Wanderlust didn't do me in. Pining for more courses didn't do me in. I just spent less time on here and took a few small bites a day and it was amazing how far I got.I recently returned from a very wonderful trip to Italy. I was going to post about it sooner, but I have the amazing problem of having some other trips abroad planned for the rest of the year so needed to get organized.
Anyway, during my trip I was able to:
Get around, asking and receiving help in Italian when needed
have authentic Italian conversation! Nothing particularly deep or inspiring, but with pantomiming and patience of my listeners along with the other person using simple language, I was able to go for quite a while at a time engaging in actual discussions of things. What an amazing feeling
It sort of felt like being in the deep end of a swimming pool and struggling between actually swimming and just holding my breath and hoping for the best.I was able to peruse an italian bookstore and read newspaper headlines and get the gist of what was going on in the world.
Language using beats language learning by a mile!
Basically, I stalled out with Assimil in the mid-60s (of the newest version of the English-base) doing a lesson a day and not ending up doing anything with the active wave because I was reviewing pretty regularly as I went along. I only stopped because I went to Italy and preferred spending "study time" out and about having Italy time.
It turns out that I don't much care for formal grammar study and that, at least with Italian, you don't need a ton to get going. For me it was very much about familiarizing myself with vocab and listening to lots of Italian. I had a lot of false starts with various things. In the end, the only things I stuck with were an Assimil lesson daily, listening to loads of Italian music/talk radio in the background at home in the evenings, and lots of bilingual readers:
Alice in Wonderland
Adventures of Pinochio
The Jungle Book
A Christmas Carol
The nice thing is that most of these are available very cheap as an ebook. 99 cents or thereabouts. So it isn't quite as pricey as stacking up physical books.
I'd say, based off the descriptions on Wikipedia that I am somewhere around upper A1 or maybe A2! So to anyone out there just starting out, realize that I only started Italian at the end of May and just went to Italy and got around with no real issues other than late trains, haha. Far from being able to hold down a job or relationship in Italian, but frankly that was never a goal.
As mentioned above, I have an absolute ton of various travel coming up through the rest of the calendar year. None in Italy. I am setting aside language study to focus on enjoying my upcoming travel.
In a sort of ironic twist considering my posting history, I may actually have a job opportunity in the longer-term that'd require me getting to B2 in German in about two years. However, as of now, my plan is to not worry about language study for the moment, enjoy my travel, reflect on the huge confidence boost of getting somewhere in a language, and wait to find out if German and I will be getting reacquainted in the new year!
Thanks to everyone for the support along the way