Studying for C2 In Italian

[marcuspezzaioli]

Introduction

Hi, my name is Marcus and I am planning on taking a C2 exam in Italian next year.

I have reached a level where I believe this is possible mostly by reading and listening a lot this year after a couple of months looking at Duolingo back in Nov/Dec 2021. (I have started to detail my thoughts on the 'beginning' stages of learning a language here: http://www.marcuspezzaioli.com)

My idea for here however is to mainly log the things I am doing specifically for this test (The CILS).

The aim now is to really knuckle down and turn up really prepared on test day in December 2023. (EDIT: Plan is now June 2024)

Today's test study then...
I made up some notes on the format from the test from this post online that I found: http://brianjx.altervista.org/
On Tuesday I will talk to an Italki tutor to check if this is still the format (the above post is 7 years old), and for ideas on how to practice.

Today's general Italian practice:
2 news articles read, 2 chapters of a fiction book read, and 2 of an audiobook listened to.
1 Duolingo lesson done mostly for some shadowing practice (my pronunciation feels far from perfect)

[Lawyer&Mom]

You’ve been studying for a year, and you are still using Duolingo. Bold to aim for a C2 next year. But hey, shoot for the moon, land in the stars, your Italian will improve no matter what! Glad you are here, looking forward to following your journey!

[marcuspezzaioli]

'You’ve been studying for a year, and you are still using Duolingo. Bold to aim for a C2 next year. But hey, shoot for the moon, land in the stars, your Italian will improve no matter what! Glad you are here, looking forward to following your journey!'

Thanks

To be fair I'm not really using Duolingo for anything other than trying out shadowing.

I'm not going to get my hopes up for a C2 next December... its more I'm going to take a C2 exam at some point, and that is the only date currently announced that doesn't seem completely insane. If I get to the summer and I think, 'There's absolutely no chance I'll pass even 3 or 4 of the sections' I'll take the test in 2024 rather than sit lower levels.

[marcuspezzaioli]

My family and I have been ill recently, so I'm posting a few days updates in a row.

Tutor's Thoughts

The tutor I spoke to on Italki said the best thing to do is focus on grammar, then worry about exam specific revision nearer the time.
She was absolutely brilliant as well, so I'm inclined to trust her judgement. She managed to diagnose issues in my spoken grammar instantly, then pulled out explanations and examples in seconds. She then set me homework on the issues we discussed. I used to be a teacher and I wish I'd been that prepared

The grammar study begins...

I'm using the book 'Grammatica Italiana Per Tutti' by Elisabetta Perini as my current 'syllabus'.
All of its topics from the contents page are set up in a 'Retrospective Revision Timetable' - which piqued my interest after seeing a YouTuber Ali Abdaal talk about it. His article on it is here https://aliabdaal.com/retrospectiverevisiontimetables/.

My technique at present is to read the book's descriptions of a concept, then watch a YouTube video in Italian on the topic (there seems to be an infinite number of Italians teaching grammar concepts to Italian learners in Italian), then adding notes/questions to Anki.

After that I'll create some questions on the topic for whenever I come back to revise it in the future, and put a date next to it on my timetable so I know when I last looked at the subject.

This is just what I needed

My brain is always whirling from one interest to another, so having a clear concrete goal for the end of next year is really helping me to focus. I've loved 'studying' Italian so far, whether that's reading, listening and having conversations with language exchange partners and my non-Italki tutor, but it does feel like the right time now to 'really' study the language, in terms of understanding how to produce it myself in a fluent way.

I think once I've made grammar study an ingrained habit, the next step is to ramp up the amount of writing I'm doing, which is just one short piece a week at present.

[marcuspezzaioli]

Organisation

Today I focused on getting my electronic storage situation under control.
It may seem like procrastination, but for the first time since I left the teaching profession 7 years ago being able to find documents quickly actually matters so I feel like it was time well spent. And as a parent its rare I have a day free, so it seemed like now or never.
Now I've got a good little setup in my google drive and evernote, and I'm feeling like everything's a little easier to find.

Walking / Audio book habit

However, I did keep up my habit of having at least a 30 minute walk, and taking notes on the audiobook I was listening to.
I actually used Italian this time rather than the English notes I took for Atomic Habits.
I have type one diabetes and actually bought this book 'I 4 pilastri della felicità' by David Mariani in the middle of a hypo, so I'm not sure there's any good reason behind its purchase other than the title sounded appealing to me at the time.
However, I've started it now and it isn't overly long, so I'm just going to presevere with it.

Motivational trick

I wasn't feeling motivated to start studying grammar, so I used something from the Atomic Habits book and decided to commit to creating 1 Anki card from the notes in Grammatica Italiana Per Tutti. 45 minutes later and I'd made quite a few cards about different verb tenses and watched some videos in Italian on the subject.

So all in all I'll call today a success Italian-learning-wise despite it seeming like a lost cause at around 9pm.

Now to do some reading before bed. I'm halfway through Cesare Pavese's 'La bella estate'.
I can't quite get into it, but its really short so I'm just going to blast through it and add it to my 'read books' list.

Benefit of keeping these logs

Its actually just hit me that if I hadn't written all of that I would have been questioning myself today.
But considering today felt like a rare 'off day' in terms of motivation its surprising how much I actually did now I read it back.

[marcuspezzaioli]

'Studying'

I'm settling into a rhythm with 'studying' every day now - rather than my pre 'I'm going to take the C2 level exam' 'method' of read and listen a lot every day.

Habits

I'm quite happy with this, but I want to try and make sure I'm using my time as wisely as possible so I'm trying to think exactly what habits I want to cultivate.

I'm trying to go with the mindset of 'what would I be happy with as my worst day'. And it seems to me that doing something towards each of the 5 areas tested (reading, listening, grammar, writing and talking) is something to strive for as a minimum.

For now I've put the following as daily tasks into the Todoist app (its a task manager app, I find it quite nice for listing my daily tasks and ticking them off one by one. If nothing else its stopped me going to bed and trying to remember if I'd taken my nightly long acting insulin injection):

• Study flashcards (I'm getting back into using the Anki app. I have a love/hate relationship with it, but it seems like more of tool and less of an endless burden now I have a clear goal!)

• Make 10 flashcards from reading (For now, I'm just making cloze cards for any words I don't know when I read Corriere Della Sera)

• Write a google doc (whether its just a random collection of my thoughts, or an assignment for a teacher)

• Answer some grammar exercises/drills (for this I leave a grammar exercise book lying around somewhere convenient and answer a few questions when I get chance). I'm also slowly working through a book explaining grammatical concepts, so will count this if I've read a section and made some flash cards on it.

• Talk (whether this is with a tutor, language exchange partner or myself... Needs must!)

Early Days

Its early days of course for this learning log, but the above seems pretty reasonable as daily goals to tick off as a minimum. I can even do the first 3 on my phone, so its quite easy to just replace dead time staring at a tiny screen with something constructive.

Whether the flashcards get out of hand or not is a different question of course, but I can simply stop making new ones if it feels its taking too much time.

[marcuspezzaioli]

Its been a long time since I posted an update, but real life got in the way (things I don't really want to talk about publically)

However, I have not stopped immersing in Italian at any point, even if I haven't been actively studying it with passing a test in mind. I do feel practically fluent at this point, in the sense that I could wake up in Italy tomorrow and navigate through daily life without any issues.

The new plan is to take the test in June 2024, giving me nearly a year to prepare.

I've decided that because I have so long to wait I'd burn through all past exams materials available if I started using them now, so I'm playing with the idea of using chat GPT to help me prepare.

I've just pasted in a YouTube transcript from a 6 minute video used it to create 7 multiple exam questions 'in the style of a C2 CILS exam' and it did a good job in my opinion!

I got 3/7... which I'm fine with. It was a new experience answering questions on something I listened to and there's plenty of time to develop that skill before next June!

[diaconia]

hi marcus, I popped by because I'm also toying with the idea of taking an exam next year, not quite so difficult as C2 but some sort of benchmark would be great. So it's inspiring to read about your journey. I like how you structure your log, too.

[marcuspezzaioli]

hi marcus, I popped by because I'm also toying with the idea of taking an exam next year, not quite so difficult as C2 but some sort of benchmark would be great. So it's inspiring to read about your journey. I like how you structure your log, too.

Thank you

I can't help but feel I've been a bit disjointed so far (in terms of going from one idea to another), but I think that's just the reality of doing something for the first time. I'm coming up with some kind of revision structure now and will have a more detailed update on what I'm actually doing soon!

[marcuspezzaioli]

So I've used Chat GPT to help me for a week or so now, and I think there are benefits to using this for help with preparing for an exam. (Especially , if like me, you have prepared for exams best - in any subject - when focusing on past papers)

You might have to ask it several times in slightly different ways to get what you want, but I think this is just a case of their being a learning curve with how to write prompts.

Listening Practice

For listening test practice, it is very good at knocking up 7 multiple choice questions related to a transcript (which I've been copying and pasting from YouTube videos).

Its far from perfect though... So far I've had a question where 2 of the multiple choice options were correct, and it seems pretty terrible at creating a set of statements where some are true or false, which is a style of question that exists on the CILS. It seems like a very useful tool, but I think you have to know enough of the language to be able to spot things that seem obviously wrong.

However, the practice has definitely paid off.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er_YcU9LoBc&t=2s[/youtube]
I found the above question from a past exam (after one of my chat gpt practice questions turned out to be completely unusable) and attempted question 1.
This was harder audio than I've practiced with as it was questions asked about what a doctor was about how parents raise their children (advanced subject matter and language), over a phone call (harder to parse).
However, I got 5/7, and it probably should have been 6 if I hadn't changed my mind on one question.
Considering I won't be doing this exam for another year, that's certainly a place I'm happy to be.

I think therefore I can be reasonably confident my listening skills don't need to be the main focus of my preparation, and while I won't stop doing practice at this type of activity with them, I will certainly do it less often and focus on getting my other areas up to scratch. I will focus on trying to find audio similar to this, rather than YouTube videos with fantastic sound production levels.

Reading Practice

Probably unsurprisingly, Chat GPT seems very good at creating a reading practice question. (Because producing text from a prompt is what its designed for!)

These seem pretty easy so far, but then reading was the way I managed to make a break through in Italian, and is something I've always carried on doing, so has always been my main strength in the language.

It has seemed a little too easy if I'm honest.. so I need to compare the questions I've been working on with past papers and make sure they are actually at the standard being tested.

Writing Practice

Again, generating questions of this sort seems to be a ChatGPT speciality.

This is definitely an area I need to strengthen... I am not even good at writing essays in English it seems... But looking at what chat gpt produces as sample answers when giving me feedback I'm starting to pick up on a way to style and structure my arguments.

I am writing in a diary every day, to make sure I am getting in the habit of writing Italian by hand (which I'll obviously need to do in the test), and answer some grammar exercises from text books. I'm hoping the synergy of all this will help my writing improve before too long.....

I also think its beyond ridiculous to not get some proper help with this from a human at some point (the horror)... but I feel its worth getting to a reasonable standard first before paying someone money to help me finetune.

Next steps

I haven't knocked up any Grammar questions yet, but I think it makes sense to get through a couple of Susanna Nocchi textbooks I have first and make sure I've mopped up any grammar points I've missed over my mostly immersion focused study of the language.

I also need to think about how to practice for the oral part of the exam at some point. I'm probably being naive, but I think getting writing up to scratch will help get me up to scratch with how to structure an argument in a monologue (which is the main thing I'll need to think about with the oral part of the exam too). I do talk 2 or 3 times a week, one of which is a lesson, so I'll probably start integrating talking about a set topic 'CILS style' before too long.