Serpent wrote:The missing element might be linguistics
Also Spanish-Italian parallel texts. although to be fair I also had Latin when branching out in the other direction. well, it's also useful for Spanish/Portuguese, but not that much maybe.
That's a little meaningless, "linguistics" is a massive subject area and much of it has little relevance to practical second-language learning. I did a couple of linguistics courses at university, mostly relavant to computer science (generative grammars and things like that) and didn't find it too interesting, and I've also read stuff like the Loom of Languages about how Romance languages branched out from Vulgar Latin. The parts about spelling changes between the languages were useful, at least for understanding, and might be worth a re-read now that I'm working on Spanish. It's no magic bullet though.
Parallel texts might be useful. Using the Italian-base Assimil for Spanish was certainly helpful for seeing both the similarities and differences, and it fits in with the idea of exploiting the similarities while still seeing Spanish as its own language. I have experimented with L2/L3 bilingual subtitles in the past and I found two foreign languages at once to be too much to deal with in real time, but for reading I can go at my own pace so that isn't such a problem. It's a good idea, I'll look out for Spanish-Italian texts, do you know of any that have relatively everyday language?
Still, the missing element is simply time. I'm not spending much on Spanish and that's why progress is slow.
Robierre wrote:Voyage was very difficult for me; I wasn't able to read it.
It was three years ago, I wonder if today it would be easier. The problem might be the colloquial French, as Céline was one of the first writers (1930's) introducing the vernacular language in French literature.
I'd imagine it should be easier now. I think the colloquial language is the reason it's not difficult for me. Aside from a few old-fashioned words it doesn't feel too dated and has quite a conversational feel.
Not much to report from the weekend. I was playing a gig in another city and then went to a party when I came back; some Spanish and Italian speakers had been at the party but had mostly left by the time I arrived. Missing out on practising one hobby because I was practising another, it's a hard life
. I did watch a few films though:
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Amer, that I mentioned before. Again not my thing and very little dialogue, just a few lines of French and also a few of Italian at the start.
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Los ojos de Julia: saw the rest of this horror/thriller, I liked it and it definitely held my attention but watching it before going to bed was a bad idea.
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Septimo: one that I wanted to see at the Spanish film festival last year but didn't manage. I assumed it was Spanish but it's actually Argentinian. I'm not very familiar with the Spanish from there but it seemed quite easy to understand, just a bit of unfamiliar slang/swearwords and use of "vos" instead of "tú" which at this point is one of these things I only need to understand rather than use. The film has good Spanish and English subtitles. It's no masterpiece but it's quite watchable and has lots of conversational dialogue.
No Italian films or TV, just some YouTube stuff, like
a guy talking about guitar pedals.
Other news: one of these times has come when all my Skype contacts have become too busy or stopped responding to me. I'll wait and see how things go at home and socially, whether I'll have enough opportunity to speak or I'll need to look into tutors yet again, or just work on Spanish for a bit. I've definitely been in a Spanish mood for the last few days.