POLISH:I started reading and listening to Dolores Claiborne in Polish today. The story is not what I expected. I've heard good things about it, so I'm curious to see where it goes. Apparently, the whole book is one long dialogue (with no chapters). The audiobook artificially creates chapters every ~10 minutes, and sometimes it does so in a really weird place, like in the middle of a paragraph. I find this a bit jarring, but I'm sure I'll get used to it. I've borrow the English version from the library, so I read a page or two in English first, then listen and read to the same section in Polish.
Cursing help, continued:The narrator uses the word "pieprzona". The translations I got were all over the place from a stronger curse like fucking to a milder one like friggin' or goddamn. Would you say this is on level with a curse like kurwa?I put Polish Tutor on the back burner and started working instead on
this awesome Preston Publishing Polish course book, which was recommended to me by
Hedgehog.chess. In addition to the Polish Tutor course book, I've got several others in storage that I bought many years ago but never was able to use because they were terribly confusing and overwhelming (and had no audio). I'm still in the beginning, but so far this course is really good; there are mp3 files with audio, which I haven't used so far because I don't need them, but I think they would be very useful for a beginner. The exercises are very practical, there are really helpful notes in the margins; everything about this course book is just well done. I'm going to create a section for course books on my resource pages and give this one first place. I really can't say enough good things about Preston Publishing. If I ever start studying another language, I will definitely use one of their books.
ITALIAN:I recorded myself reading an article for 1/2 hour. I started feeling really self-conscious about my accent, and thinking that maybe it wasn't as acceptable as I previously thought, I asked my husband to evaluate my reading. He is always brutally honest; he's not someone who is capable of saying that something is good when it isn't. He is the one person I can always trust to give me a totally objective evaluation, which was what I wanted.
I read each sentence then paused so that he could give me feedback. Afterward, we were talking about my accent, and he said that I'm never going to pass for a native speaker, but for a foreigner, I sound really good. He thinks that reading aloud everyday is a really useful thing, but he ultimately doesn't think I have much room for improvement. I was really not expecting that. I wanted to write this down so that I don't forget about this and start doubting my accent again. I've got plenty of legitimate things to doubt (my speaking ability and grammar), I don't need to feel bad about things that are actually not that bad.
I have a copy of Dolores Claiborne in Italian also (no passato remoto!) and I think I'm going to start reading it Italian while I'm reading it in English+Polish. I hope it's a book that's worth reading in 3 languages!