Lingua's Italian All The Time Log

[lingua]

Italian

film: total of 412 minutes
MHz Choice: Don Matteo: Bravi ragazzi, Una dura prova per don Matteo, L'ultimo salto, Il mestiere di crescere, Orma d'orso
YouTube: Cucine da incubo: La Zuccona (Triuggio), Bar Davis (Milano), Il Corallo (Livorno)

books:
Cucinare con i fiori e con le erbe di campo by Giulia Landini <-- completed
Adesso by Chiara Gamberale <-- 30%

I enjoyed Per dieci minuti by Gamberale last year enough to try one of her fiction books. Amazon had only two in Italian so I chose Adesso since it was cheaper. The writing itself is not difficult but she is all over the place. Because I felt lost a couple of times I took the time to find some some reviews and in one case an Italian said they could make no sense of the book and I agree with that sentiment. Often there are conversations between two people and I lose track of who is speaking. In a couple of cases the main character (Lidia) goes off on a tangent. That can happen in English too if there is a lot of dialog but usually authors throw in a "he said" or "she explained" etc but here there is none of that.


For Latin, Sicilian and Piemontèis I've continued with memrise and/or clozemaster

Outside of that I've entered all my books/film for the Super Challenge and have 10 film and 3 books so I'm already at an imbalance. I need to read more as I want to stay at an even pace for them.

[lingua]

Italian

Memrise & Clozemaster. I didn't like doing Clozemaster for Italian when I tried it a long time ago but this time I'm doing it with text input and focusing on the Grammar challenges (prepositions, pronouns, etc) which works better for me. My only annoyance is whenever the sentence is first person singular there is no indication as to whether the gender of the "I" is male or female so my endings were often incorrect because I'm accustomed to using the feminine form of nouns. Luckily they allow switching to multiple choice on any sentence.

film: total of 509 minutes
MHz Choice: Don Matteo: Numeri primi, Caro papà, Dietro le mura del convento, questione d'onore, Mete Ambiziose, Non è uno scherzo, L'anello, La ragazza senza nome
YouTube: 4 Hotel 2018: Stagione 1 Episodio 0 Intero

books:
Adesso by Chiara Gamberale <-- 65%

This book is getting easier and the primary story line is not so difficult to follow but every time it switches to one of the side stories I get confused at least temporarily and in fact don't like those as much. I wanted to finish this last week but I keep falling asleep while reading it.


For Latin, Sicilian and Piemontèis I've continued with memrise and/or clozemaster and not much else. I found a free Latin book online from this site: http://hiberna-cr.wikidot.com/reading-material called Iulia (Julia). It's for absolute beginners and I was able to read the first chapter without looking up very many words. But the redundancy is tedious. I know that's the point but I probably need something a little more interesting. I may return to it later.

[lingua]

Finally finished book #3. I would give this an average rating. It was only OK. The writing itself is not difficult but as mentioned earlier there is some rambling and long conversations over many pages with very little to indicate who is talking. Sometimes I could tell but other times I had to go back and try to figure it out. I felt a general sense of vagueness throughout reading this book.

The primary story is about Lidia and Pietro. Lidia is a director of a show and Pietro was on her show as his ex-wife left him to join a convent. Lidia still has an attachment of sorts to her ex-husband. Lidia leaves her job in Roma to go to Milano where Pietro lives and lies to him saying she is interviewing/following the story of three people for her show. Instead, she wants to get to know him better. There is a side story that seems unrelated (and pointless) about Valentina who regularly picks up random men and in the process cheats on her jealous boyfriend. I at one time thought there were several side stories but now I think I was just confused because of all the men Valentina spent time with. At the end Valentina seems to realize this isn't what she wants to do anymore. Lidia and Pietro are apart for their respective vacations and somewhat at odds due to her confronting some aspects of his behavior regarding his past. But in the end it seems they will stay together.

Adesso.jpg

[lingua]

Italian

Memrise & Clozemaster: about 15 minutes a day for each of them.

film: total of 312 minutes
MHz Choice: Squadra antimafia - Palermo oggi - S1 Ep 1-2
Montalbano: La vampa d'agosto

While watching Montalbano I heard a Sicilian word at one point that I knew. Picciriddu (boy).

books:
Adesso by Chiara Gamberale <-- Complete
Pane formaggio e vino by Valerio Pignatta <-- 5% ... just started

I need to speed up my reading if I want to meet my goal to read 100 books by the end of 2019. I am getting back on the treadmill this week for at least 30 minutes a day so the plan is to read Italian while walking. My chosen book is only 87 pages so I should be able to complete it this week.

Latin

Mostly Memrise & Clozemaster with a 25%/75% split respectively. At least an hour a day but often more. I also listened to some random YouTube videos.

Sicilian & Piemontèis

I'm doing only 5-10 minutes a day for Sicilian and Piemontèis but the 6WC is over tomorrow so I will be spending less time with Latin and more with these two in a more even split. I probably shouldn't even spend time on Piemontèis but for now I like it.

[lingua]

Finished book #4 Pane formaggio e vino by Valerio Pignatta
Not surprisingly, this book is about bread, cheese and wine. The author makes the case that one should make these three items at home and not consume the industrial versions. There was a chapter on each of the three explaining how nutritional they all were and how to make them. It was an easy read and if you like bread, cheese and wine it might be an enjoyable book to read.

For me the vocabulary was easy most likely due to my regular reading of food related books. I only had to look up a few specialized words.

pane.jpg

[lingua]

Italian

Memrise & Clozemaster: about 15 minutes a day for each of them.

film: total of 384 minutes
MHz Choice:
Squadra antimafia - Palermo oggi - S1 Ep 3
Montalbano: Il campo del vasaio
Don Matteo: Balla con me

one hour italki session

books:
Pane formaggio e vino by Valerio Pignatta <-- complete
Tokyo Redux by Anthondy Bourdain (translated) <-- complete
Il formaggio con le pere: La storia in un proverbio by Massimo Montanari <-- 5% (just started)

I'm not sure why Tokyo Redux was translated into Italian but it's part of Bourdain's A Cook's Tour book. It was only 28 pages but an enjoyable read about one of his first trips to Japan. While I'm adding these pages to the SC I will not be considering it a book for my 100 books goal as it's far too short. I'm also pleased that I decided to read while on the treadmill. It's giving me a consistent 30 minutes of reading per day at a minimum. Some days more. And I'm improving my health at the same time.

Latin, Sicilian & Piemontèis

Memrise and/or Clozemaster for these three. I'm concentrating on Italian until the next 6WC so I won't be spending more than 15 minutes per day on these.

[lingua]

Italian

Memrise & Clozemaster: about 15 minutes a day for each of them.

film: total of 59 minutes
MHz Choice: Don Matteo: La cattiva strada

I don't think I've ever watched so little during a weeks time.

books:
Il formaggio con le pere: La storia in un proverbio by Massimo Montanari <-- 45%

Not much reading going on either. I had limited free time this week so not much studying took place.


Latin, Sicilian & Piemontèis

Memrise and/or Clozemaster: about 15 minutes a day for all of them in some combination. I did manage to finish the first chapter in the Sicilian book.

[lingua]

Completed book#5. Il formaggio con le pere: La storia in un proverbio by Massimo Montanari. This was a crazy book. It took one proverb about cheese w/pears and beat it to death quoting writers from 1400s-1800s dealing with the two food items. Variations on the proverb were provided not only in Italian but also French and Spanish. Some of it was hilarious. For example, some doctors back then didn't think cheese was good for you but somehow if you ate it with pears it was better. In the end, I don't think the subject matter was worth the length of the book.

formaggio.jpg

[lingua]

Italian

memrise: 4527/5579 continue to review and add new words
clozemaster: played 1719 sentences, mastered 693 sentences

italki: one hour lesson.

The Italian clozemaster is one that has the fast track to fluency, grammar challenges, cloze-reading and cloze-collections. I am doing the fast track plus preposition grammar challenge in hopes of using the correct one more automatically. I also do text (with hints) rather than multiple choice. This is because it is not always obvious which form should be used. Or they used a synonym of the first word that popped into my head. When needed I can switch to multiple choice but my hope is the second time around I'll get it right. The downside to using this site is that it's based on the Tatoeba site and there are sometimes errors.

film: total of 802 minutes
MHz Choice: Squadra anitmafia - Palermo oggi S1 E 4-5; Don Matteo: Amabile chiacchierata, Perfetta, Tango, Perché non lo diciamo a papà, Sai chi viene a cena?, Una margherita per Natalina, Ad ogni costo, Era mia figlia, Rave Party, Prova d'amore

books:
Il formaggio con le pere: La storia in un proverbio by Massimo Montanari <-- finished
La testa degli italiani by Beppe Severgnini <-- 15%
Storie per imparare. Brevi racconti con esercizi per stranieri che studiano l'italiano by Elena Maria Duso & Maria Teresa Dinale

storie.jpg

I bought Storie per imparare in Italy some years ago. It's geared towards foreigners living in Italy who have at least a beginning fluency. The idea isn't so much to improve ones Italian but to encourage foreigners to read books for enjoyment rather than limiting their reading to the minimum amount that one needs to in order to get by in life in a foreign country. The authors also wanted to introduce foreigners to as many contemporary Italian authors as possible.

It's divided into chapters, starting from easy to intermediate to advanced. The easy stories tend to be quite short while the advanced are much longer. They obviously had difficulty finding easy stories as the number of authors is more limited. They chose nothing written before 1950 because they wanted to avoid obsolete or dated vocabulary. There's a very long introduction discussing their thought process, how they chose the stories and how to use the book for self-study or classroom.

Each chapter includes a synopsis of the level, theme, grammar structure, lexicon, information about the author, a few questions to think about while reading, the actual story followed by exercises on comprehension, using words in sentences, etc. I decided to use this book for studying but intend to include it for the SC as well. I read the first two stories, looked up any words I didn't know, did all of the exercises and reread the stories a couple of times until I was convinced I understood everything 100%. This is the process I plan to continue with though when I get to the intermediate/advanced sections I may start to reread the prior chapter story before the new story to make sure I've retained everything.


For my other three languages, I'm not spending more than 5-10 minutes a day as I currently want to focus on Italian.

Latin
memrise: 1389/1986 continue to review and add new words
clozemaster: played 4,246 sentences, mastered 2,682 sentences

Sicilian
memrise: 113/178 continue to review and add new words at a slow pace

Piemontèis
clozemaster (from Italian): played 425 sentences, mastered 152 sentences
clozemaster (from English): played 88 sentences, mastered 0 sentences

Piemontèis feels like a cross between Italian and French to me. That makes the one from Italian much easier for me to guess the word so once I realized there was also one from English I started using it too. It's definitely harder.

[lingua]

Italian

I'm continuing to focus most of my time on Italian.

film: total of 292 minutes
MHz Choice: Squadra antimafia - Palermo oggi - S1 E6 and S2 E1
RaiPlay: Un'ultra vita 1.1

I was able to watch the first of six episodes of Un'ultra vita on RaiPlay. I thought maybe it was open to those outside of Italy but when I tried to watch the second episode it wouldn't let me. I would be happy to pay a subscription to Rai for access but as near as I can tell it's not available. While I can switch my VPN to Italy I'd prefer not to.

books:
La testa degli italiani by Beppe Severgnini <-- 50%
Storie per imparare... by Duso/Dinale <-- 18%

italki: I had two one hour sessions both with new people. Last year I eventually settled on using the same three people but one no longer does italki (she got a more permanent job) and the other cut her hours way back and doesn't work weekends. The third is available but cut back her hours for a lot of the summer so I decided it was time to try some new people. One I really liked and already booked another session. The other I'm undecided on. I might try one more time. Even people I used last year that I didn't stick with are no longer available. I imagine for a lot of people it's a way to make some extra money or any money at all if you're unemployed. So once something better comes along they leave.



Latin, Sicilian & Piemontèis

Continue to use Memrise and/or Clozemaster for these three about 5-10 minutes a day each.