Dylan413's Language Log

[dylan413]

It's been about a month since my last post and I am quite happy to say that my Italian is firmly in B2 territory at this point. I have completed the first Harry Potter, highlighting every single word that I did not know, and entering all that I found to be worthy of study into my Quizlet decks. I really have no issues with reading standard Italian at this point and I have even found Il nome della rosa by Umberto Eco to be surprisingly comprehensible. It's certainly beyond my level, but I have obtained access to a copy with an English translation, and it has been smoother than I expected.

My speaking and writing are not as high as my reading level, as one may expect, but I would say I reached B2 in these areas at least a couple of months ago. I have been writing in Italian every day for months at this point and I have never found speaking to be more difficult than writing. Once I can do one, I can generally do the other.

Listening, as always, is my weakest skill, which isn't particularly surprising considering my preference for reading over listening as a general mode for the acquisition of information. I have improved this skill as well over the past month by listening to voice messages sent by language partners and through watching youtube videos, mostly by the historian Alessandro Barbero, whose videos I enjoy immensely.

This is by far my favorite stage of language learning because it's at this point that I feel the least as if I'm putting in genuine work into the language. While I do have to study some grammar and I am continuing to use flashcards to improve my vocabulary, most of my time is spent doing everything that I normally would enjoy doing in English but instead in Italian, making it slightly more challenging but infinitely more useful. I am sure it will be quite a long time before I reach a comfortable C1 level, but I'm not really concerned about that because I am learning Italian as hobby and not for some career-related goal.

There is still plenty of vocabulary and idioms that I encounter seemingly for the first time every day, but I can almost always identify the meaning with context, and sometimes even without context due to the ubiquity of cognates between Italian and English. Even some of my other languages have helped me with vocabulary in the past, such as balena and fattura, which are both the same in Turkish.

I am hoping to visit Italy at some point later this winter or early in the spring. I'm not certain that it will work out, but I think it would be a nice reward for over a year's worth of dedication.

For the time being I don't have any plans to begin studying another language. I feel that it's necessary to speak a language at a B2 level or higher for a sizable period of time in order to avoid excessive interference when learning the next target language and especially to avoid losing the language altogether. Right now I feel that Italian is integrated pretty well into my life, so I shouldn't have any issues, but I would rather err in the direction of caution. I also don't feel particularly inspired by any other language or culture at the moment, so I don't feel an urgent need to begin a new target language for now. I have some interest in revisiting French, a language that I have not touched since high school, but I will probably wait at least a year before I even consider the possibility of studying it due to its proximity to Italian. I think that I will likely work a bit on my Ukrainian, which I believe I could get back up to a B2 level with about a month of casual use, before going back to one of my Turkic languages (Turkish, Azerbaijani, or Uzbek). Likely I will choose Turkish because of its wealth of resources and my taste for Turkish music.

[dylan413]

I have spent the past month focusing primarily on listening due to the fact that this skill lagged far beyond all of the others. It has always been a skill that I have struggled with and never truly known how to develop effectively. I learned Russian through complete immersion and Ukrainian was similar enough to Russian that it didn't take much to get used to it. In a sense it feels like it is my first time getting over this hump since learning a language in immersion is so different and learning Ukrainian I almost felt like some kind of false beginner due to its similarity. I have mostly been listening to lectures from a historian I enjoy named Alessandro Barbero. He has a Youtube channel and a podcast on Spotify with videos on a variety of interesting topics. Sometimes I listen to his lectures multiple times both for the purpose of consolidating my understanding of the information he's lecturing on and for the purpose of improving my comprehension. Others had recommended this method to me in the past and I am finding that it is quite helpful. I typically look up words that I don't know when I use subtitles, which is also a helpful method for growing my vocabulary. I would estimate that my active vocabulary is in the range of 5000 words and my passive vocabulary substantially higher. It would be good if I watched more movies with more ordinary dialogues in order to improve my understanding of colloquial Italian, but I have never enjoyed watching movies or TV much and I haven't been able to find any Italian cinematography that didn't feel like a real chore to watch apart from some shows that were almost entirely in dialect and not particularly useful.

I will be spending a few weeks in Italy in February and March, so that will be a wonderful opportunity to use my Italian a bit. I'll be traveling with a friend who does not speak Italian, so it will be far from immersive, but I am certain it will be a useful, motivating experience. My goals for the next month are to improve my conversational skills in order to get the most out of this trip.

[dylan413]

Today was my last day in Italy and I think now would be a good time to reflect on my experiences since it was not only my first time in a country where my TL is spoken since I started learning but it was also my first time communicating with people orally in any meaningful way, which I think is quite bizarre for someone of my general proficiency level.

While I don't think it would be accurate to describe my experience as immersive because I spent most of my time here with a friend who does not speak Italian, and to be frank, Italian often felt like it was only one of many languages around me in the more touristed parts of the country, overall, it was a great opportunity and tremendously beneficial. I spent the last five days or so after my friend left in Marche and Emilia-Romanga in relatively ordinary cities and it is during this time that I was truly able to use the language. I didn't know anyone in these places, but I did my best to communicate with people whenever I found the opportunity.

Overall, my listening and speaking skills have definitely benefitted and my intonation in particular has really improved. It was also very important for my sense of confidence when speaking the language. Initially, I was quite shy about it because I simply had never done it before. I'm quite happy with my progress and I feel proud to have reached this level without spending money on tutors or attending classes like I did with Russian. I still have quite a ways to go before I will be truly satisfied with my level of proficiency, but overall I am quite happy with the progress I have made so far. I used to think that B2 was enough for me, but I can safely say that I no longer believe that to be the case. To be fair, my speaking and listening are at the very low end of this threshold (whereas my reading and writing are much better), but in any case, it just isn't quite enough for me to feel truly satisfied with it. I plan on finally starting conversational classes a few days a week when I get home so that I can level the chasm between my oral and written skills even more. I'm fairly certain that this will yield quick results.

At this point, the areas of the language that I feel I need to work on most are the colloquial aspects, including idioms and slang. I'm not quite sure how to go about this since I only have one Italian friend and they dislike slang and colloquialisms in general, so I'm not receiving much exposure to this side of the language to say the least. So far I've been trying to work on it by reading the comment sections on meme pages and so far that seems to be working out ok. It's relatively helpful, but I think I will need to find other ways to approach this issue if I want to feel truly comfortable with slang.

[dylan413]

I have now been studying Italian for roughly a year and a half. I have 81 Quizlet decks, each with 100 cards, including words, phrases, and sentences. I suspect that this includes somewhere in the range of 6-7000 unique words, depending on how one defines what a word is. If I am to define word similarly to that of Paul Nation, I'd probably lower my estimate to 4-5000 since some cards would be duplicates of the same words, but probably closer to 5000. Of course there are also thousands of words that I know for which I have not made flashcards as well, but there are also some words that appear multiple times and other words that are in the list that I have forgotten. Overall, however, I think these estimates of my vocabulary are quite conservative. I have also attempted to quantify my vocabulary by opening up random pages of Harry Potter books and counting the percentage of words that I understood, which seems to be a good way of estimating my vocabulary thanks to a study I came across last fall. In most cases, I understand >98% of the vocabulary, which places me firmly in the 6000 word family range.

Obviously, there is much more to learning languages than simply memorizing vocabulary, but I like to use vocabulary as a benchmark because it's one of the few things that I am able to quantify when attempting to measure my progress. It's hard for me to imagine language learning without flashcards, but it is by no means something I rely on in isolation. Typically, I learn languages by engaging with native materials, mining them for new vocabulary and for interesting or useful sentences that exemplify the language's grammar. I don't usually learn words in isolation unless they are something basic that doesn't require much context to remember or nuance to grasp the meaning like "dog" or "house."

Now that I really feel truly confident about my Italian skills, I am thinking about revisiting one of my neglected languages. I have a few weeks left to decide whether or not I will do a PhD that would require me to do some research in Uzbek, so in that case I would obviously choose to revisit Uzbek with the aim of reaching a B2 level. However, in the case that I opt not to get my PhD, I would also have the options of Ukrainian, Azerbaijani, French, and Turkish. Ukrainian would take very little time to get up to B2 since it's the language I spoke the best in the past and the one I have the highest level in at the moment, but I am feeling an itch to work on one of my Turkic languages, so I suspect I will probably choose Turkish or Uzbek.

In any case, I will not neglect Italian the way I have done so many times in the past. I have learned the hard way how easy it is to lose one's progress when I don't make the effort to maintain my languages, and it is a mistake I will not make again. I will continue to read, watch the news, and talk to people in Italian as frequently as possible. I'm not particularly worried about it because I have integrated it so well into my routine, but I would like to start working on another language soon.

[dylan413]

At the moment I'm leaning in the direction of enrolling in graduate school and feeling an intense level of revived interest in Uzbek both as a result of an audiobook I'm listening to on the history of the steppe and my curiosity for the grammar and syntax of Turkic languages. I already have solid foundations in Turkic languages, but I have all but ignored them for some time now, and it has been nearly four years since I last gave Uzbek any amount of attention, so I am starting from scratch. Of course, I still remember quite a bit, but I have forgotten enough that it's necessary for me to start with a clean sweep of everything from the ground up, especially since my previous study of Uzbek has since been overshadowed by Turkish and Azerbaijani.

Unfortunately, I am once again remembering how much of a challenge it can be to study languages with limited reliable resources. Google Translate doesn't even provide the option to hear an AI-generated reading of terms, dictionaries often feel quite barren, etc. When I previously studied Uzbek, it was part of an intensive class, so these problems weren't nearly as significant. Now, I'm doing it on my own, so it's much tougher. In any case, there are also some distinct advantages to studying a language like Uzbek. For starters, I think the barrier for entry to basic communication with native speakers is a lot lower. One nuisance about studying European languages is that the minimum threshold for engaging Europeans in their native languages is much higher. You have to be quite good at the target language usually in order for them to refrain from switching to English. Additionally, they are usually less curious to interact with me as a foreigner because they're more used to it, and so it's harder to gain access to them to begin with. There are not many people interested in learning Uzbek, so it's easier to find conversation partners, their level of English is usually substantially lower, and they are usually intrinsically more interested in talking with me as an American and a native speaker of English–so there are definite advantages as well.

I'm planning on approaching Uzbek in much the same way that I studied Italian and I am very curious as to what the results will be considering the many differences between the two languages. I am still not totally certain that I will commit to studying Uzbek for an extended period of time–that largely hinges on whether or not I do end up committing to enroll in graduate school or not. In any case, though, I'm enjoying the process, and I don't see any harm in studying it at the moment, even if there is a chance that I'll drop it in a few weeks. If I do indeed accept the offer to start my PhD, I won't officially begin until October, so I still have more than six months until then. Ideally, I would like for my level to be in the range of B1 or B2, which I think is totally achievable considering I have reached a level not too far from this in the past, but I am curious to see how things will go.

For those of you who are curious how Uzbek could possibly be related to my research, my specialty is Soviet history, and since Uzbekistan was part of the Soviet Union, it's intimately connected with my research. Furthermore, due to the fact that I am American and relations between the United States and Russia are quite tense, I'm not able to access archives in Russia, making it quite challenging to research anything connected to Russia. Uzbekistan is far from an open country as well and gaining access to archives there can be a serious challenge, but it's a whole lot more manageable at the moment for Americans at the moment.

Once again, sorry for the many typos.

[dylan413]

I am quite glad to be revisiting Uzbek because it is in terrible shape. My Uzbek abilities were never that strong to begin with, but it's quite remarkable how much I was able to forget over the course of the past few years. A2 is still probably an accurate designation for my abilities in Uzbek, but I have a ways to go before I will be B1. I am quite excited about studying Uzbek in large part because it's a nice opportunity to test my methods while learning a language that is truly different from any other language that I am comfortable with. I felt quite vindicated by the progress I made with Italian over the past year and a half, but Italian isn't so difficult as a native English speaker, so I am quite curious to see if I will be able to reach a similar level in Uzbek on my own. I am quite comfortable with simple constructions in Turkic languages, but their syntax continues to baffle me as soon as any serious level of complexity is introduced. I suspect that I would encounter less problems if there were more resources available to help explain the more complicated aspects of the grammar and syntax, but there are unfortunately few available for Uzbek.

So far I have made 15 decks of flashcards on Quizlet, each with 100 terms. I have memorized somewhere in the vicinity of 1000 of the terms thus far, which isn't too shabby considering I began this process barely over a week ago, but I am not a true beginner, so that explains most of the speed.

My goal is to reach B1-B2 by October with a strong emphasis on reading skills. That leaves me about six months, which isn't a lot by any means, but I am only working part time, so I think it is feasible. I certainly shouldn't have any issues reaching B1, but I suspect that I won't be able to make the leap to a solid B2 level by that time. I think it would be quite doable if I were to choose a Romance or Slavic language, but I am yet to learn a Turkic language to this level, so I suspect I will have issues.

I also need to continue using my Italian every day because I do not want to lose all of my progress. While I am under the impression that language skills don't disappear so quickly once they reach a certain threshold, I think I would probably have to use it every day for an extended period of time before I could really stop worrying about losing it. I certainly can go for many months without using Russian at all, but it's been a huge part of my life now for quite some time and is at a much higher level, so it's not particularly surprising.

[dylan413]

Yesterday, I finally committed to my PhD program, which means my experiment with Uzbek will continue. I am quite excited about this and truly enjoying my study of Uzbek. While at first, I felt quite overwhelmed by it, I'm starting to feel more confident. I have a lot of progress that needs to be made before October when my program officially begins, but there is no doubt in my mind that I can achieve a relatively proficient level by then. I should also note that while I am interested in becoming a proficient speaker of Uzbek over time, the only skill that I really need to develop in the short term is reading. So far, virtually all of my practice consists of reading articles from Uzbek newspapers and mining them for vocabulary and important grammar points, which I then throw into Quizlet to memorize. So far I have 16 decks of 100 cards, of which I would say 10 decks I have mastered. I think that by the time I have mastered somewhere between 30 and 40 decks, I should be able to read relatively comfortably, using a dictionary every now and then for words that I do not recognize.

Learning vocabulary is a much slower process than it was for Italian as a native English speaker, but it's much easier than it could be thanks to my knowledge of Russian and my previous study of Azerbaijani and Turkish. I will say that I expected there to be more Russian vocabulary though and I have been quite disappointed to find that it appears quite limited.

I think it's quite likely that I will be able to reach a B2 level in reading by October, but I suspect that my other skills will continue to lag behind unless I start diversifying my study methods to prioritize those skills as well. It's likely that at some point in the summer I will start practicing other skills, but for now, I am quite content with prioritizing my reading.