Polski & Italiano (+ Latin) Episode II: StringerBell Strikes Back

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Brun Ugle
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Re: Polski & Italiano (+ Latin) Episode II: StringerBell Strikes Back

Postby Brun Ugle » Sat Nov 23, 2019 9:25 am

Is the difference between the tenses always just a matter of an extra m? If it is, why not just make yourself some sort of mnemonic to remind yourself which one gets the extra m?
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Re: Polski & Italiano (+ Latin) Episode II: StringerBell Strikes Back

Postby StringerBell » Sat Nov 23, 2019 2:11 pm

The one I have the most trouble with is the difference between future vs. conditional for "we"

faremo: we will do
farremmo: we would do

There are other times when letters are doubled (or not) that I still struggle with, but this is the worst one. I can't figure out a mnemonic that helps with this. If you (or anyone else) have a suggestion for a mnenonic for this situation, I'd very happily give it a try.

I have other problems that I though practicing with Anki would help (but didn't). For example, I mix up the way "ai" and "ei" sound constantly. So when I see "vorrei" or "vorrai" I have to pause and think about which way they are pronounced. I have this problem also when speaking; I'm sometimes not sure which one to say. No matter how much I practice with them, I can't make the distinction automatic.

I think that unfortunately, some things I'm just not capable of "knowing". For example, I don't actually know which is left vs. right (in English); every single time I have to think about it using a mnemonic. Even though it's annoying, it doesn't impact speaking, because it's not like I have to stop mid conversation to search for a word or a pronunciation; I can decide in my head ahead of time whether I need to say left/right. I think this would be an issue when it comes to using mnemonics for pronunciation/spelling if I'm trying to speak/write in real time.
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Re: Polski & Italiano (+ Latin) Episode II: StringerBell Strikes Back

Postby StringerBell » Sat Nov 23, 2019 11:12 pm

Morgana wrote:Excuse this very extremely lame attempt at coming up with something:

Conditional is a longer word than future.
Farremmo is a longer word than faremo.
Would is a longer word than will...
?
It was worth a shot lol...


I appreciate the effort! I think it would take me about an hour to use that line of reasoning to figure out the right word, unfortunately I don't think it would work in a real-time conversation!

Morgana wrote:Another thing that comes to mind is I think it was Olle Kjellin who recommended against learning two similar things together, because you’ll forever associate them with one another and have difficulty separating them. I assume the takeaway from that is to work on one until you know it really well before learning/working on the other. No idea if this can be rectified after the fact.


I actually did try doing it this way - I stuck with repeatedly reviewing only future tenses for more than a month until I thought I was forever cemented in my brain. Then, I started reviewing the conditional tenses and after a few days it was like I'd never done any practicing at all with anything! I'm just as confused as I was initially. I think I'm a lost cause!
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Re: Polski & Italiano (+ Latin) Episode II: StringerBell Strikes Back

Postby dampingwire » Sun Nov 24, 2019 5:00 pm

I doubt it will help in a conversation but ...

potrebbe goes with potremmo

That's always assuming that you're fine with potrebbe ... but I can't think of another tense that comes close to -ebbe.

However, as you can't hear the difference, how can you tell which it is supposed to be anyway when you are transcribing? Sometimes context will help but I suspect that there must be many cases where it's not obvious.
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Re: Polski & Italiano (+ Latin) Episode II: StringerBell Strikes Back

Postby StringerBell » Sun Nov 24, 2019 11:57 pm

dampingwire wrote:potrebbe goes with potremmo


This is helpful! I'm going to try to think about it like this, maybe it will help.

dampingwire wrote:That's always assuming that you're fine with potrebbe

However, as you can't hear the difference, how can you tell which it is supposed to be anyway when you are transcribing? Sometimes context will help but I suspect that there must be many cases where it's not obvious.


I am fine with "potrebbe".

I actually often can't tell which tense it's supposed to be when transcribing. Sometimes it's obvious from context, but there are lots of situations where it could be either tense so I usually just pick one randomly. Verb tenses are something that I've always struggled with, and no amount of input or drilling seems to make it any easier.
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Re: Polski & Italiano (+ Latin) Episode II: StringerBell Strikes Back

Postby StringerBell » Wed Nov 27, 2019 1:10 am

ITALIAN:

I've been working like a fiend this past week; I finally finished transcribing all 10 episodes of Lucifer (episodes 9 and 10 are awaiting corrections).

Was it worth it?

The short answer is: I don't think so.

I don't feel like anything really improved. My spelling is still atrociously bad. I'm no better at knowing what all the millions of stupid articles are supposed to be (when speaking). I'm sure something must have gotten better, but I'm at a loss as to what it could be. Overall, I don't think transcription was worth the time/effort it took and I don't plan to do this again in the future. Maybe this is an activity that works much better for other people.

As I mentioned before, I've been thinking of doing a 1-week trial of what I'm hoping to start doing in January. But, I have to say that I'm quite sour on language learning at the moment, and part of me really wants to say F--- it and go back to just watching some Italian TV to maintain my comprehension and call it good. I'm worried that attempting challenges is counterproductive for me because I don't seem to ever improve as a result of them (and if anything, I end up doing worse mentally because I'm always disappointed in my lack of improvement).

Today's LE was particularly difficult. It felt like I was struggling with practically every sentence.

Anyway, to celebrate the completion of my challenge, we're having some really good steaks that I had tucked away in the freezer for a special occasion...but upon setting everything up, we discovered the meat thermometer is broken. Will they be raw? Overdone?
Chi lo sa?
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Re: Polski & Italiano (+ Latin) Episode II: StringerBell Strikes Back

Postby DaveAgain » Wed Nov 27, 2019 12:11 pm

StringerBell wrote:
I don't feel like anything really improved. My spelling is still atrociously bad. I'm no better at knowing what all the millions of stupid articles are supposed to be (when speaking). I'm sure something must have gotten better, but I'm at a loss as to what it could be. Overall, I don't think transcription was worth the time/effort it took and I don't plan to do this again in the future. Maybe this is an activity that works much better for other people.

As I mentioned before, I've been thinking of doing a 1-week trial of what I'm hoping to start doing in January. But, I have to say that I'm quite sour on language learning at the moment, and part of me really wants to say F--- it and go back to just watching some Italian TV to maintain my comprehension and call it good. I'm worried that attempting challenges is counterproductive for me because I don't seem to ever improve as a result of them (and if anything, I end up doing worse mentally because I'm always disappointed in my lack of improvement).
I watched a presenation by a lady who used transcription for language learning the other day, How to learn a language by watching films and TV.

She also did double-translation from her transcription, and wrote summaries of the episodes. Perhaps you'd like to try that for one of your transcriptions and see if you find it helpful?
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Re: Polski & Italiano (+ Latin) Episode II: StringerBell Strikes Back

Postby StringerBell » Wed Nov 27, 2019 2:16 pm

Thanks, DaveAgain! That article was well written, I enjoyed reading it.

I think that I benefitted little-to-not-at-all from transcription because my listening comprehension was already quite good, so there wasn't much room for improvement in that area. I think this activity could be really useful for people who are still struggling with listening comprehension, so I don't want to give the impression that I think it's a waste of time for everybody - just me.

I don't feel like I really learned much (if anything) new in terms of vocabulary or expressions besides the odd word here and there. I found that when I rewatched each episode after some delay (during the correction phase) most of whatever had been new was still unlearned - it was like I was seeing it for the first time, even though I'd already listened/typed it out previously. So this doesn't seem to be an effective way for me to learn new words. I'd have to actually use those words multiple times myself to actually know them.

My take away from the article is that in order for me to get value out of transcription, I probably need to actually do something in addition - like write some plot summaries, for example. I could have easily done that without doing the transcription, so I think that the actual act of transcribing was not very useful to me on it's own.

Oh well, at least now I know something that doesn't work for me and I can cross it off the list.

********************

BTW, I was folding laundry with my husband the other day after having forgotten about it in the dryer, so of course everything was all wrinkled. He used one of my favorite Italian sayings (which I may have mentioned before) to describe how everything looked: "Sembra è uscito dal culo del cane". (Looks like it came out of the dog's ass.)
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Re: Polski & Italiano (+ Latin) Episode II: StringerBell Strikes Back

Postby StringerBell » Fri Nov 29, 2019 8:26 pm

ITALIAN:

Yesterday and today I've been trying out what I plan to do starting in January and Holy Cow! Not what I expected.

1) I had been thinking that the writing portion of the Output Challenge would be the most difficult: the most time-consuming, the most energy-draining, the most dreaded. I really suck at writing in Italian. However, I was able to write a few "How To" paragraphs of ~200 words without problem. Of course I made errors, but not as many as I was expecting. I was also able to encorporate some of the error corrections from yesterday's writing into today's writing. I think I knocked out 200 words written in about 10 minutes. I'm not sure that's how long it took, but it felt like it went quickly.

So starting in January I'll aim for at least 200 words/day (5 days/wk), which will bring me to 50,000 words/year. This is feeling very doable and I have a feeling it will lead to some improvements.

2) I had been thinking the R-L would go much quicker. Turns out, it took 37 min to listen to 14 pages worth of audiobook (~2.5 min/page). For some reason I was expecting about 1 minute per page. I'll have to double this number since I'll be listening to each chapter twice: once while reading along in English, once while reading along in Italian. This means ~1hr 15min per 15 pages (5min/page or 12 pages/hr)!!! Yikes.

However, the numbers don't totally add up:
This audiobook is 10 hours 40 min
The book has 326 pages. If I round down to 300 pages to account for pages without much text, that still comes to ~13 hour audiobook.

So I don't really know exactly how many pages I can realistically complete per day on average, but this portion of my plan will obviously take more time than I was thinking. Assuming 12 pages/hr is accurate, that means that to reach 5,000 pages in 1 year, I'll need to average 1.25 hours/day (at least for the R-L portion of the reading challenge, but I have a lot of audiobooks lined up). I'm not sure if I can make that happen, but I'll try. Once I drop R-L and just do straight reading, I should only need half that amount of time per day.

I haven't yet tested out the speaking spontaneously portion of the challenge, I'll probably do that in the next few days.

LATIN:

I haven't been doing any Latin since my first disappointing foray into Lingua Latina. I just hasn't occurred to me until it's the end of the day or not the right time. I'm not sure if it's sheer forgetfulness or because I find LL so off-putting that my subconscious is highjacking me. I keep seeing so many people raving about it, so I know it must get much better and consequently I don't want to give up on it. I'm going to try to read a little more in it today to see if I can break this weird block I have against it.
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Re: Polski & Italiano (+ Latin) Episode II: StringerBell Strikes Back

Postby rdearman » Fri Nov 29, 2019 11:24 pm

You can always speed up the audio to say 1.5 speed which will cut the time by 25%. :)
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