Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

[cjareck]

As a joke connected to your last paragraph of Italian:

[StringerBell]

Hmmm, I think I need some help with that one. I think I understand the words but something isn't clicking. Does it say: The son of a programmer asks (his) dad: why does the sun rise in the east and set in the west? (Then I'm not sure what "działa" means here, which is maybe why I'm confused) and then "don't move it".

[dampingwire]

Also, I had a conversation with my Italian language partner the other day and I used the word "piuttosto" which is a word that I can never seem to understand;

Infatti "piuttosto" è piuttosto difficile da capire. Userei piuttosto un'altra parola ...

[hedgehog.chess]

Hmmm, I think I need some help with that one. I think I understand the words but something isn't clicking. Does it say: The son of a programmer asks (his) dad: why does the sun rise in the east and set in the west? (Then I'm not sure what "działa" means here, which is maybe why I'm confused) and then "don't move it".

The son of a programmer asks (his) dad: why does the sun rise in the east and set in the west?
Does it work?(It works?) Then don't touch it.(Leave it be as it is.)

[cjareck]

Hmmm, I think I need some help with that one. I think I understand the words but something isn't clicking. Does it say: The son of a programmer asks (his) dad: why does the sun rise in the east and set in the west? (Then I'm not sure what "działa" means here, which is maybe why I'm confused) and then "don't move it".

You could be misguided by my interest in military history since "działa" is the same for "she/it works" and "guns". As it was stated above, the first translation is correct in this case. It is as in your case - you understand the usage of the word and "feel it" so you don't need to know its exact meaning since the dictionary definition may confuse you.
Here is an useful tool (online morphological analysis) with the word "działa":
http://sgjp.pl/morfeusz/demo/?text=dzia%C5%82a
The main page of the project is here http://sgjp.pl/morfeusz/morfeusz.html.po, and Morfeusz is here: http://sgjp.pl/morfeusz/

[StringerBell]

Infatti "piuttosto" è piuttosto difficile da capire. Userei piuttosto un'altra parola ...

Ecco perchè sono confusa!

I think I will start collecting examples of piuttosto every time I come across it and group those sentences based on how piuttosto is being used. Maybe this will help me to start using and understanding it in a variety of contexts.

[StringerBell]

You could be misguided by my interest in military history since "działa" is the same for "she/it works" and "guns". As it was stated above, the first translation is correct in this case. It is as in your case - you understand the usage of the word and "feel it" so you don't need to know its exact meaning since the dictionary definition may confuse you.

This reminds me of something that I've been noticing about my comprehension in foreign languages. When I'm listening, watching, or reading something new, I sometimes second-guess myself because I'm automatically assuming that I'm not understanding something. But it usually turns out that I understand it just fine but wasn't expecting what is being said.

I recently had this experience with a Dylan Dog podcast in Italian. The episode started out with Dylan Dog and friends driving in a car searching for a hospital. But I had no idea why they were doing this; was Dylan Dog injured? I kept listening to the beginning trying to figure out what I was missing, but it turns out that they didn't explain why he needed the hospital until a few minutes later. So I wasn't misunderstanding anything, I was just assuming that I was since I wasn't expecting the episode to start like that.

Clearly, in the case of this poster I wasn't totally understanding the whole message, but when I saw the word "działa" the first thing I thought of was "work" because it's a word that comes up a lot in my short stories/podcasts, but I couldn't get the rest of the message, so I assumed I was misinterpreting that word (when in fact I had the next part wrong instead).

Not really sure if there is a solution to this or if it's just a natural part of dealing with learning new languages.

[StringerBell]

I thought I would share some details about my note-taking process for anyone who might be interested. It's really not anything unique or revolutionary, in fact, it's probably pretty boring. But "taking notes" can mean a million different things, so I thought I'd show what it means for me.

I don't really stick to one method of note-taking, my strategy tends to change over time and depends largely on my mood. If I'm not in the mood to take notes, I don't. If I feel like copy+pasting something into a doc will disrupt my flow when reading, then I don't do it. If my notebook is in another room...I probably won't get up to go find it. I don't want to let something like taking notes turn a pleasant experience reading into something annoying that I dread.

With Italian, I started off jotting notes in a physical paper notebook. There was no specific organization to it; when I heard a word used repeatedly and wanted to remember it, I wrote it down. When I asked how to say something, I wrote it down so that I could say it again in the future. My handwriting was pretty sloppy. After time, I accumulated so many notes in this notebook that it wasn't super easy to find what I was looking for, but that didn't really matter to me. Occasionally I'd flip through the notebook to just remind myself what was there. Eventually I started color-coding things in the notebooks with colored pens. At one point I decided to go through it with a highlighter to make it easier to find information.

When I started reading a lot of articles online, I switched to copy+paste whole sentences into docs because that was easier than hand-writing. I always copy the entire sentence, even if I only need to remember one word or phrase because the sentence gives me context for how it's used. I've noticed that the more sentences I collect for a given word/phrase, the more likely I am to remember that word. I guess this is an organic SRS.

With Polish, I had a totally different mission. Instead of writing down things I wanted to remember, I started taking note of words that had specific endings to try to figure out a pattern or discover some kind of rule. After I'd assembled a long list of examples, I'd try to categorize the words in some way; by gender, by how they were used in the sentence, if they always appeared with a specific preposition, etc... Then I'd try to see if there was some kind of rule. If I could come up with a rule, I'd write it at the top.

*screen shot examples are below.

[StringerBell]

ITALIAN:
In the beginning, it was a little messy, completely disorganized, and probably has a bunch of mistakes.

ItalianNotes1 copy.jpg

[StringerBell]

ITALIAN:

Then I got a little fancier, but still quite messy:
(These are pieces of dialogue I jotted down from a TV show that I didn't understand at the time)

ItalianNotes2 copy.jpg