Neurotip's log: Italian and Icelandic, i.a.

[Neurotip]

Log post 5: May 2018

Hi all! Reasonably big post to make up for slightly late. If you speak It or Is better than I do (or even if not!!) then any corrections or comments would be very welcome

Italian progress.

In brief, quite a lot of listening, a bit of reading, a post on a thread in the language section of this forum. I'm broadening my listening to include various RAI programmes and podcasts (Alle 8 della sera, Fisicast) and the YouTube channel of Dario Bressanini who speaks clearly but rather fast and a bit more naturally than the scripted broadcasts, at least I think so. Reading-wise I've nearly finished the Montalbano book and am about a third of the way through Fontamara. I'm not using a dictionary at all for either; it would probably be more effective as a learning experience if I did, but I don't find myself missing anything important so the impetus isn't strong enough. Whether I'm actually learning anything or just reading is a moot point

So che sia importante scrivere il più possibile, ma ci sono parecchi problemi: richiede molto più energia che leggere (e magari ascoltare), non so mai di che devo parlare, e poi sono un po' perfezionista e ogni cinque parole bisogna rileggere e controllare tutto - e sono consapevole che vi rimarranno errori e cattive scelte di frase (proprio questo ad esempio non mi suona bene). E quindi finisco sempre per parlare del scrivere e dei problemi stessi e non risulta molto interessante (Alcuni lettori attentivi si renderanno forse conto che esattamente lo stesso è accaduto nelle frasi islandesi qui sotto...)

I'm not satisfied with my Italian accent. I've tried to take account of the helpful comments I've received here, especially to improve the rhythm of my spoken Italian, but I'm worried I may have overdone it and may be skipping over important syllables. Comments would be very welcome!

original text | me reading it
(The text is the first couple of paragraphs of Silone's 'Fontamara' - it may be still in copyright but I think this is fair use. If anyone knows to the contrary, please let me know.)

Icelandic progress.

I've done quite a lot of unprepared listening. I've turned the Viltu læra íslensku videos into mp3 files and listen to them on the way to work, and also have come across the Linguaphone recordings on the web and have been using those for extensive listening. I've also been transcribing those and comparing them with the correct transcripts. Other than that, I'm still enjoying trying to decode news articles on websites such as frettabladid.is and Vísindavefurinn: I have a first look to see how much I can understand, then put the paragraph into Google Translate and see how it works, and finally try to understand any unfamiliar constructions or compound words. I'm not at all sure that these are efficient ways of learning a language, but I'm enjoying it which is the main thing. Oh, and I'm on page 11 of Krabbaveislan (not necessarily implying that I've understood the first ten...).

My Icelandic output.

A sample of my Icelandic pronunciation sem stendur - I can't hear that much difference from last time, annoyingly, but maybe I'm being too harsh:

original text | me reading it

Ég er ekki búinn að skrifa neitt á íslensku hér, eða mjög lítið (og ekki heldur annars staðar). Svo nú er ég að skrifa. Ég ætla að segja aðeins það, sem ég kann án þess að nota neina orðabók, Google og svo framvegis. Það er enn erfitt og ég veit ekki hvort ég fæ sagt neitt, en nú er ég farinn, og það er gaman að geta skrifað svolítið. Ég má líka segja að ég sé búinn að læra íslensku í eitt ár!

If I stick to the plan of devoting a year to these two languages, next month will be the halfway point. Better make sure I actually learn something by then.

[Neurotip]

Of less general interest so I've put it in a separate post...

How Icelandic feels.

I was reading a post on r/learnIcelandic and I came upon a sentence in which I knew all the words but the meaning was not obvious - quite a common situation in Isl, and I thought it might be interesting to describe how I'm approaching this, for anyone who might be thinking of learning Icelandic. (tl;dr - syntax and polysemy.)

In the context of a discussion about our dependence on mobile phones, the sentence was: 'Við þurfum að huga að nokkrum þáttum þessa máls.' I can manage the syntax: 'We must verb some nouns (dative) of this noun (genitive).' Máls is clearly genitive, but I'll need to check that þessa is too - sounds obvious but occasionally it turns out that the obvious sentence structure is not actually the right one. Putting in the content words, Neurotip Translate returns: 'We must mind some episodes of this language.' Hm, more thought required.

Huga looks like an infinitive verb; I know hugsa 'think', athuga 'consider' and hugmynd 'idea = mind-image' but not huga, but the context suggests a similar meaning. If so, I also need to check separately that 'huga að something-in-the-dative' means 'think about something'. I recognise þáttur as the word for 'episode' in podcasts or TV. I know that Isl has an extremely strict policy against borrowing directly from other languages, and typically when it needs a word for a new concept it will co-opt an already common word. As such, probably þáttur has an older meaning which gave rise to 'episode'; from context, perhaps 'part' or 'aspect'? I have no problem with mál as a word for 'language', short for tungumál. The context doesn't allow that interpretation though. I know it's a very common word, and I've sometimes been able to ignore it and still understand a sentence, suggesting that it might have a rather general meaning; '(this) matter, (this) subject' seems plausible.

OK, so now I have: 'We must think about some aspects of this matter.' Checking: huga að 'look into' - fair enough; þáttur 'part, factor, strand, act, programme, story'; oof, OK. Now that I'm told that þáttur and þráður 'thread' can be synonyms I realise I've been confused between these two. For mál, 'matter' is indeed listed among many meanings.

There are other aspects that contribute to the 'feel' of Icelandic for me - the noun compounding, the pervasive devoicing of consonants, the proliferation of rules and sub-rules for pronunciation and grammar - but this example illustrates the heavy reliance on inflectional morphology and the confusion that can arise from the very broad ranges of meaning that many common words have. Hopefully it gives a flavour.

[Soffía]

I've done quite a lot of unprepared listening. I've turned the Viltu læra íslensku videos into mp3 files and listen to them on the way to work, and also have come across the Linguaphone recordings on the web and have been using those for extensive listening.

If you're looking for more extensive listening... have you discovered the motherlode of Icelandic podcasts yet?

http://www.ruv.is/hladvarp

[Neurotip]

I've done quite a lot of unprepared listening. I've turned the Viltu læra íslensku videos into mp3 files and listen to them on the way to work, and also have come across the Linguaphone recordings on the web and have been using those for extensive listening.

If you're looking for more extensive listening... have you discovered the motherlode of Icelandic podcasts yet?

http://www.ruv.is/hladvarp

No I hadn't - thank you! The Linguaphone material (70s?) says 'you cannot listen to Icelandic radio, so reading must be the mainstay of your learning' ... how times change.

[Neurotip]

Not an official post, but I just had to show off share this. I never managed to make any headway with Icelandic Online and was a bit sad about that as it was clearly a great resource. Only this week has it occurred to me that maybe the beginning wasn't the right place for me to start, so I've done two brief sessions of IOL 2, straight in with spatial prepositions and inflection drills, and:
1. I'm loving it! (and also getting most of it right)
2. IOL 2 is labelled 'lower intermediate level, A1/A2' -- which means that I must be pretty much on track to achieve a my goal of a solid A2 by the end of the year, which would be awesome
Just saying.

[Neurotip]

Log post 6: August 2018 (oops)

Attentive readers may have noticed that the intended posts for June and July didn't happen - sorry (mi dispiace, fyrirgefðu). Ironically, even though in principle I had more time for language work, holidays and other disruptions to my usual routine were more distracting than helpful. It seems that language learning has a definite place in my day - i.e. during my commute and other walks - and it's difficult to change that now. That's probably a good thing on the whole.

Icelandic. I'm still using much the same techniques; I haven't managed to incorporate Icelandic Online into my routine unfortunately. I have become a bit more systematic with my use of Anki, insofar as:
(1) I've primed it with some common vocab, drawn from an online list of '1000 common words' (itself scraped from subtitles to Icelandic YouTube content, apparently) and from early episodes of VLI;
(2) I only mark a noun or verb as correctly remembered if I've got the inflections right too;
(3) as well as single words, I've started inputting common phrases ('Do you remember...', 'as luck would have it', 'for the first time', that sort of thing), which seems like a good idea to me.
I've also realised I need to start learning the Icelandic equivalent of phrasal verbs - the common verbs like búa, fara, koma and so on each have a page of idiomatic constructions such as 'búa í', 'búa til', 'búa undir', 'búa yfir'. This is a bit of a nightmare but at least the verb is the same so one doesn't have to learn a new set of inflections. Except when you do. <aargh>
Reading-wise, I've abandoned Krabbaveislan for now and have turned to http://www.reddit.com/r/Iceland/ which offers genuine colloquial Icelandic, perhaps too colloquial but it is at least fun to read (and to see what Google Translate makes of it).

Italian. Montalbano finished (Il gioco degli specchi), also Fontamara (enjoyed reading it but a depressing story) and half of Italo Calvino's Fiabe italiane. Also about halfway through Sciascia's A ciascuno il suo which is fun but odd, described in the preface as 'un giallo che non è un giallo' (a detective story that isn't) which is about right. There's a fair amount of vocab that's new to me, maybe a couple of words a page, just enough to make it worthwhile without becoming tedious. Listening - still going with the podcasts, chiefly Rai 2's 'Alle otto della sera' but also branching out into the odd unscripted interview or debate from YouTube, which are significantly harder for me and - interestingly - feel now like the podcasts did six months ago.

German. Not a TL for now but the hot favourite for 2019's 'revival' TL, so I thought I'd spend the afternoon on Dialang to see where I'd be starting from. The results are as follows.
Listening: B1 (self-assessed as B1)
Writing: B2 (self-assessed as B1)
Reading: B2 (self-assessed as A2)
Vocab: B2 (self-assessed as A2)
I do think these are overestimates, and I didn't feel at all confident of most of the answers, but I've duly updated my profile and I suppose I should be aiming at a solid B2. I still don't think it's ever going to be up to par with my French and Italian, at least not without a *lot* of vocabulary work, but we'll see!

[Neurotip]

Log post 7: September 2018

Italian. Largely same old same old. Not much reading this month, and still haven't mustered up the courage to mention anything to the Italian guy who sits at the next desk to me. I have however done a bit more verb drilling and now feel pretty confident of being able to produce the more obscure tenses with a bit of thought - possibly even in the right context, with the help of Prof Mitchell's essays (well worth a look btw).

Slightly broadening my listening habits, I've landed on Decanter which is a bit less scripted than my usual fare and certainly counts as n+1 for me at the moment. Also listening to Veleno which, while entirely scripted and read by someone with what I think is a very clear standard accent (oh signore, com'è bello il Suo raddoppiamento sintattico), I'm finding quite challenging. I think a lot of listening comprehension is about knowing what you're expecting to hear, and the subject matter here is less familiar to me so it could be that. (While looking for the URL for Veleno, I've just noticed this list of podcasts which could have saved me a lot of time )

Icelandic. More extensive and less intensive this month. At this stage, if the language is simple and the context is helpful, I can often get the gist of a few sentences before having to stop and look something up - that's reading of course; listening is much harder but I've started approaching new VLÍ episodes by listening unprepared a couple of times without the video or text, and I can usually understand something of what's going on. Anyway, I'm through to the (partly deliberately) hilarious episode 15 of VLÍ and have started watching Hrútar with Icelandic subtitles; it isn't a particularly dialogue-heavy film but it is at least native content and that's a big step forward.

Realised with a thrill of horror that Dialang has Icelandic tests, and therefore (stung by smallwhite's sig) I will obviously have to do these alongside the Italian ones at the end of the year. I can console myself with the thought that it normally overestimates.

[StringerBell]

Also listening to Veleno which, while entirely scripted and read by someone with what I think is a very clear standard accent (oh signore, com'è bello il Suo raddoppiamento sintattico), I'm finding quite challenging. I think a lot of listening comprehension is about knowing what you're expecting to hear, and the subject matter here is less familiar to me so it could be that. (While looking for the URL for Veleno, I've just noticed this list of podcasts which could have saved me a lot of time )

Yeah!!! I loved Veleno. I took A LOT of time with it, I think I listened to each episode at least 3-4x along with reading the transcript. It's challenging but so worth it.

I just watched a video by Dario Bressanini about how, when cooking pastasciutta, you can turn off the flame after it comes to a boil. Really interesting. It's weird that he titles everything in English - are all of the other English-titled videos in Italian, too? I had no trouble understanding him though he does speak pretty quickly.

[Neurotip]

I just watched a video by Dario Bressanini about how, when cooking pastasciutta, you can turn off the flame after it comes to a boil.

Yes - I also cook potatoes that way now!

It's weird that he titles everything in English - are all of the other English-titled videos in Italian, too? I had no trouble understanding him though he does speak pretty quickly.

I never noticed that! But I agree, he's surprisingly easy to understand. I imagine (without evidence...) that listening to someone who speaks rapidly but clearly is good training in learning to predict in real time what will come next.

[Neurotip]

In case some of the world's many italo-icelandophiles might not yet have discovered this, I hereby share: http://www.iseyskyr.is/uppskriftir/skyramisu/15.

October's log post not far away now...