Eternal Sunshine of the Italian Mind

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Re: Eternal Sunshine of the Italian Mind

Postby StringerBell » Thu Aug 11, 2022 3:32 pm

First, a disclaimer: I don’t want anyone to think that I believe extensive reading = bad/wrong, intensive reading = good/the only way.

I thought I would share some of my recent “fails” to illustrate why I, personally, don’t think extensive reading is a silver bullet for improving vocabulary or comprehension, and why I think it's not as useful as people seem to think it is. This is only my opinion and while I appreciate that others seem to use this strategy effectively, I thought I'd show why I think that as a strategy often used in the intermediate stage, it has some legitimate flaws (that I rarely see acknowledged).

Both of these examples are sentences that I chose not to look up during round 1 of my "intensive reading" but then eventually did ask my husband about later because I was really not convinced about my interpretation.

1st sentence from my book: Invece è rimasta tutto il tempo in soggiorno a rimettersi in pari con le scartoffie.

I guessed it meant: She stayed the whole time in the living room, putting in pairs again/organizing... (some type of shoes? At the very least, something that comes in pairs.)

This sentence came shortly after describing this character as someone who woke up at dawn to clean the apartment like clockwork, so it seemed fitting that she’d be obsessively trying to pair up disorganized shoes in a closet.

The sentence actually means: She stayed the whole time in the living room, catching up on paperwork.

rimettersi in pari= to catch up
le scartoffie = paperwork

With extensive reading I would have taken my guess at face value without questioning it too much because I was using context to make a guess. It wouldn’t have changed the overall plot of the story since this is a minor character doing something in the background, but it would have completely changed what I was picturing in the scene. There is a HUGE difference between someone sitting quieting at a table doing paperwork vs. someone on their knees at the closet furiously searching for matching shoes.

Really glad I looked up the unknowns there. I wonder how many others make equally ridiculous guesses about what’s happening in a scene that seem reasonable because it fits contextually with what they already know about a character and then mistakenly assume their comprehension is higher than it actually is… The more time I spend making sure I *actually* understand sentences, the more evidence I see that just relying on guesses for meaning can easily lead one astray from what’s really happening in a given scene.

If a sentence is talking about someone doing paperwork and I understand the sentence to mean they are matching up shoes, I would say that my comprehension is basically zero. And if my comprehension is close to zero but I’m deluded into assuming that it’s close to 100% because I’m just missing some trivial detail, that’s a counterproductive activity that’s not actually helping the goal of improving comprehension.

Here’s another example where I again misunderstood something that didn’t affect the plot but also wasn’t right, either:

Ero felice da fare schifo, e al tempo stesso profondamente disperata.

Fare schifo = to suck, to be crappy

I guessed it meant: I was happy to suck, and at the same time profoundly desperate

I understood the meaning of all the individual words but putting them together just sounded... weird: I was happy to suck? The person narrating is a depressed alcoholic, so maybe she was just dumping on herself? It did fit with her personality. I took it at face value originally before eventually asking for help translating it.

If I were doing extensive reading, I would have been satisfied with understanding that this character is just degrading herself and is “happy to suck”. Instead of moving on, I asked my husband to explain WTF was up with that sentence and apparently…. Drum roll…. The “da” completely changes the meaning of “fare schifo” and is actually an idiom.

Ero felice da fare/far schifo = I was happy as shit, I was happy as hell

So the sentence actually means: I was as happy as hell, and at the same time profoundly desperate.

That makes more sense than what I came up with and significantly changes what she's actually saying since she's remembering a bittersweet time in her past before she got divorced. With extensive reading I never would have picked up on that idiom and therefore would have misunderstood how she was remembering the past. I have no memory of ever having encountered that idiom before in the past 10+ years (which is unlikely) so probably when I’ve heard it in the past I either ignored it or I filed it under “that’s a weird thing to say, oh well”. Or maybe I genuinely never heard/saw it before??? In any event, I’m glad I didn’t just accept my misinterpretation and move on. The more these kinds of misunderstandings happen, the less value I see in relying on guesses and moving on.
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Re: Eternal Sunshine of the Italian Mind

Postby iguanamon » Thu Aug 11, 2022 4:10 pm

I am enjoying reading about this phase of your learning process, StringerBell. It has been my experience that extensive reading vs intensive reading shouldn't be reduced to an "either/or" dichotomy. I do both. I learn something new all the time

When I first started learning Catalan, I was looking everything up that I didn't know from my other romance languages experience. I had to. There was a lot of vocabulary and idioms about which I had not a clue. This helped me to build my vocabulary and my idioms. Now I look up words/phrases to confirm guesses or gain better understanding about them than what I think they might mean. Even if I may know all the words, the specific combination may be something that means more than their sum.

What you are describing is what I try to tell people who wonder about how to learn from native materials, when they have been used to learning from courses. It's about noticing small things that can give more understanding about what we think we know. It makes a huge difference in our learning. I would argue that this is an essential component in language-learning. I call it "noticing".

So, congratulations, the good news is that you are on your way to a fuller understanding of Italian. The bad news (or good news, it's all about one's perspective) is that this learning after noticing never stops, ;)
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Re: Eternal Sunshine of the Italian Mind

Postby rdearman » Thu Aug 11, 2022 4:23 pm

StringerBell wrote:First, a disclaimer: I don’t want anyone to think that I believe extensive reading = bad/wrong, intensive reading = good/the only way.

First, a disclaimer: I don’t want anyone to think that I believe intensive reading = bad/wrong.

You don't seem to be doing something when extensive reading, which I do. I was going to upload a photo of one of the pages I read, which has a ton of scribbles. When I am reading I do guess but where ever I've guessed I underline the phrase or word, and later I'll return to the page with a dictionary to see if my guess was correct. But also I do a combination of intensive and extensive because every X pages (currently 25) I underline and look up every single word or phrase where I have even the slightest doubt. But I also flip back a few pages to check through my guesses to see if I've guessed correctly. One of the reasons for just guessing is that it makes me better at ... guessing! Because I want to learn the skill of guessing. This is because I remember reading a report which said.

Guessing, in fact, is a higher order mental skill that needs to be developed by any language learner keen on making progress beyond what they are taught or learn from books and teachers. A study of language learners studying French some years ago found that the ones who were made to guess words from context (rather than study a word list) not only learned more words in less time, but they also retained the words longer.


But also the type of guessing I'm talking about isn't just a random guess, you guess based on if the word seems to be noun, pronoun, verb, etc, or if the phrase seems to be some kind of idiom.

When reading intensively, looking up words is fine and a great way to learn vocabulary. But it is a conversation killer. When I'm speaking with someone I normally let them just continue to talk and then when there is a natural break I normally try to paraphrase what they said back to them to check understanding. In a conversation, I'm doing a lot of guessing!

Regardless of the road we take, assuming we just keep plugging away at it, we'll get there eventually. I'd be interested in finding out how your husband went about reading in English when he was learning. :)

And as usual I agree with everything iguanamon says, and as always I'm slightly annoyed that he's said it better. :)
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Re: Eternal Sunshine of the Italian Mind

Postby Caromarlyse » Thu Aug 11, 2022 5:53 pm

I'm finding these thoughts interesting, too, and will read them more when I am less hot and my brain returns to proper functioning... But I just wanted to pop in and say that I totally get your point about extensive reading having its flaws. I mainly read extensively with my better languages, but principally because I have a limited amount of brain power, and sometimes I can only read without too much effort. So I accept the trade-off: I will have contact with the language and get its rhythm into my head, but I'll miss out on some learning opportunities. Some new words do stick this way (dragonfly, reeds, and dungeon in German are ones that I can think of now), lots more don't, but I just lose them. As you asked, I do look up unknown words when I come across them in my native English, but, similarly, I tend to forget them again quite quickly and not bother too much about it. I have a very strong pragmatic streak, which fights with my perfectionism (and often wins).

By contrast, I mainly read intensively in Russian, where I'm much less proficient. This week I could happily have read a sentence and understood it as meaning that a celebration was going to happen in the street where the narrator lived (and congratulated myself for understanding all the words!), were it not for the footnote I had in my learners' book explaining that this sentence meant something akin to "things are finally looking up". I am noticing that my Russian vocabulary (and ability to come up with Russian translations for quite uncommon words in English) is starting to surpass my vocabulary in French and German, where I am definitely better able to use the languages, but my vocab is a bit fuzzier. I prefer intensive reading in Russian, and haven't done much extensive reading at all. It means I can't get through anywhere near the same volume of material, but as long as I enjoy it and feel as though I get something out of it, I'm happy - and I am happy too to combine that with extensive reading in other languages when I just need to chill out.
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Re: Eternal Sunshine of the Italian Mind

Postby StringerBell » Thu Aug 11, 2022 6:36 pm

I'm enjoying reading all the responses to my take on extensive vs intensive reading! Thank you to everyone who has contributed. :D

iguanamon wrote:So, congratulations, the good news is that you are on your way to a fuller understanding of Italian. The bad news (or good news, it's all about one's perspective) is that this learning after noticing never stops, ;)


I did reach a point of exasperation years ago where it felt like new words, phrases, expressions, idioms were never-ending and I'd never get a grasp on any language. Once I accepted that I will forever be a lifelong learner (and that I'm constantly learning new words and expressions and slang even in my native language) it stopped feeling so overwhelming!

Caromarlyse wrote:I mainly read extensively with my better languages, but principally because I have a limited amount of brain power, and sometimes I can only read without too much effort. So I accept the trade-off: I will have contact with the language and get its rhythm into my head, but I'll miss out on some learning opportunities.


This makes a lot of sense. I think reading extensively in either a very strong language - or during times when it’s a choice between doing that or reading nothing at all because a person is mentally tired or just needs something more relaxing to do is very valuable.

rdearman wrote:You don't seem to be doing something when extensive reading, which I do. I was going to upload a photo of one of the pages I read, which has a ton of scribbles. When I am reading I do guess but where ever I've guessed I underline the phrase or word, and later I'll return to the page with a dictionary to see if my guess was correct. But also I do a combination of intensive and extensive because every X pages (currently 25) I underline and look up every single word or phrase where I have even the slightest doubt. But I also flip back a few pages to check through my guesses to see if I've guessed correctly. One of the reasons for just guessing is that it makes me better at ... guessing! Because I want to learn the skill of guessing.


I would love to see some snapshots of your scribbles, if you ever have time to upload them! I also really enjoy hearing your point of view on reading, as you do a lot of it and you always have some interesting insights.

When I come across an unknown word, I always try to guess what it could mean before I look it up. Sometimes I’m right and sometimes I’m really wrong or I just can't make a good guess because I don't have enough information within the sentence/paragraph. I agreeing that “practicing guessing” is a good skill to have, regardless.

So it sounds like you aren't strictly doing extensive reading (I think it’s a great strategy no matter what it’s called). Whenever I’ve read about extensive reading, it’s mainly explained the way Luca Lampariello describes it:

To read extensively is to simply read as much as possible, without concerning oneself with the minutia of meaning and the occasional unknown word. This is done by reading for large swaths of time, and looking up words only when you deem it absolutely necessary to your understanding of the text. If the text you wish to extensively read is at the appropriate level, you'll find that most unknown words can be deciphered by looking at their surrounding context, making overt use of translations or dictionaries unnecessary.
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Re: Eternal Sunshine of the Italian Mind

Postby StringerBell » Mon Aug 15, 2022 8:44 pm

At the risk of jinxing myself and having to eat my words in the future, I want to go on record saying that I think re-reading is vastly superior to extensive reading in the intermediate stage.

I have only been using my new strategy for a few weeks but I'm already seeing a HUGE difference. When I was extensively reading in the first few months of this year, the reading process never felt like it was getting easier. I read about 3,000 pages in a few months and I didn't notice any improvement :roll: ; I just had to have blind faith that it was doing something. I wasn't remembering any of the new words I was encountering without actively studying them with Anki cards. Each new book felt frustrating. It was like Groundhog Day. I kept wondering when it would get easier, when I would see some kind of improvement.

I'm now only on page 70 of my current book and WHAT A DIFFERENCE!

To recap, what I'm doing is:

1) read 5 pages, looking up every unknown word, asking about any phrases/sentences/grammar that is at all confusing
2) re-read those same 5 pages without looking up anything again
3) re-read those same 5 pages without looking anything up
4) once I read 50 pages, reread the previous 50 pages without looking anything up
5) when I finish the book, reread it a 5th time from start to finish without looking anything up

:shock: What I'm noticing:

If I do a really good job of making sure I understand everything very well and can visualize in my head what's happening on step #1, I'm remembering everything during the following readings. I don't really need to look anything up again during step #2, #3, or #4 because I can easily visualize in my head or feel what's happening.

Not only am I remembering words between each mini 5 page re-reading session, but I'm noticing instances where the author is reusing a previously unknown word from an earlier chapter that I read days or weeks ago. With extensive reading, this is something that almost NEVER happened. For example, in the first pages of my current book, the author used the word "schiera" to describe row houses along the train tracks and I caught the word again when she was describing birds sitting in a row on a telephone line.

Once in a while on step #1 I struggle with a sentence (or even a paragraph) because even though I know the words, I just can't piece them together in a scene in my head. I have a sense of what's happening, but it's a little hazy. However, even when I can't quite make the paragraph really make sense on the first round but I spend a lot of time trying to, somehow on the second round it's blatantly obvious what's happening and I can't figure out why I had been so confused before. It's like my brain just needs to take a quick break sometimes before the lightbulb is ready to turn on. :idea: With extensive reading, I would have struggled with the sentence, gotten frustrated, and moved on without ever having figured out EXACTLY what was happening.

I'm now on page 70 so I've done step #4 once (reread the previous 50 pages). It was shockingly easy. It felt as easy as reading in English. I could see instantly how much progress I had made in a very short amount of time.

Also, I'm noticing that I'm often able to recall new words, phrases, or even whole sentences from the book later in the day. And a few times, I've taken a new expression and transformed it into a much more complicated sentence, changing the conjugation or the verb tense, and said it aloud to get feedback. I think I'm shocking my husband because I've gone from not talking for many months to spontaneously saying complicated stuff that is actually grammatically correct (!) like, "I'm sorry that I gave you the impression that I wanted a glass of water because I hate water with every fiber of my being." (we have an inside joke about how we hate drinking water) So not only am I learning the meanings of new expressions but I'm actively using them with very little effort. This is something that NEVER happened when I was reading extensively.
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Re: Eternal Sunshine of the Italian Mind

Postby rdearman » Mon Aug 15, 2022 9:21 pm

You shouldn't drink water, fish pee in it.
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Re: Eternal Sunshine of the Italian Mind

Postby Cavesa » Wed Aug 17, 2022 9:56 am

I think you haven't understood some things about extensive reading, no offense meant.

Extensive reading doesn't mean just guessing and believing all your guesses correct. Neither it means an expectation that you'd understand everything the first time. It is a path of accumulated experience with an obvious learning curve.

With extensive reading I would have taken my guess at face value without questioning it too much because I was using context to make a guess. It wouldn’t have changed the overall plot of the story since this is a minor character doing something in the background, but it would have completely changed what I was picturing in the scene. There is a HUGE difference between someone sitting quieting at a table doing paperwork vs. someone on their knees at the closet furiously searching for matching shoes.


Not exactly. With extensive reading, you would slightly misunderstand a thing not that important for the plot. The first time. Then you'd encounter the expression again. You'd encounter it a dozen times in the next 10000 pages of books read, and you'd either understand completely and with proper use, or in some cases be so struck by the discrepancy of the assumed meaning and the rest of the text to look it up, or it simply wouldn't appear a dozen times and therefore not be that much worth learning.

Vast majority of complaints about extensive reading misses one point of it. An extensive reader doesn't expect to get the knowledge from one book or page, intensive reading is clearly better at that. We expect to learn it gradually from lots of books. 10000 pages are the minimum an extensive reader should aim for imho.

Just like the few people doing research in academia on this (the papers I saw were really funny in a sad way), you are comparing the two on something extensive reading was never meant to be better at. It's like comparing two olympic sportsman. They are both great, in top shape, and have a gold medal. But if you compare them both at swimming, of course Usain Bolt will totally suck compared to Michael Phelps.

StringerBell wrote:I thought I would share some of my recent “fails” to illustrate why I, personally, don’t think extensive reading is a silver bullet for improving vocabulary or comprehension, and why I think it's not as useful as people seem to think it is. This is only my opinion and while I appreciate that others seem to use this strategy effectively, I thought I'd show why I think that as a strategy often used in the intermediate stage, it has some legitimate flaws (that I rarely see acknowledged).


But this flaw has been acknowledged, it is a part of the design. Just like a car is not designed to fly, an extensive reader is not supposed to understand everything perfectly the first time they encounter it.

And nobody ever treated it as a silver bullet, I'd say. Honestly, Extensive reading is the less popular and much more criticised choice. Even language teachers (wrongly) discourage people from it, recommending only intensive reading.

Extensive reading will fail, if you compare "intensive reading" and "extensive reading" on a sample of a few pages or a few dozen pages. Like in my very simply olympic analogy. In such a case, "extensive" reading won't be extensive at all, it will be just guessing.

But if you compare intensive and extensive reading after an amount of time (a wild idea a 500 hours), I think your view might change. The instensive reader will have dissected a few books and memorised tons of vocabulary. The extensive reader will have read many more books and internalised the vocab from the usage.

Really glad I looked up the unknowns there. I wonder how many others make equally ridiculous guesses about what’s happening in a scene that seem reasonable because it fits contextually with what they already know about a character and then mistakenly assume their comprehension is higher than it actually is… The more time I spend making sure I *actually* understand sentences, the more evidence I see that just relying on guesses for meaning can easily lead one astray from what’s really happening in a given scene.


You are clearly an intensive reader, awesome! It is a wonderful method. But you are a bit falling under the impression that the extensive readers just make ridiculous guesses. Nope, we just expect the next twenty or thirty books to correct us enough times and write it all well into our memories :-)

There is no way to evaluate extensive reading, without actually focussing on the first word.

If a sentence is talking about someone doing paperwork and I understand the sentence to mean they are matching up shoes, I would say that my comprehension is basically zero. And if my comprehension is close to zero but I’m deluded into assuming that it’s close to 100% because I’m just missing some trivial detail, that’s a counterproductive activity that’s not actually helping the goal of improving comprehension.


Yeah, it is basically zero this time. And it doesn't matter. An extensive reader doesn't dwell on it enough to memorise the wrong meaning. We move on, devour more content, and our understanding gets more and more precise. We are not deluding ourselves at all.

If I were doing extensive reading, I would have been satisfied with understanding that this character is just degrading herself and is “happy to suck”. Instead of moving on, I asked my husband to explain WTF was up with that sentence and apparently…. Drum roll…. The “da” completely changes the meaning of “fare schifo” and is actually an idiom.


Again. If you were an extensive reader, of course you'd move on. You wouldn't dwell on it. But this common idiom would come up many times again. Next time it would be more obvious. The next ten times, the natural repetition would make you remember it.

Actually, I remember encountering exactly this various times in tv series. Which is extensive listening. I know very well what it means, because I heard it used various times in various situations.

With extensive reading I never would have picked up on that idiom and therefore would have misunderstood how she was remembering the past. I have no memory of ever having encountered that idiom before in the past 10+ years (which is unlikely) so probably when I’ve heard it in the past I either ignored it or I filed it under “that’s a weird thing to say, oh well”. Or maybe I genuinely never heard/saw it before??? In any event, I’m glad I didn’t just accept my misinterpretation and move on. The more these kinds of misunderstandings happen, the less value I see in relying on guesses and moving on.


That's the thing. You would have picked up on it. If you encountered it several times. That's how I picked up on it. Extensive doesn't mean just guessing, it means relying on the amount of exposure and the various pieces of context falling all together.

As an extensive reader, I don't think I am just some delusional moron learning misunderstandings. I simply accept the learning curve. Otherwise, I'd be an intensive reader. I am not relying on a guess and just "moving on", I am moving towards the next twenty examples.

It is interesting that you don't have a recollection of it from the last ten years. Who knows, perhaps you haven't encountered it enough times for you, it simply wasn't an important enough thing in the types of media you consume. Or you weren't overall ready. Things we miss at first become interesting later, when we are ready for them.

I am not arguing against instensive and extensive reading being different, and having different advantages. that's actually a wonderful thing, as we can pick whichever fits the best our needs. I am just a bit sad that 100% of extensive reading criticisms are based on a misunderstanding of what extensive reading actually is, on comparing the two on too tiny samples to let the extensive reading shine, and on assumptions about extensive readers as sort of lazy people learning mistakes.

You know, I would love to see a proper research comparing the two. But it will never be done due to being too time consuming, due to such research usually being done on people too affected by other factors totally changing it, and due to everybody just being too happy to show off how extensive reading of one page doesn't work. :-( Of course it doesn't, it was never meant to.
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Re: Eternal Sunshine of the Italian Mind

Postby StringerBell » Wed Aug 17, 2022 12:44 pm

Cavesa wrote:Not exactly. With extensive reading, you would slightly misunderstand a thing not that important for the plot. The first time. Then you'd encounter the expression again. You'd encounter it a dozen times in the next 10000 pages of books read, and you'd either understand completely and with proper use, or in some cases be so struck by the discrepancy of the assumed meaning and the rest of the text to look it up, or it simply wouldn't appear a dozen times and therefore not be that much worth learning.


No. Maybe this is what happened for you and for others, but don't tell me how my brain works. I know what my abilities are (spoiler alert: they're not the same as yours) and every day I'm experimenting with ways to modify my life to optimize what my brain and body are capable of doing in the face of some pretty significant and increasing limitations. What works for other people sometimes just doesn't work for me.

After 10+ years and way more than 2,000+ hours of studying, TV watching, reading, and conversations I have learned that your experience is NOT usually my experience. I don't really learn words this way even in my native language. I look up EVERYTHING, even English slang I repeatedly come across on Twitch stream chats. Plus, even when words and phrases are repeated multiple times within the same book (which doesn't happen very often outside of a handful of words), being exposed to 300 or 500 new words per book is so overwhelming that I don't remember any of them at all. I know this because I kept re-highlighting the same verbs in my kindle multiple times which tells me I had no memory of even coming across them before.

So far my process is working for me. In just 70 pages I see a massive difference in how much I'm learning, remembering, AND ENJOYING. It's combining intensive reading with extensive reading of the same material, which for me seems to be the silver bullet. Why is it a problem for you if that leads me to think that what I'm doing just might be a superior method (at least for some people)? Wait, don't answer that. I'm not looking for a fight.

I don't know what I was thinking by writing about my opinion and what works for me in my own log. I guess every log should be a carbon copy each other's praising how great extensive reading is and if someone sees issues or limitations with it (or it simply doesn't work for them for whatever reason) they can just go elsewhere and keep it to themselves.

I love hearing about what works for others but I don't enjoy having someone come on my log to tell me the 100 ways that I'm wrong and don't know what I'm talking about. Since I am not interested in arguing I will continue the rest of my experiment with rereading on my own without documenting it.

Cavesa wrote:Actually, I remember encountering exactly this various times in tv series. Which is extensive listening. I know very well what it means, because I heard it used various times in various situations.


Congratulations! You win Italian.
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Re: Eternal Sunshine of the Italian Mind

Postby jackb » Thu Aug 18, 2022 1:21 pm

I know you dropped your personal super challenge, but this technique of reading fits within the rules of the public super challenge. Every page you read counts every time you read it. A 200 page book read your way will be 1000 pages counted in the challenge. Since you've found your smile again with reading, maybe you'd like a challenge.

Speaking of challenges, have you continued your writing challenge?
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