Eternal Sunshine of the Italian Mind

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StringerBell
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Re: lettura, lettura, e poi lettura.

Postby StringerBell » Sun Feb 27, 2022 6:10 pm

Reading Challenge Week 10: Feb 21 - Feb 27

Books finished this week:

12) Ogni giorno - 280 pages (translation of Every Day - David Levithan)

First, some minutiae. I had a difficult time figuring out what the page count should be for this book. I doubt anyone else cares about this, but I wanted to make note of it in case I forget in the future what I ended up doing.

Page counts online can be wildly inaccurate (sometimes off by more than 100 pages, as in the case of the 1st Jack Reacher book). The book I read this week was listed as having 370 pages but as soon as I started reading I could tell that wasn’t right because at this point I have a good feel for how long different-length books take me. So my challenge was how to get a page count that was at least remotely accurate. In the past I’ve sometimes used the PDF version of ebooks to figure out a more accurate page count but even that can be very inconsistent.

For example:
286 real pages = 315 PDF pages (The Glass Castle)
276 real pages = 165 PDF pages (Blink)

There were 244 PDF pages in the ebook version of Ogni giorno, which would give me 292 regular pages (I multiply by 1.2. The official conversion should be x 1.5 but I found that x 1.2 yielded more accurate results so that’s what I use).

The other metric I sometimes use is the running length listed for the audible audiobooks on Amazon. If I compare that to the running length of Ogni giorno to other audiobooks I own:

~8 hours (Colpa delle stelle): 337 pages
~8.5 hours (Ogni giorno): ?
~10 hours (La ragazza del treno): 296 pages

Whoa! Something is off here. :? How could a book that’s 40 pages longer have an audiobook version that’s 2 hours shorter? Clearly, audiobooks aren’t always an accurate metric, either.

I finally decided to collect samples from my kindle. Since kindle doesn’t give page counts but does tell me the % of the book read, I used that. For each 1% of a book, I counted how many times I had to “turn” the kindle page, compared to the actual # of pages in the real book:

310 real pages > 1%=5 kindle pages
285 real pages > 1%=4 kindles pages
*Ogni giorno ? > 1%=3.5 kindle pages (280 pages as estimate)
276 real pages > 1%=3.25 kindle pages

By this metric, Ognio giorno would have about 280 pages. That’s a significant difference from the official 370 pages on Amazon’s site but it’s more consistent with my subjective experience of how long it took me to get through it. Who says you don't use math in the real world? :D

I can understand page counts in paperback books differing by 10 or 20 pages but to be off by 100? I can’t even think of a reasonable explanation that would account for this.

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

This week’s book was fucking fantastic. :o :shock: I don’t usually swear in my log but if ever a book deserved a strong endorsement, it’s this one. It’s a young adult novel (which I’m generally not a fan of) and it’s ultimately a love story (also not usually my thing). The premise is kind of absurd (the narrator, who calls him/herself A wakes up every day in a different body). All three of these things would normally have predisposed me to disliking the book right off the bat but the quality of the writing was so good and even though it was a love story, it was ultimately a book focused on philosophical and ethical dilemmas that left me debating with myself every day. It’s deceptively complex and could be enjoyed on multiple levels depending on how much you do (or don't) want to think.

The writing style and vocabulary was far more complex and rich than the crappy crime thrillers I’ve been reading lately. Perhaps the writing seemed even more impressive than it otherwise would because I just finished a very poorly written book. I sometimes had to reread sentences to make sure I was actually understanding them but slowing myself down and rereading sentences 2 or 3 times was usually enough to figure them out. Bonus: no passato remoto verb tense in the narration! I always appreciate that.

Since I have a pretty big backlog of Anki cards that I haven’t gotten to yet, I only made cards if an unknown word/expression seemed especially useful or interesting. For the rest I just used my pop-up dictionary and moved on. This would be a great book to reread in the future and focus more on collecting vocabulary, especially when my current Anki decks start running out of new cards.

***********

I’m still doing my Write Streak consistently. I’m pleasantly surprised by how well this challenge is going. I can see myself using more new vocabulary, expressions, and grammar than I ever did in the past. I know I’m making a lot of mistakes (in part due to stepping out of my comfort zone) but it’s really cool to see some of the complex stuff I’m trying out.

My new grammar goal is to figure out when to use il cui vs il quale. I think I might have seen a section on this in my Practice Makes Perfect workbook way back when, so I’ll have to dig that up and see if I can refresh my memory on when to use each one.
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Re: lettura, lettura, e poi lettura.

Postby StringerBell » Sun Mar 06, 2022 8:16 pm

Reading Challenge Week 11: Feb 28 - March 6

Books finished started this week:

13) Sharp Objects - 35 of 350 pages read (translation of Sharp Objects - Gillian Flynn)

This week was extremely unproductive. I had absolutely zero interest in reading Italian. I started and then abandoned two other books first before eventually settling on this one. I bought it several years ago on a flash sale for a few bucks and ever since I've been itching to read it so that I could cross it off my list. This week I was only able to finish the first 10% of the book, which is ~35 pages. The writing is decent, nothing impressive but definitely a lot better than I was expecting. I haven't really gotten into the meat of the story since I'm still in the beginning but so far it's holding my attention as well as any book probably could in this moment.

This whole week, every time I attempted to start reading, I found that I couldn't concentrate and kept wanting to read the news instead, so I gave myself permission to just take a week off and read as much news as I wanted without feeling guilty for slacking. I don't want reading Italian to turn into a punishment but I am a little worried that it will be difficult to rekindle the enthusiasm I had in previous weeks. I'm really not sure if the best thing is to push through the disinterest and try to brute force my way through the book next week, or continue to give into news-binging, which is what I'd rather be doing when I have down time for reading.

On a positive note: even in the face of my apathy toward Italian this week, I've still manages to consistently do my 10 minute daily WriteStreak. I usually try to get writing done in the morning before I start anything else, but it doesn't always work out that way. I set a recurring alarm to go off every evening as a reminder to write if I haven't already. So far, it's saved me from forgetting on two days.
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Re: lettura, lettura, e poi lettura.

Postby StringerBell » Mon Mar 14, 2022 3:00 am

Reading Challenge Week 12: March 7 - March 13

Books finished read this week:

13) Sharp Objects - 70 of 350 pages read (translation of Sharp Objects - Gillian Flynn)

This is a slightly pointless update since I only read another ~35 pages this week. I think I'm going to take a brief hiatus from my reading challenge since I'm (1) extemely far ahead of where I need to be, and (2) I'm getting very frustrated with reading Italian, and (3) my motivation for reading is virtually nil. However, since experience has taught me that I tend to respond very well to reverse psychology, I have a feeling that banning myself from Italian reading for a little bit will likely result in me getting really excited to return to it, so that's what I'm going to do.

I'm not sure if I'm going to attempt to finish this book when I do resume or just move on to a different one and maybe cycle back to this one later on. The vocabulary is more challenging than what I'm comfortable with - 2/3 unknowns per page. I was expecting it to be poolside trash-level and it surprised me by not being super crappy, so some frustation may be due to a mismatch between my expectations vs. reality.

I have consistently been doing WriteStreak everyday.
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Re: lettura, lettura, e poi lettura.

Postby StringerBell » Fri Apr 01, 2022 5:49 pm

Today marks the 1/4 point of the year (tomorrow could work, too) so I thought I'd write a brief update on where I am now that the first 25% of the year is done.

So far this year I have read 2,926 book pages, which means that I can continue my reading hiatus for another 2 weeks and still be right on schedule to meet my goal by the end of the year. I haven't resumed reading yet but I probably will soon. This past week I started doing a little bit of L-R since I still have a few Italian audiobooks to knock off. I only did about 3 chapters (so nothing impressive there) but I think I will make it a priority to finish this by the end of next week since the audiobook is only 8.5 hours long. This won't count toward my pages read since I'm listening in Italian and reading in English but I enjoy it so I don't care about that.

I have not been keeping up with Anki card reviews during this hiatus but I'll return to them when I resume reading. I hope. :roll:

One of the issues that's been getting in my way is just not having a good, comfortable place to sit and read. I often end up laying on my bed which gets really uncomfortable really fast. I've been just dealing with it but I'm starting to realize that it's an issue I really need to resolve.

On a positive note, I have managed to keep up my 10 minute-per-day Italian WriteStreak challenge. I only missed 2 days early on due to forgetting. Since I've put a daily recurring alarm on my phone that hasn't happened anymore. Another important thing is that if I can't do the writing when the alarm goes off, I keep resetting the alarm for a later time rather than just turning it off.

Depending on which day you ask me, my feelings about doing the WriteStreak range from, "wow, this is a fantastic thing to do and I think it's invaluable" to "this is a waste of time, why am I even bothering with this?" :lol: I think the truth is probably closer to the first option. I honestly don't know what, if anything, is actually improving but consistently forcing myself to think in Italian daily (if even just for 10 min) and commit those thoughts to writing - I think - is at the very least helping me to maintain what I know and prompting me to look up what I don't know.

Side note: A few days ago I was reading through this reddit thread in Italian about why it seems like all Italians watch foreign dubbed shows and there are no good Italian shows. It was a fairly interesting read though that's not why I'm referencing it. At some point, one of the posters used the word "perbenista" which is a word I learned from the book Ti Sto Guardando. When I originally came across that word I had been stuck on whether or not it was worth making a card for it because I wasn't sure how common it actually was. I eventually made the card and memorized the word and now it looks like I made the right call. Things like this are good reinforce that all that time making cards and memorizing new words is actually worth it.
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Re: Eternal Sunshine of the Italian Mind

Postby StringerBell » Fri Aug 05, 2022 10:08 pm

munyag wrote:Hi Stringerbell

How goes your Italian? I have always followed your posts and saved a few nuggets of wisdom on my desktop. Hope it's going well?


I noticed that you posted this on an old log so I'm replying to you here. The answer to your question is long and complicated so hopefully you don't regret asking! :D

I stopped my reading challenge several months ago. I started to really hate reading and part of it was churning through too many poorly-written crappy crime thrillers. Also, I just don't care *that much* about reading in Italian. Maybe if there were original Italian novels I were dying to read I'd feel differently. I'm sure there must be some good ones out there but I haven't found them yet. Also, when it comes to reading (for me) quality feels a lot more productive and useful than quantity. The bottom line is I confirmed that I don't like extensive reading and trying to force myself to do it anyway turns reading into a punishment that I dread. Even though I stopped extensive reading and my challenge, I haven't 100% stopped reading. I'll write more about that in my next post since this one is going to be way too long as it is.

After several months of rumination, I decided that I'm trapped in a Lucifer-style hell loop. It's been more than 10 years of studying Italian, getting frustrated and giving up and then returning to it. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Will I ever get out of this hell loop? I genuinely don't know, but I'm going to keep trying! 

So the plan is to try - yet again - to break free of the hell loop by trying a slightly different approach. The bulk of my problem is with verbs. Both knowing more complicated tenses AND knowing which tenses to use when. I'm fine with most of the simpler tenses but I create a hot mess when I attempt more complicated constructions like "If I had known then what I know now..." or anything that triggers congiuntivo (the subjunctive)... which is a lot! It's surprising how much conversation requires these kinds of tenses and without having a mastery of them I often feel that I can't express what I want to say.

So, I'm in the process of tackling this issue in a way I never *really* did before:

1) Drilling them with flashcards. Yuck. Sometime you just can't avoid those disgusting vegetables. :lol: I've been making physical flashcards rather than using Anki, which is making the whole thing more palatable. In the past I did work through an Italian grammar book (Practice Makes Perfect) but I never really dedicated daily practice to verb conjugation practice for a long period of time. I also started using Linguno to practice conjugations a few days ago. I'm really enjoying the site and glad that Cavesa mentioned it on her log.

2) Practicing specific constructions so that I will eventually know which tense to use when. I haven't done much of this so far; I'm waiting until I finish memorizing the conjugations for all regular and irregular verbs for those 11 tenses before focusing on when to use them in various constructions.

So far, I've got a stack of conjugations for the 11 verb tenses that I want to be automatic (I know congiunivo is a mood and not a tense, but for the sake of simplicity I'm going to include it with tenses):

-presente

-passato prossimo

-imperfetto

-futuro semplice

-condizionale presente

-condizionale passato

-congiuntivo presente

-congiuntivo imperfetto

-congiuntivo passato

-trapassato

-congiuntivo trapassato


Right now I have a stack of cards for 3 verbs: Avere, Essere, plus prima coniugazione (-are verbs). I already knew the first 5 tenses so those are review rather than active learning. I think they're worth reviewing because I do occasionally make stupid conjugation mistakes even with these simple tenses. Plus it's nice to have some easy ones mixed in with the more challenging ones.

I've been reviewing conjugations as a really low-stress, low-effort thing and so far that has been working well. I'm spending probably 10-15 minutes/day tops on it. My husband quizzes me most days for a few minutes, I run through the conjugations in my head at random moments, and I use Linguno when I have some dead time here and there. Even with such little time spent on practice, I've been able to progress to the more complicated tenses pretty quickly since I already knew the simpler ones and the more complicated ones aren't totally unknown.

My goal is to make similar decks for the remaining -ere/-ire verbs and all the irregular ones. I'm also planning to make stacks of sample sentences for specific grammar constructions that trip me up. Once I've got all the conjugations memorized the plan is to ease back into speaking. I'm sure I'll still make a ton of mistakes but at least when I get corrected I'll understand why.

You'd think that after more than 10 years I would have conquered Italian but it's still very much a messy work in progress. It's something I can never totally walk away from no matter how much I want to at times (both a blessing and a curse of being married to a native speaker of another language). The good thing is that every time I stop for a while, when I return it feels easier. Perhaps my brain needs a really long rest period to assimilate info or maybe it's related to my attitude. Or both. Either way, stopping periodically doesn't seem to have any negative affects on my skills.
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Re: Eternal Sunshine of the Italian Mind

Postby StringerBell » Sun Aug 07, 2022 1:38 pm

MY NEW READING STRATEGY

Even though I stopped my reading challenge a few months ago, I decided to resume reading (albeit in a different way) last week. I realized that another part of the problem with my challenge was that it required extensive reading to rack up lots of pages, which just didn't work for me. Somehow it magically works for everyone else, but flying past words I didn't know just frustrated me and didn't feel like it improved my vocabulary. It's a mystery to me how other people improve this way. Even in English I always look up unknown words even when I think I can guess them from context because there's often some nuance to the meaning that can't be inferred from seeing the word just once in context. Plus, looking up words helps me to remember them. Do other people not look up words in their native languages? If most of you don't, maybe that explains why many of you seem to have a better experience with extensive reading in a target language than me.

Here's what I'm experimenting with right now: instant and multiple re-reading, which is a mix of intensive & extensive reading with a natural SRS built in.

1) I read 5 pages, look up most of the words I don't know (without making flashcards), take notes on anything I have a question about or is a construction I want to practice.

2) Re-read those same 5 pages, looking up the few things that I didn't look up the first time that's bugging me or I don't remember.

3) Re-read those same 5 pages a 3rd time without looking up anything.

4) When I get to page 50, go back and reread pages 1-50 without looking anything up.

5) Once I get to the end of the book, reread the whole thing without looking anything up (I might make an exception, like 1 look up every x pages is allowed).

The end result of this will be that a book with 296 pages = 1,480 pages read. Hopefully, another end result will be a lot of new vocabulary acquired without making Anki cards.

I am up to page 40 today so I haven't gotten to step 4 yet. However, what I'm noticing so far: the second and third reading feel super easy. I'm remembering almost all the words I looked up the first time so I rarely have to look up much during step #2. I also get instant gratification: putting some effort in for a few pages leads to an immediate improvement in comprehension the second and third time.

Also, because I'm covering a smaller # of pages in one session, I'm remembering and thinking about many of the new words & phrases later in the day without even trying. I may not remember them all long term BUT it's better than remembering none of them long term, which is what feels like was happening with extensive reading unless I made and studied flashcards. I'd like to avoid vocabulary flashcarding right now since I don't want to invite burnout due to the flashcard studying I'm already doing with verb tenses, which is my main priority.

Something else I've realized:
Even when it feels like I'm reading at a good pace with 100% comprehension, the fastest I read is 1 page/3.5 minutes :roll: . From reading other people's logs, that seems pretty s l o w. Is it because I'm subvocalizing and others aren't? Or am I just a slow reader in Italian? If I'm able to stick with my new reading routine, I should check my reading speed again in the future to see if it improves.

As I mentioned, since I'm covering few pages per session, I have the ability to ask a lot of questions when something isn't the way I'd expect it, even if I can still understand what's happening.

For example, I saw in one paragraph the author wrote "un goccio" to mean a drop but long ago I learned that a drop was feminine (una goccia). This was really bugging me. Was it a weird word that could be BOTH masculine and feminine??? Turns out, I was right that a literal drop is feminine... unless you're figuratively talking about "a drop of alcohol" or "a drop of something to drink". In that specific case, you'd use the masculine version "un goccio" (as a synonym of "un sorso" > a sip). If I were reading extensively I would have glossed over this and never learned it.

Another weird thing that threw me into some self-doubt: I learned long ago that the past tense of correre (to run) used the auxiliary verb avere. However, in one scene a character was running around her house but the sentence used the auxiliary verb essere to make it past tense ("Sono corsa" instead of "Ho corso"). WTH? Was I remembering wrong? Cue a long internal debate about the right way to make the past tense of "to run". Turns out, if you conjugate correre with avere, it literally means "ran". But if you conjugate correre with essere it means something more like "rushed". I never knew that! :shock: If I were extensively reading, I would have just mistakenly assumed "Sono corsa" meant "I ran" which still worked in context. 

I don't know if I'll be able to keep this rereading strategy up for the whole book or for future books (even though that's the hope), and I don't do it every single day, but it is paradoxically helping me to deal with reading a trashy crime thriller better. When I was reading extensively, the books felt like a punishment I had to get through with little reward for my work since each new book felt equally frustrating and I couldn't see any improvement. I'd look at the long list of unknown vocabulary words I'd highlighted in my kindle and not remember the meaning of a single one of them. BUT with my new instant re-reading strategy, the book feels more like a tool that is noticeably improving my skills; I can actually see in real time that I'm learning and improving and that makes me very motivated to keep reading it, no matter how stupid or trashy it is.

And, if I am able to stick to this new routine consistently, I will still be on track to read about 5,000 pages in one year.
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Re: Eternal Sunshine of the Italian Mind

Postby rdearman » Sun Aug 07, 2022 6:23 pm

Don't under any circumstances use me as a guideline for anything. But I am currently reading in Italian at ~2.5 pages per minute. I'm one of the seemingly rare people in the world who isn't a perfectionist, and ambiguity doesn't bother me. Which means if I looked at your examples, I would have just pressed on. My mind would have noted an ambiguity and filed it away for later. Basically a pattern I know has not been matched, and my brain would have unbeknownst to me flagged that and waited to see if this was a unique occurrence. If it happened again, there is a good chance my subconscious would stop me, make me read it again the second time I encountered this odd pattern and make me figure out why. At this point, I probably would have asked a native or tried to figure out why.

As for words, I just figure it out from context and this becomes the first pattern. If all subsequent encounters match this context, happy days. If it could be something else, then I assume the word has two meanings, like "bow". There are lots of words with many meanings in English, so I'm not going to blindly assign one meaning to every encounter with the word. But the human brain is amazing at pattern matching, and because I am comfortable with ambiguity, this type of pattern matching works for me.

So it looks like you're reading the same section 4 times? Whereas I would have read nine sections (2.5 times your speed, and no re-reading) which means I'm much more likely to have encountered more patterns and more context than you. But honestly, your Italian is better than mine, so as I said before I'm a bad example, I just wanted to explain why I read the way you appear to dislike.
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Re: Eternal Sunshine of the Italian Mind

Postby StringerBell » Sun Aug 07, 2022 6:52 pm

rdearman wrote:My mind would have noted an ambiguity and filed it away for later. Basically a pattern I know has not been matched, and my brain would have unbeknownst to me flagged that and waited to see if this was a unique occurrence. If it happened again, there is a good chance my subconscious would stop me, make me read it again the second time I encountered this odd pattern and make me figure out why.

As for words, I just figure it out from context and this becomes the first pattern. If all subsequent encounters match this context, happy days.


I think this probably is what happens for most people, and it probably does explain why extensive reading works well for others. My issue is that it doesn't work like this for me. If I'm reading 40 pages in one sitting and I'm encountering an average of 3 unknown words per page, that's 120 unknown words per reading session. With some books, it's possible that my average is closer to 4 or even 5 per page. That's way too many to remember, therefore my brain rejects them all due to being overwhelmed and I end up remembering none of them.

Considering many of the words I don't know are relatively low frequency, there's a good chance I won't encounter them again in the same book. Even when I do, it doesn't matter; there are so many unknown words that I sometimes end up highlighting various versions of the same word multiple times because I had no memory of having encountered it before. I'm a little jealous that you have such a good memory for the unknown words you come in contact with!

rdearman wrote:So it looks like you're reading the same section 4 times?


Assuming that I'm able to follow my plan, I would end up reading the book a total of 5 times. I'm curious to see if I can actually pull that off.
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Re: Eternal Sunshine of the Italian Mind

Postby rdearman » Sun Aug 07, 2022 11:32 pm

Oh, I should also point out that much of the time I cheat. For example the book I am reading in Italian is a fictionalised account of the life of Alexander the Great. But I have studied Alexander and his battles and life before so my guesses about the context are better informed than if is was reading about a topic I didn't know. Also I tend to read fiction in other languages I have already read in English. So not all the time, but a lot of the time I cheat. :mrgreen:
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Re: Eternal Sunshine of the Italian Mind

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Mon Aug 08, 2022 8:27 am

rdearman wrote:I'm one of the seemingly rare people in the world who isn't a perfectionist, and ambiguity doesn't bother me. Which means if I looked at your examples, I would have just pressed on.
(...)
So it looks like you're reading the same section 4 times? Whereas I would have read nine sections (2.5 times your speed, and no re-reading) which means I'm much more likely to have encountered more patterns and more context than you. But honestly, your Italian is better than mine, so as I said before I'm a bad example, I just wanted to explain why I read the way you appear to dislike.


I'm not a perfectionist either (at least not when it comes to pattern recognition/exposure). I also read fast - but not at a speed reading pace. Still, I think your method makes a lot of sense. Exposure to more content and more examples in the same time span. This I like. Chop wood now. Sharpen your axe later.
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