, why am I doing reviews on this word I’ve only seen once? It’s those reviews that pad the number and make me not want to do them.


What about just taking those words found of likely use and drop the rest? Why to bother learning words that will not be seen but once every 5+ years? These were my thoughts and I am very picky right now with the words that I add to a deck.
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StringerBell
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Re: è un po che non ci vediamo

Postby StringerBell » Sun Jan 23, 2022 2:26 am

Deciding what goes in a deck can be tricky sometimes. There are definitely some words that I don't bother with at all. For example, in a novel I just read, the main character opened up a can of yellow paint and then described the shade as being "buttercup" yellow. Buttercup is a yellow flower that I'm quite confident I've never once talked about in my life even in English. So I had no interest in making a card for that.

But then there are a bunch of other words where I go to make a card and Anki informs me that I'm trying to make a duplicate; not only did I already see the word before but I even made a card for it and yet I still have no memory of having come across it before. So that tells me that just seeing a word more than once isn't enough to remember it and I can't even trust myself to necessarily know when I've seen a word more than once.

Then there are other times where I make a card and then it turns out that an author went on to use that word so many times that by the time I get to that word in the deck I'm like, "Why did I even make a card for this? I've seen it a million times and I know it". But when I first encountered that word it was impossible to know if it was going to be one of the ones I could learn without effort or it would be one of the ones that I'd keep forgetting that I'd seen.
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lusan
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Re: è un po che non ci vediamo

Postby lusan » Sun Jan 23, 2022 3:39 am

StringerBell wrote:Deciding what goes in a deck can be tricky sometimes. There are definitely some words that I don't bother with at all. For example, in a novel I just read, the main character opened up a can of yellow paint and then described the shade as being "buttercup" yellow. Buttercup is a yellow flower that I'm quite confident I've never once talked about in my life even in English. So I had no interest in making a card for that.

But then there are a bunch of other words where I go to make a card and Anki informs me that I'm trying to make a duplicate; not only did I already see the word before but I even made a card for it and yet I still have no memory of having come across it before. So that tells me that just seeing a word more than once isn't enough to remember it and I can't even trust myself to necessarily know when I've seen a word more than once.

Then there are other times where I make a card and then it turns out that an author went on to use that word so many times that by the time I get to that word in the deck I'm like, "Why did I even make a card for this? I've seen it a million times and I know it". But when I first encountered that word it was impossible to know if it was going to be one of the ones I could learn without effort or it would be one of the ones that I'd keep forgetting that I'd seen.


My rules are very simple regarding adding cards:

1. Must be a common word that I might need to know because of common use. For example ATM, frightening, yellow, etc.
2. Do I like it?
3. Have I seen them in either English or Spanish several times within the last year?

If no... no way Jose!
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StringerBell
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Re: è un po che non ci vediamo

Postby StringerBell » Sun Jan 23, 2022 9:10 pm

Reading Challenge Week 5: Jan 17 - Jan 23

Books read this week:

8) Zona Pericolosa - 50%/203 pages completed (translation of The Killing Floor - Lee Child, 1st book in Jack Reacher series)

A few years ago I went to my library to physically look at all the English versions of the ebooks I had bought to see how accurate the Amazon page count was. According to Amazon, this book has 529 pages. That didn't sound right for the kind of book it was and sure enough, the actual paperback has 407 pages. That's a pretty big difference! I'm counting it as 407 pages.

This was the first novel written for adults that I ever read. It's been a few years but I was pretty confident that I remembered the story well enough to read it now extensively without frustration. I was originally planning to read it while listening to the audiobook but I realized after a few pages that even if I wasn't looking up definitions, I still wanted to be able to take an extra few seconds when I needed it to think about a word's meaning, so I pretty quickly reverted to regularly reading, senza audiobook.

Every once in a blue moon I came across a page with handful of unknowns but they didn't affect my comprehension of the story (there was one sentence with like 4 unknowns but I could tell it was just describing how the morning dew looked after a big storm). Overall, it's more common that many pages go by with no unknowns at all and even when the occasional one pops up I can easily tell what the word is doing in the sentence (describing how someone is moving or walking, for example). I've been able to resist looking up words, with the exception of 2 words that kept getting repeated and it was driving me nuts not to know what they meant.

This author likes to use the same words over and over. The story is exciting but the writing quality is pretty crap. However, that's kind of what I'm looking for right now, so no complaints. I'm not sure if the characters actually know how to do anything other that to shrug and then look someone in the face because they seem to be doing this every few minutes.

At this rate, I expect to finish the book next week.

Favorite new words/expressions from the book:
un piede di porco = crowbar

There was a scene where a character used a crowbar, which was translated as un piede di porco (the foot of a pig). I've never come across this in Italian before (I obviously did years ago when I first read the book but since I have no memory of it, I must have immediately forgot it) but the minute I read that someone used "the foot of a pig" to pry open a door, I couldn't stop laughing. That is such a genius thing to call a crowbar, because that's exactly what it looks like. We should really switch over to calling it that in English, too. This might be my all-time favorite name of an object in Italian.
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Aloyse
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Re: è un po che non ci vediamo

Postby Aloyse » Mon Jan 24, 2022 6:55 am

The French version is somewhat more poetic: un pied-de-biche (foot of a doe)
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rdearman
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Re: è un po che non ci vediamo

Postby rdearman » Mon Jan 24, 2022 9:27 am

StringerBell wrote:There was a scene where a character used a crowbar, which was translated as un piede di porco (the foot of a pig). I've never come across this in Italian before (I obviously did years ago when I first read the book but since I have no memory of it, I must have immediately forgot it) but the minute I read that someone used "the foot of a pig" to pry open a door, I couldn't stop laughing. That is such a genius thing to call a crowbar, because that's exactly what it looks like. We should really switch over to calling it that in English, too. This might be my all-time favorite name of an object in Italian.


But:
The accepted etymology identifies the first component of the word crowbar with the bird-name "crow", perhaps due to the crowbar's resemblance to the feet or beak of a crow. The first attestation of the word is dated back to circa 1400.
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StringerBell
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Re: è un po che non ci vediamo

Postby StringerBell » Mon Jan 24, 2022 3:06 pm

In my opinion, a crowbar looks much more like a pig's foot than a crow's foot. A doe's foot it not bad but somehow a pig's foot just really does it for me. Maybe I'll set up a poll and see what others think! :lol:
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Re: è un po che non ci vediamo

Postby StringerBell » Sun Jan 30, 2022 5:10 pm

Reading Challenge Week 6: Jan 24 - Jan 30

Books finished this week:

8) Zona Pericolosa - 407 pages completed (translation of The Killing Floor - Lee Child, 1st book in Jack Reacher series)

As I think I already mentioned, I read this extensively since I'd already read it intensively years ago so I had a good handle on the story, even though I'd forgotten the details. Overall, reading it extensively wasn't as painful as expected. I did look up just a handful of words that either kept reappearing or just seemed really intriguiging for some reason. One of these was squargliarsela (to sneak away, to slip out of the room). I don't know how I never encountered this one before since it seems really useful.

While I was reading, instead of looking up unknown words I just highlighted them in my kindle. It turns out that I hightlighted 500+ words. Some are duplicates or variations of the same word, but in looking over the list of the highlighted words I don't know what most of them are. That feels like an overwhelming amount, but it averages to about 1 word per page, which I guess isn't so bad. I was planning to leisurely add them to a deck for this book but I'm realizing that doing it this way (instead of while I'm reading) is proving to be even more tedious than adding them while I'm reading (largely due to how unbearably slow my kindle is) so I will not be using this strategy with future books.

During my audit of my Italian resources I realized that I had a lot of audiobooks that I never listened to. I think at some point I was planning a massive R-L challenge that never happened. So, I've decided to mix in some R-L in addition to my regular reading when I have time. This week, I listened to 70% of an Italian audiobook while reading it in English. I'm hoping to finish it off by tonight and then read the same book in Italian this next week. I actually really enjoy R-L. I find it very relaxing to listen in Italian while reading in English.

However...the book I'm using is a contemporary British novel and I'm finding that there are more British words I don't know than Italian. So I'm actually using the Italian version to figure out what the heck the English version is saying at some points. I'm generally not a fan of British stuff, but I have read enough books/watched enough shows that I feel very comfortable with British English but for some reason this book is coming up with some seriously challenging nonsense that I haven't come across before. Even my kindle dictionary doesn't know what most of them are! Anyway, this is the first time that I've had to use an Italian translation to understand English, which is quite a weird experience.
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DaveAgain
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Re: è un po che non ci vediamo

Postby DaveAgain » Sun Jan 30, 2022 5:34 pm

StringerBell wrote:However...the book I'm using is a contemporary British novel and I'm finding that there are more British words I don't know than Italian. So I'm actually using the Italian version to figure out what the heck the English version is saying at some points. I'm generally not a fan of British stuff, but I have read enough books/watched enough shows that I feel very comfortable with British English but for some reason this book is coming up with some seriously challenging nonsense that I haven't come across before. Even my kindle dictionary doesn't know what most of them are! Anyway, this is the first time that I've had to use an Italian translation to understand English, which is quite a weird experience.
I'm really surprised by this!
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