Eternal Sunshine of the Italian Mind

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StringerBell
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Re: è un po che non ci vediamo

Postby StringerBell » Wed Feb 02, 2022 9:50 pm

zjones wrote:Do you usually add your reading vocab to a specific deck to practice later? Can you tell me more about that?


What I'm doing now is to create an Anki card for most unknown words, expressions, constructions that I come across while reading. I have 1 deck per book. When I finish "learning" all the words in 1 deck, the plan is to reread the book and then delete the deck. I take supreme pleasure in deleting decks, so this is a very satifying reward! I don't add words that I don't care about knowing in English (like names of lesser known flowers) or words that seem to be really specific to a book and probably won't really appear elsewhere.

I try to fit Anki reviews in here and there throughout the day and I don't always do them all at once. So far, what seems to be working really well is to keep the number of new cards to 5 per day with 50 max reviews. In the past I'd always end up getting overwhelmed if I saw that I had like 200 reviews waiting for me and that would usually lead to me uninstalling Anki and hating on flashcards for awhile. It's reverse psychology - if I know i have to do a lot of reviews then I don't want to them. But if I finish doing them quickly because there's not that many, I often choose to do some extra ones because it's my choice. Sometimes I'll review some cards when I first wake up and then immediately do my 10 minutes of writing and try to incorporate some of those words I was just practicing. I've also noticed that if I review a few cards right before I go to sleep I wake up thinking about them. So I try to do that whenever I think of it.
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StringerBell
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Re: lettura, lettura, e poi lettura.

Postby StringerBell » Sun Feb 06, 2022 7:31 pm

Reading Challenge Week 7: Jan 31 - Feb 6

Books finished this week:

9) Ti sto guardando - 285 pages (translation of I Am Watching You - Teresa Driscoll)

So this book was a real turd. :lol: I was expecting that since the title was "I Am Watching You" it would be a psychological thriller about a stalker. The whole stalker thing ended up being a minor afterthought that really didn't fit with the story at all. The characters were extremely boring and generic. One character's enitre personality was that she was a pretty blond. Meanwhile, her best friend's whole personality was that she was good in school. The mother of the missing girl was so unbearably annoying that I could not sympathize with her at all. I didn't like or care about a single character. All of them are tormented by guilt over things that are so obviously not their fault that it's irritating. The author goes to great lengths to withhold information as long as possible to create artificial suspense that ends up going nowhere. The whole book is full of stale, tired observations on life; a private detective who gets involved has a newborn daughter and I lost count of how many times he says that now that he's a father he sees the whole anguish-over-a-missing-child in a different way. Puke.

So with that glowing review, I warmly invite everyone to never read this book. :lol: Considering I was able to get through it twice in 2 weeks (last week I used it for L-R in the evenings, this week I just straight up read it in Italian) it's not the worst book I've ever read. And there's no dreaded passato remoto in the narration, which in my opinion is the best thing about it.

I made a total of 185 cards for this book, with the highest number added on the 1st day of reading (the first 14% of the book). That's close to 1 word per 2 pages. I ended up making cards for a lot of words that I knew in context (possibly as a result of doing R-L the previous week) but I wasn't confident that if I saw those words in another book I'd still know what they meant. In skimming through the cards for this book, I'm realizing that I remember quite a few of them. Perhaps I didn't need to make quite so many? It will be interesting to see if I still remember them in another month or two when I finish my current deck and start working on this one.
Ti sto guardando.png


Yesterday I decided to buy a new dictionary for my kindle and I think it's a game-changer. A little while ago I reread the excelling blog post How I Passed the Demanding, 5-Part, 5 1/2 Hour, Oral, Paper and Pen, Highest Level (C2), Italian Language Exam Without Going to Italy and decided to buy the Italian-English dictionary il Raggazzini Zanichelli that he highly recommended. I have to say that it is so, so much better than what I'd been using previously. There are still occasionally words it can't deal with but it's so much easier to look up words with my kindle now. I wish I had bought this years ago. Perhaps this will even allow me to make fewer Anki cards.
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StringerBell
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Re: lettura, lettura, e poi lettura.

Postby StringerBell » Sat Feb 12, 2022 12:55 am

I learned this week that in writing vi sono = ci sono. The first time I came across vi sono I couldn't make sense of what was going on in the sentence and after quite a bit of headscratching I reluctantly decided it must have been a typo until I came across the same kind of construction on the next page (vi siano). This made me realize it wasn't a typo. Apparently this is something that I will never, ever hear conversationally but it's something that occasionally pops up in some writing.

rdearman wrote:My main feeling when reading "extensively" in French is a vague, constant fear that I'm not understanding what I am reading. But frequently when I stop and translate every word on the page, I discover that I did understand about 99.5% of what was going on, and the remainder was mostly unimportant detail. In English, I don't have this fear because I know when I'm not understanding something. I'm not sure if I'm conveying what is happening to me, but if I read in English, I know what I don't know. In French, I'm not sure that I know until I confirm that I know it. This fear stems from the fact that when doing extensive reading I'm not looking everything up and I'm guessing some words from the context. But are my guesses correct? Many times, in fact most of the time, they are correct, but until I confirm it the little guy in the back of my head keeps questioning me. "Are you sure that is right?"


I’ve been thinking about my experience with reading in Italian and I think RDearman’s insight is true for me, as well. Just a few days ago, I was reading and everything was totally fine and then all of a sudden I had no idea what I was reading. It wasn’t that I couldn’t understand the words, it was more of a realization that what I was reading wasn’t connected to anything and I had no idea why the author was saying what he was saying. My first instinct was to think, “wow, my Italian really sucks, how did this get so confusing all of a sudden?" I could understand the individual words but I didn’t know why I was reading it, which made me doubt my understanding of what I was reading. So I decided to go back a few paragraphs to see if I could pinpoint where it went off the rails. It turned out that when I turned the page, my kindle had jumped forward 2 pages so I had skipped 1 whole page. Now wonder it wasn’t making sense! Once I saw what happened and read the missing page there was no problem with comprehension.

If I were reading in English and the same thing happened, it wouldn’t even occur to me to think that the problem was with my English. But somehow in Italian, I always have this vague worry that I’m assuming that I understand something when I don’t. There are some times when I genuinely don’t understand what I’m reading (cue: vi sono) or I confuse two words that are very similar and it throws me off, so it's not like this insecurity is unfounded.

So… what am I hoping for by the end of my reading challenge? Rather than focusing on anything measurable like the number of unknown words per chapter or quantifying my comprehension with a percentage, my goal is more subjective: to feel that when I’m reading a book, I’m confident about my ability to understand. What a murky, elusive goal to aim for! Is it even possible?
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garyb
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Re: lettura, lettura, e poi lettura.

Postby garyb » Sat Feb 12, 2022 9:08 pm

I prefer your goal to trying to measure comprehension. There have been very long debates on here in the past about how to measure comprehension and whether it's useful at all to even try, but I'm not convinced it is and I'm happy enough with pulling out estimates like "I feel like I understand 95%".

It really depends on the book, too, which makes even a vague goal questionable. I can breeze through some books while others are still a huge struggle even now (although admittedly reading has never been a primary goal for me). I just saw another topic about how long it takes to be able to "read comfortably" and it felt like asking how long a piece of string is. Of course the difficult books are usually more classic/literary choices and the easy ones are usually more modern, but again it depends on the particular book. I do know that you try to seek out books with modern and informal language, and in that context the goal makes a lot more sense.

It's maybe stating the obvious now, but "vi" can replace "ci" in most situations (at least for the meaning of "there" or replacing a + a noun; I don't think it can for the pronoun "us"!), not just in "ci sono", in formal language. I think I learned that in Assimil Perfectionnement so I was just lucky to be prepared for it in real life.
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StringerBell
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Re: lettura, lettura, e poi lettura.

Postby StringerBell » Mon Feb 14, 2022 12:09 am

Reading Challenge Week 8: Feb 7 - Feb 13

Books finished this week:

10) In un batter di ciglia - 276 pages (translation of Blink - Malcolm Gladwell)

I'd been thinking about rereading this book recently since I read it in English more than a decade ago and remembered liking it but couldn't really remember it. Then I figured I'd read it in Italian and kill 2 pigeons with 1 fava. :lol: It was just as enjoyable the second time around. I've read and liked 4 of his books but since I don't remember them well, I just may go on a Malcolm Gladwell bender and read them all in Italian now.

I read this book on my kindle and used my new pop-up dictionary, no Anki cards for this one. I was pleased to come across some words that I've been studying with Anki. Particularly one that's been becoming something of a leech (spavaldo = cocky, defiant). I pulled it from another novel and for some reason it was one of those annoying words that wouldn't stick. Somehow, coming across it in this book seems to have done the trick because now I can not only remember the meaning but I can even recall it with no problem.

Why do our brains refuse to remember some words no matter how many times we study them and other words can be memorized with little effort? I'm sure there are some fascinating studies out there on the topic. Or if not, there should be.

I'm not sure how many unknowns I was averaging for this book. Maybe 1 per 1-2 pages. It felt relatively comfortable to read, even with the look ups and the whole vi sono = ci sono confusion. I'd say at least half of the unknowns I could easily figure out from context without looking them up. The writing was a little more academic than most of the other stuff I've been reading, but somehow that didn't make it more difficult. It seemed that with some of the more "advanced" vocabulary that I was coming across I could deduce the meaning due to recognizing some root word buried in the middle or coming across something in verb form that I recognize as a related adjective.

*************

Still consistently doing my WriteStreak. Every time I'm convinced that I don't know Italian at all, I take a look at how much I've written and the kinds of things I'm writing (both topics and grammar/vocabulary) and I realize that I should not be so quick to dismiss my abilities. Even though I'm sure I'm making lots of mistakes, it's still a good feeling to see how much writing I've produced. The nice thing about this challenge is that no matter how much I don't want to write, I can always manage to talk myself into doing "just 10 minutes". Once I get started, the time flies by. The biggest challenge is just getting started, and having this daily challenge seems to be a good motivator.

Talking is still often laborious. Even when it seems like I'm speaking relatively fluently, I have to think about conjugations and fem/mas agreements constantly. It's exhausting and I've been avoiding it lately outside of my scheduled LEs. Nothing ever becomes automatic, even things I've said and heard hundreds and thousands of times. The minute I decide to try talking without thinking about what I'm going to say in my head first, it comes out as nothing but mistakes.
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StringerBell
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Re: lettura, lettura, e poi lettura.

Postby StringerBell » Fri Feb 18, 2022 6:46 pm

WRITING:

7 weeks of WriteStreak and I've only accidentally missed 2 days, so I've done 47 days total. Of course I'd prefer that it was 100% but even if I continue to accidently skip some more days, at the same rate I will have written for 358/365 days, which is not too shabby.

I also finally figured out how to turn on the word count in Pages. It was actually super easy and I don't know why I didn't think to this is in the past. :oops: When I attempted an Output Challenge in the past I was manually counting handwritten words which was...tedious. After 7 weeks of 10 minutes/day free writing I have exactly 8,812 words written. I only end up writing about 2 paragraphs per session, which feels like nothing when I'm actually doing it but it's starting to add up.

By my estimation, if I continue along the same trajectory, I should end up with ~ 67,000 words written by the end of the year. Even though that's more than the requirement of the Output Challenge, it actually feels like it's less. I think the reason is that I'm focusing on the 10 min/day aspect and not the total words written part. It's strange that by subtlely shifting my goal I'm able to change my perception of how easy or difficult a challenge is.

VOCABULARY:

I've been contemplating the whole studying-words-with-Anki strategy lately. There are a few cards that can identify instantly but I still question whether I’d recognize these words in the wild. It feels like I’ve memorized the cards but not the actual words so if I were to come across those words in another context I don't feel confident that I would recognize them. This only applies to a few words, though, so probably not a big deal even if it's the case.

Some cards have words that are really specific and I periodically wonder if I should actually devote the time to learn them or not. One in particular in this category was: l’intingolo (a sauce produced from meat juices, usually a roast). I know and use a more colloquial word with the same meaning (which is Italian, not dialetto, but possibly regional): pucia. I don't even know if I spelled it right because I've only ever heard it in conversation. I keep going back and forth on words like intingolo - how likely am I to come across a word like this again? Is it worth studying?

Well, yesterday I pulled a Latin/Italian copy of the Satyricon off the bookshelf. I was curious to gauge whether it was something that I could feasibly read in the near future. I opened to a page at random in the middle of the book and in the very first sentence, what do I see? “Gli intingoli” I read the rest of the paragraph to confirm that it was the word I thought it was, and it was. So I guess that answers my question about whether these infrequent words are worth studying! Infrequent words come up very rarely (duh!) but when they do, knowing them really does make a difference. So even though it feels like a pointless endeavour, I think I will continue trying to learn them at least passively. Or until I reach my frustration threshold. :D

I have noticed that explicitly studying unknown words is slowly paying off. I'm recognizing words from my Anki cards in other novels. Without Anki I doubt I would be recognizing most of them as many just don't appear frequently enough for me to make connections. For example, in my current book, the word la culla (crib) has been repeated several times, so I didn't need to make a card for it. However, in my recent Anki reviews, a card from a previous novel just appeared for the first time: cullare (to lull, to rock, to cradle). I had no memory of making the card, and I certainly didn't remember seeing the word cullare when I read the word la culla. But now that I know la culla, it's extremely easy to remember the meaning of cullare without even trying. I might even just suspend or delete that card now. But had I not made the card originally, I would not have made that connection (or at least not for a much longer time).

GRAMMAR:

Somewhere I read someone online highly praising the grammar workbooks from the ALMA publishing company. I made a mental note of it and I keep almost buying a few of their workbooks only to talk myself out of it because shouldn't I finish the edX Wellesley courses first???

Speaking of that online course, I'm still doing the intermediate one. I go through the sections that I know well (like reflexive verbs) pretty fast and slow down when I come to something that's a rule I probably should have already learned but didn't. I'm going through it pretty slowly since I'm prioritizing reading so I don't often have both time and mental energy to deal with doing a course.

Right now I just learned the rule for when to use più/meno...di vs. più/meno...che when making comparisons. I mentioned to my husband I learned a rule about this topic and his response what that he had no idea what the rule was even though he uses it correctly and obviously knows what sounds right or wrong. It's strange since they teach so much grammar in Italian schools, so this must be one of those grammar points that since native speakers instinctively pick it up very easily it's not explicitly taught because it would be a waste of time for them. However, I'm very happy to know the rule now! I wrote a page full of practice sentences applying it and I think I feel confident with it. It's always a good feeling to patch up one more hole.
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StringerBell
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Re: lettura, lettura, e poi lettura.

Postby StringerBell » Sat Feb 19, 2022 8:42 pm

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StringerBell
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Re: lettura, lettura, e poi lettura.

Postby StringerBell » Mon Feb 21, 2022 2:01 am

Reading Challenge Week 9: Feb 14 - Feb 20

Books finished this week:

11) La Coppia Della Porta Accanto - 276 pages (translation of The Couple Next Door - Shari LaPena)

From a language learning perspective this book was great: very simplistic writing, no passato remoto, and repetition, repetition, repetition.

From a storytelling perspective it was pretty bad. The characters are more like caricatures than real people. Just like in the book I Am Watching You the only two personality options for female characters are (1) being super attractive, or (2) being insecure about not being super attractive and therefore consumed by jealousy. The story centers around a baby that gets kidnapped. Everyone is at various points a suspect, although not for very good reasons. The best friend is suspected at one point because since she doesn’t have kids, she must therefore be capable of kidnap and murder. At another point the grandfather is suspected because he’s rich which therefore means he doesn’t mind destroying people. (<<<this reasoning was actually given by the detective during a very misplaced socialist rant that came out of nowhere and was so jarring that I had to reread it several times to confirm that I wasn't imagining it). The protagonist even suspects herself at one point (the most believable of all of the potential suspects, if that says anything). I found the ending unsatisfying since the person who was actually guilty got immunity due to the fact that someone else gave him the idea to kidnap the baby.

Eye rolls aside, this was the first book where I found myself thinking that reading felt pretty effortless and comfortable. The few unknowns were very easily understandable in context and I then got to see many of those words again and again. So I think I'm officially at a level where trashy poolside reading is easy but not yet at a level where I feel good about reading real novels. That will take more time. I have some more trash lined up for the future (though I think I need a break because there is only so much I can take, so I'll read some other stuff first). I'm curious to see if this book was a fluke or if it's actually indicative of my level.
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garyb
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Re: lettura, lettura, e poi lettura.

Postby garyb » Mon Feb 21, 2022 12:56 pm

StringerBell wrote:For future reference, the grammar workbooks I'm interested in:
...
Grammatica avanzata della lingua italiana
I bought this one years ago, and I found it a bit disappointing; here are my thoughts in another thread. Still, from a quick flick through it now, I think it might be useful for filling in some knowledge gaps or drilling a few specific points. Certainly not a book I'd want to work through from start to finish though, and it has put me off from trying other books from the same publisher. If you lived closer to me I'd offer to send you my copy to give it a try since I've just been using it to prop up my speakers for the last few years, but I doubt that it would be economical to send it so far.

I am always curious to hear if there are any genuinely good intermediate/advanced Italian grammar books out there. In French there are the excellent CLE materials, but I've not seen anything comparable for Italian or been able to find excerpts of the books that do look potentially useful, and after my experience with Grammatica avanzata I've been reluctant to order any others without getting a good preview first.
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StringerBell
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Re: lettura, lettura, e poi lettura.

Postby StringerBell » Sun Feb 27, 2022 5:59 pm

garyb wrote:I bought this one years ago, and I found it a bit disappointing; here are my thoughts in another thread. Still, from a quick flick through it now, I think it might be useful for filling in some knowledge gaps or drilling a few specific points.


I appreciate this! I think I'll put this one on the back burner indefinitely and maybe just start with the congiuntivo workbook as a test rather than getting several at once.
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