Bookworm's adventures in the exile

[tarvos]

Italian will be super useful if you plan to go to Italy.

[Cavesa]

Italian will be super useful if you plan to go to Italy.

Not only!

My plans including Italian:

1.going to Italy again. Skiing next year, hopefully a student exchange next year. One of my options for future life and work.
2.Italians in Prague. There are many and not only as tourists. I translate and interpret at times (I had quite a lot to do lately actually) and there are French, Spanish, Italian and other opportunities! It is actually a very practical language in many fields these days. Especially as the italians are fortunately less enthousiastic about English than many others I'd actually say Italian is one of the most underestimated languages in Europe these days.
3.The books! And movies are quite well known too, there are surely some tv series... and the music is absolutely awesome!

[garyb]

I agree that Italian is underestimated - people (especially native speakers) often say that it's only useful in Italy, but Italians are everywhere! I spoke as much Italian as French on my last trip to France, for example. And indeed there's an impressive amount of film and literature, especially for a small country.

[Mohave]

French: finished rereading Malronce by Chattam. I love the book series!
Spanish:watching Cuentame

I am reading Chattam's La Mal du Trilogie series - currently on the second book In Tenebris. I love this series - probably one of my most fun French reads to date! I will have a look at your series of his also - thanks for posting about it.

[Cavesa]

I should write further about that Paris journey... or I can do one more Italian lesson today.

Non Italian news: finished reading La Tour des Anges, a translation of Pullman that I had bought for a very tempting price. I actually bought the sequel, the last part of the trilogy in Paris. Again in sales. I am now reading it.
Watching Cuentame como paso, I should watch more. Much more.
From now on, I will not watch the new tempting episodes of Doctor Who, Once upon a Time, The Big Bang Theory immediately! They are tempting (at least Doctor Who is hard to wait more than necessary for) but the exchange rate from now on is five episodes of something in Spanish:one new episode of these addictions of mine.

You know what is one of the best aspects of having a boyfriend? You can spend lots and lots of time with someone in many great ways, forgetting about everything else (for example your studies). And you know what is one of the worst aspects of having a boyfriend?
(Yay, at least he can watch movies in English without subtitles with me! Perhaps not everything (yet) but he doesn't lose jokes or look bored while watching animated or superhero movies with me! A true upgrade from the previous one )

Italian!!!!!!!
I started the 6wc. Worse than I had hoped but better than usual. I am now in lesson 3 of one of my courses. And I am gonna continue today.
My beginner impressions and struggles so far:
vocab-quite easy
grammar-easy
pronunciation-doable, I need practice, thanks God for forvo!
listening/reading comprehension: so far very easy.
interference: not much of a problem for now, probably thanks to saying everything out loud.
mistakes: many! Of various kinds, no fossils, no huge troubles. Just the necessary proces of trying things out.
complaint: the coursebook doesn't have key to all the exercises, just most of them. why? why?? why??? And I lost the CD, so forvo is my only audio resource for this course. Well, the great pronunciation providers didn't enregister my course's dialogues there for some reason

It's so beautiful!

[Cavesa]

I agree that Italian is underestimated - people (especially native speakers) often say that it's only useful in Italy, but Italians are everywhere! I spoke as much Italian as French on my last trip to France, for example. And indeed there's an impressive amount of film and literature, especially for a small country.

Thanks for making me laugh. Italy="a small country" from our point of view, it is a giant!

[Cavesa]

Italian: the 3rd lesson of the course. It took under two hours.

grammar-the verbs are quite easy. With some more practice, I should soon make no mistakes in the present tense, they are quite rare even now. I suppose there are gonna be some more irregular verbs though http://www.italian-verbs.com/ this is a good tool.
A nice tiny bonus from Spanish: no problem with constructions like "accomodatevi", which are a bit new for a Czech native.
Another story are the prepositions. The problem with putting the correct preposition in place mixes efficiently with preposizioni articolate... and the mess is enormous. But I think I will sort this out with both practice and input.

vocabulary-lots and lots of thanks to Spanish and French for having prepared me so well. There are new words of course, there are changes, but the load is much smaller.
I have as well started using a Memrise course "Italien pour francophones" as a supplement. It looks really good. I am now struggling with the numbers. Why are the numbers always so complicated?

pronunciation-I think I am quite good for a beginner. However, I will needs tons of practice to sound more or less natural and acceptable in the real world. And there are words that totally destroy my confidence "I can read italian!" like piacciono or chiacchierare.

I loved a few examples today, such as: No, la birra ceca non mi piace.

French: reading a book that is not a problem from the point of view of the language (really, scientific language tends to be more repetitive in vocab and less complex in grammar than the language in novels). But the abbreviations are a hell. I am used more to the Czech and the English ones. The French ones (or the Spanish ones for the matter) are often a riddle. And the text is quite difficult because of the content at times, my level of neuroscience knowledge is still not too high. And one of the chapters described a digital imagery tool with some mathematical terms and, frankly speaking, it was a bit of a shock. I should consider math to be another language, open the old books again and review some bits, so that I could build on that.

Btw, I love emk's log. Scrtoyenne put some great music recommendations there a few days ago. Especially Coeur de Pirate is worth a try

[Cavesa]

A few notes and questions:

Italian:my "plan" for now is to go through one course until the point of the first past tense introductionr. Than I'll return to the other course and continue to the same point, making sure I'll have learnt quite well the material before the next level. What are the other significant or notoriously hard grammar features I could use as borderlines between phases of learning and to prepare for?

German: anyone has had a chance to find a GOOD conjugation course on memrise,please? the search function is horrible, the list is long, most verb courses are just vocabulary courses covering verbs in German and English, not the conjugation. The conjugation courses I've seen were very incomplete or covered just a small part of what I need. Without pushing this obstacle from the road, there is no point in returning to my other German resources. I'm afraid I'll have to spend tons of time creating one, just like I am still creating the French conjugation course.

[Anya]

"Coeur de Pirate"?…je la trouve un peu faible de point de vue de vue linguistique et musical...

[tarvos]

Cavesa, for tables, just use Verbix to learn the forms, it works for most major languages, and the German verb paradigms are relatively easy anyway (and some forms are pretty rare - I don't know many Konjunktiv I forms but I don't give a flying dingo's kidney). Use of tenses should take precedence over learning actual verb forms.