An opera fan's log - French, German, Italian, etc

[Deinonysus]

Adjective declension

There is an easier and more logical way to learn German declension and without all those declension boards. Ask a good German teacher.

At the bottom of the same page where I posted that chart, I boiled it down to a few rules. It may not be perfect but it's been working well for me so far. I'll repost it here:

So I think I have adjective declension broken down to a few rules:

1. If there is no article, use the same ending that the definite article would take.
2. Rule 1 was a lie. You can't end a genitive adjective with -s because that would be to easy, so you end masculine and neuter genitive with -n instead.
3. If there is an article, then the ending depends on the case:
   
   1. Nominative and Accusative: Use the same ending as the definite article.
   2. Genitive and dative: Always add an -n.
4. Rule 3a was a lie. If you can tell the gender from the article, end with an -e instead. Otherwise you would just be repeating information you have already given, which is inefficient and thus very un-German.
5. Rule 4 was a lie. Masculine accusative always gets an -n. It's in their contract.
6. For plurals, if there is an article, ignore the previous rules and always add an -n no matter what.
7. If you have flipped your table while reading this list, please restore it to its proper position and rearrange any items that have fallen from it.

[SGP]

At the bottom of the same page where I posted that chart, I boiled it down to a few rules. It may not be perfect but it's been working well for me so far. I'll repost it here: [...]

Now I really didn't take the time to verify these rules, because that would be a small Mammutprojekt. Nevertheless, if you know for sure that they are fully valid, then you of course simply can stick to them. But how exactly do you internalize them? I have slight difficulties imagining yourself revising them every time you decline a German adjective.

[Deinonysus]

At the bottom of the same page where I posted that chart, I boiled it down to a few rules. It may not be perfect but it's been working well for me so far. I'll repost it here: [...]

Now I really didn't take the time to verify these rules, because that would be a small Mammutprojekt. Nevertheless, if you know for sure that they are fully valid, then you of course simply can stick to them. But how exactly do you internalize them? I have slight difficulties imagining yourself revising them every time you decline a German adjective.

I have absolutely no certainty that they're fully valid since I came up with them myself. But I haven't noticed any errors.

I haven't completely memorized the list, but I think that could be useful if I start working a lot with adjective declension, and then I could just go down the list if I'm unsure of something. It's just like any mnemonic; it's cumbersome to think of it at first but you only need it when you aren't sure, and once it's internalized you don't need it any more.

[Jean-Luc]

Adjective declension

There is an easier and more logical way to learn German declension and without all those declension boards. Ask a good German teacher.

No doubt there are some other possibilities as well. Because the German-speaking Kleinkinder also learned those declensions in an easy way. But are you able to provide any (even vague) information on what method you are hinting to?

Not a vague one... and not of my own but from an Austrian teacher a long time ago (decades).
Being written in French and according to the rules of the forum, I published it in one of the authorized sections, the multilingual room (it will be weird to do it in the study group for French and the language logs looks like to be mainly in English).
Title is "Les trucs pour trouver la bonne déclinaison"

[Deinonysus]

עברית

I was able to put a solid four months into Hebrew (recorded in my Hebrew log עברית סוף סוף) , but I am being pulled in another direction so I will sadly be taking a break from Hebrew, with a firm pinky-promise to myself that I will pick it back up next year and the time that I put into it will not go to waste.

Italiano

You may look at the title of this log and be a bit curious why I have never attempted to get my Italian past the absolute beginner level. If I'm interested in opera, Italian surely should have been top priority! But, I've only ever fooled around with the early stages of Pimsleur and Duolingo, many years ago, before I started German of French.

But, French and German simply had broader appeal to me, with more top-quality classic literature, children's literature, comics, film, and music of all genres and eras.

Italian does have all of these and in the highest quality, but not in quite as much abundance, and not much that's high priority for me. Opera is a huge draw for me, but there hasn't been much else. I would love to visit Italy someday but I have no plans to do so. So Italian has taken a back seat to French and German until now.

But, the local opera company has a bunch of Italian classics in its season this year, and I thought I should check it out and if I do I'd might as well learn some Italian. I think I should be able to make quick progress. I should understand at least some of the Italian by the beginning of the season, and a decent amount by the end.

You may all be shocked to hear this, but Italian is much easier than Hebrew for an Anglophone with working knowledge of French. I've been working on Italian for about a week. It isn't just that I'm making quicker progress. I'm also using much less concentration and brainpower. I'm not agonizing to get the spelling and grammar into my head. It's just a matter of exposure.

I am having trouble hearing the difference between the open and closed e and o. I don't have this trouble at all with this in German because not only is there a length distinction (the open versions are short, the closed versions are long), but the closed vowels in German are quite high, almost an /i/ and /u/.

It does seem to vary by speaker. On Forvo the open e in Italian seems to mostly be low like the English eh, but in Pimsleur and Assimil it's a bit higher, and thus closer to the closed e. Maybe it's an isolated word vs sentence thing.

French has basically the same open and closed e and o sounds as in Italian, but since I'm more familiar with French I can hear the difference better. But if I'm not paying attention I can miss it even in French. I think I have a tendancy to make my open o more of an /ʌ/ (as in uh) than an /ɔ/ (as in awe); I don't think I round it enough. I think I do this because the American English /ʌ/ is a bit higher than its /ɔ/ and is about the same height as the French /ɔ/, so it sounds like an /ʌ/ to me.

Does anyone know of a good minimal pair drill for the open and closed e and o in Italian and/or French?

One other thing I don't quite understand is when to use the definite article in Italian. It seems to be used in places where French would use a partitive and where English would use nothing at all.

Resources

• Assimil - I bought L'italien sans peine earlier this year because I found it at a good discount and I knew I would use it sooner or later (I will probably need to pay full price for the upper level course, Perfectionnement italien ). ‎The great thing about laddering Italian on top of French is that it minimizes interference, since I can compare the Italian to the French translation and note the differences. I've only had to look up one word so far: they translated ristretto into French as café serré. I did know that the word means narrow or tight (although it wasn't coming to me at the time), but I didn't know that it means an espresso with a normal amount of grounds but half the water. The opposite is a lungo (or café allongé in French), with double the water of a normal espresso. There were words that I didn't recognize or forgot, but I was able to figure out the general meaning from context.
• Pimsleur - My library has access to all five levels so I won't have to pay for anything! Hooray! It's been many years since I did the first 10-15 or so lessons of Pimsleur Italian, but it stayed fresh in my mind. I was able to skip to lesson 10 without any ill effects.
• Duolingo - Free as always. This tree seems shorter than most. L'orso mangia la notra marmellata.

Deutsch
I haven't made much progress getting the prefixed variants of the 55 essential verbs into Anki. Hopefully I'll be able to dedicate some time to it.

Français
I'm trying to watch France24 every morning. I'm a bit rusty but my listening skills are starting to come back. As always it varies with my familiarity with the subject matter.

English
Progress is slow on The War of the Worlds. I think I'm about half-way through the novella.

[Deinonysus]

Je n'ai pas beaucoup de dire au sujet d'italien. Je fais mes études, c'est tout. Donc, je vais écrire un peut en français.

Ma femme et moi ont fini Stranger Things 3, et ça m'a inspiré de regarder des films d'horreur classiques. Night of the Living Dead est dans la domaine publique grâce à un erreur de notice, et je l'ai regardé sur YouTube. Pour un film en noir et blanc, c'était très effrayant ! Les ghouls (personne n'a dit le mot « zombie » dans le film) ont mangé de char très explicitement.

La seule chose qui ne m'a plu est que les femmes dans le film étaient absolument inutiles. Les femmes étaient trop épouvantées pour faire rien. Les hommes devaient faire tout. Mais sauf ça, c'est un bon film.

[Deinonysus]

Français

I went to a Bastille day party on Sunday. I was one of only two non-fluent French speakers there. I tried to speak a bit of French, but I didn't get too far. First, a friend of mine said « toutes les félicitacions » -- I hadn't seen him since my kid was born -- but he said it quickly and softly, and I had to ask him to repeat himself a couple of times before I got it.

Then after I introduced myself in English to a French couple, I said, « Je parle un peu de français. Ma femme est prof de français et elle parle très très mieux que moi. »

I messed up that last part pretty badly. I said "she speaks very very better than me". I should have said « elle parle beaucoup mieux que moi ».

But, I'm not too discouraged. I have no shame of making mistakes, and I won't make that mistake again!

There is a very large asymmetry between my reading ability (very good, and I have no problem reading or learning from french books), my listening ability (varies greatly depending on the speed, volume, and situation) and my speaking ability (I do great if I have time to prepare a sentence or two, but I make mistakes off the cuff, especially if I'm trying to listen to someone and think of a response at the same time). All that will come in practice I'm sure.

Italiano

Italian conjugation is so much easier than French! The three main conjugations only differ by a couple of letters, and you pronounce all of the differences so you don't forget when you need to put in a silent s, t, or e. Listening comprehension is easier, although it does present its own difficulty, since whole phrases are mashed together and pronounced as one word. But I'm sure once you have the general patterns down you get used to it. Italian also has the benefit of a very unsubtle stress accent. Since French has no stress accent it can be much harder tell where the word boundaries are.

English

It's hard for me to find time to sit down with a physical book. I decided to supplement my list of physical books with some ebooks that I'm able to borrow from the library. I've started on A Picture of Dorian Gray, which is great so far. I've read The Importance of Being Ernest before and this has a very similar style. Although it's a novel instead of a play, most of the text is dialog. And since it's Oscar Wilde, most of the dialog is a dense wall of pithy one-liners. The language is Victorian but at the same time it feels modern. It wouldn't feel out of place as the script of a hip HBO period miniseries about gay English noblemen roasting each other.

I'm trying to stick to ebooks that I don't have physical copies of, so that I fill in the gaps. Some that I'd like to get to are:

• Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
• Joseph Heller - Catch-22
• Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
• Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe
• Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
• John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
• John Steinbeck - East of Eden
• Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
• Nathaniel Hawthorne - The House of Seven Gables
• Henry Fielding - Tom Jones
• George Elliot - Middlemarch
• Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita

I'm going through Dorian Gray reasonably quickly because I can access it anywhere. The physical books are going at a glacial pace.

Before I get much further with the physical books, I thing I want to go over some "prerequisites" that will help me understand references in other works. Greek mythology and the Bible (Hebrew and Greek with a bit of Aramaic) are fundamental to Western Literature, and I would love to read them in the original one day, but learning those languages are each multi-year projects, but I want to get my feet wet now with the language skills I have now.

So I'd like to read Bullfinch's Age of Fable - summaries of Greek and Germanic myths through the lens of poetry by the likes of Byron and Shelley. I read a bit of it, but the poetry wasn't sticking; I think I'd do better with a better understanding form and meter, so I want to read through Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Traveled. I had started reading that one too but I got stuck because Fry demands that you swear to do composition exercises before proceeding past the introduction, and I couldn't get into the habit of doing that. So I think my best bet is to defy him and just read through the book without doing the exercises. Sorry Stephen!

After that, there's the Bible. I don't think I can get through it without some sort of a language challenge, so I'd like to go through the King James Bible since I'm fond of Early Modern English. Before that, I have the book Early Modern English by Charles Barber. After that I can access everything on my phone; after the King James Bible, it's on to the complete works of Shakespeare and maybe Le Morte d'Arthur (borderline between Middle and Early Modern English) and Paradise Lost (borderline between Early Modern and Contemporary English).

So in summary:

• Stephen Fry - The Ode Less Traveled
• Thomas Bullfinch - The Age of Fable
• Charles Barber - Early Modern English
• Various - The King James Bible
• William Shakespeare - Complete Works
• Thomas Mallory - Le Morte D'Arthur
• John Milton - Paradise Lost

That's quite the list! In reality I've been making slow progress with my reading and I have a hard time sticking with things long-term, so we'll see how much I can get to.

I'm also trying to see some classic films. There are a lot that I've never seen. Films are just as important as novels. I finally watched Rocky last night. I liked it, although I don't see why it needed any sequels. I think I'll try to watch Taxi Driver and The Graduate after that. Movies are so much easier to get to than books since you can get through them in one sitting. These are the three super-mega-must-see classics that I've never seen and can stream easily. There are other good ones too, but for other super-mega-must-see classics I may need to get physical DVDs from the library unless I'm willing to buy digital copies.

[Deinonysus]

Gestern habe ich nicht viel getan, außer Duolingo und Pimsleur, die nicht viel Gedanke brauchen. Ich war zu müde. Ich bin spät aufgeblieben, um Rocky zu sehen. Vielleicht hätte ich den Film nicht sehen sollen, aber es hat Spaß gemacht. Ich weiß nicht, wann ich einen anderen Film sehen kann. Ich habe The Picture of Dorian Gray etwas gelesen, aber The War of the Worlds nicht.

Aber, letzte Nacht habe ich mehr geschlafen. Vielleicht kann ich heute mehr tun.

Ich hatte vor, alle die Präfixe von Barron's 501 German Verbs in Anki hinzufügen, aber ich habe die Zeit nicht gehabt. Ich würde lieber englische Romane lesen. Vielleicht werde ich es tun, wann ich im Herbst zu Hause mit meiner Tochter bin.

[Deinonysus]

Italiano

I'm having trouble finding Perfectionnement italien at a reasonable price from a US retailer. I can get it from Assimil, but the shipping is an expensive flat rate so it makes sense to wait until I've saved up for a bunch of Assimil books. I have other things I want to spend my money on at the moment. My piano desperately needs to be tuned, and I still need to get the opera tickets that are the whole reason I'm learning Italian in the first place. So I think I'll just stick to L'italien sans peine for now and do the advanced book some other time.

Working on Italian seems almost anticlimactic after having spent month on Hebrew this year and Indonesian last year. Hebrew is a constant puzzle of new grammar and incomplete spelling, and even though Indonesian grammar is simple there was still a ton of new vocabulary to get used to, and the verb affixes and the tenseless aspect system are new and interesting to me. But Italian is just kind of... French but you pronounce all the letters and move your hands more. There are no puzzles and there isn't much thinking to do. I'm not learning it from scratch, I'm learning how it differs from French. And it's not a puzzle, it's just something to get through because I want to understand Italian. But, I'm not losing steam and it's not frustrating at all, it's just that I'm focusing on the destination rather than the journey.

The easy time I'm having with Italian is also encouraging me to learn Spanish and Portuguese sooner rather than later; I'm expecting a similarly easy time. The main problem will be keeping all of these languages separate. I might want to try getting Assimil Spanish in both French and Italian; the audio should be the same if I make sure to get the same edition, so I won't need to get two super-packs; then maybe I could find some Portuguese learning resources in Spanish. But Hebrew is a higher priority. I want to start phasing it back in as I finish up with the Italian resources. That will give me some time to save up for all of those Assimil books.

Piano

Piano isn't a language of course, but learning an instrument can't be that different. You need to practice every day and know what to work on. I have a hard time setting aside time to practice piano and sometimes I don't do it for weeks or months even though I enjoy playing. I've been practicing at least a little bit every day for the past few days, and I want to see if I can keep it up for the rest of the month, and then for all of next month. I've already shaken most of the cobwebs off of the first half of Debussy's « La fille aux cheveux de lin » and I'm ironing out the spots where I hesitate. I've gone over the second half with my teacher but haven't quite learned all of it yet. It's been a couple of months since my last lesson and I don't know when I'll be able to take them again.

[mvillalba]

But Italian is just kind of... French but you pronounce all the letters and move your hands more.

MDR, trop marrant !


On a more serious note, I had a similar thing with Italian (though interestingly, not with French): it just felt too easy. It helps I'm a native Spanish speaker, but still, it's just so transparent and straightforward. I like reading in Italian, and listening to them speak; there is just something very pleasant and melodic about the language or I can't imagine I would have bothered learning it.