Re: Polski & Italiano (+ Latin) Episode II: StringerBell Strikes Back
Posted: Sun Sep 01, 2019 2:59 pm
ITALIAN: Full steam ahead!
I feel like I have a lot of different things going on at the moment so I wanted to make a list of what's in progress.
1) I am slightly more than 1/2 way through the edX course: Italian Language and Culture: Beginner (2019-2020). I was thinking that since I'm having such a hard time getting through the damn Practice Makes Perfect course book, taking this free online course would be a good way to patch up any missing parts. I'm finding that the course feels extremely easy and I have not yet come across anything I don't already know. I don't think I'm really gaining anything by doing it, other than the realization that my basic grammar knowledge isn't as bad as I thought it was, so I guess that's something.
This course is extremely well done, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has never formally studied Italian but wants to, or who is interested in a refresher/review. The dialogues are all done by native speakers, and nothing is dumbed down or oversimplified like what can often be found in introductory course books. The vocabulary introduced is surprisingly useful and not just the typical "the pen is on the table" kind of stuff. The professor also uses a lot of humor, which makes it more enjoyable.
2) I started transcribing episode 3 of Lucifer. The first two episodes felt brutal, but at 7 minutes into episode 3, this one is actually not feeling too bad. After getting repeatedly corrected on certain things (like the spelling of può darsi instead of podarsi, which is how I was spelling it ) I noticed that I'm making fewer spelling mistakes, and I'm getting better at using context to figure out what something should be, like l'ho vs. lo. I'm going to try to work on this more consistently instead of taking such huge breaks.
3) I have written one paragraph per day for the last 7 days (I missed one day because I forgot, so I did 6/7 days). I'm seeing that the key to getting myself to write (at least at this stage) is to keep the requirement short and sweet - even when it's evening and I'm almost out of steam, I can still usually manage to pop out a paragraph. My strategy this time around is to write the paragraph first in English. Then, I use the English version to help guide me when I'm writing in Italian. This is helping both me and my husband (who does the corrections) because it helps me to focus on what I want to say, and it helps him to know what idea I was trying to express when I end up creating a disasterpiece of verb tenses. When I tried to write in Italian in the past, part of the difficulty was just figuring out what to say, so getting my thoughts on paper in English is eliminating this issue.
What I'm seeing from the corrections is that my verb tenses (the more complicated ones like "I would have..." or "If I had...") are a mess. I feel like I should use the corrections somehow to improve these, but I'm not really sure how to go about using the corrections. I'm at max capacity for entering things into Anki. Any suggestions?
4) I'm looking up/making Anki cards for any unknown words/expressions in whatever Italian TV show I watch. I'm hoping that a renewed vocabulary acquisition effort will eventually lead to an easier time reading novels, and reduce the unknowns that I don't even realize I'm missing when I'm listening to TV/podcasts. Making multiple cards that use the new word/expression in different ways is helping to make me feel like I actually know these words for real, instead of only being able to recall them during an Anki session (but then not in real life).
I finished seasons 3 & 4 of Torbiti Delitti (Swamp Murders) and am now on season 5. I think I'll stick with this genre of TV show (crime procedural) because some of the vocab I'm learning from the episodes tends to repeat like: Lei è annegata/affogata = She drowned, or Lui è aggredito = He was attacked. Since this series has a lot of re-enactments, the narration tends to describe what the characters are doing, which makes it really easy to pick up words like il grembiule = apron.
5) L-R: (listening in Italian/reading in English) the novel: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Molto Forte, Incredibilmente Vicino). I'm not doing this everyday, so I've only done 3/10.75 hours. I wish the chapters were more evenly divided; for example, one chapter is 15 minutes while another is 1 hour and 10 min. Seeing that a chapter is only 15 minutes makes me think, "I can totally do this right now" but seeing that the next chapter is over an hour fills me with dread and I keep postponing it. I'm really enjoying the book and the process so I don't know why an hour commitment is such a deterrent. I suppose I could just do half a chapter, but I greatly prefer to do one complete chapter at a time.
6) Listening to the audiobook of a Diary of a Wimpy Kid Portatemi a Casa (Take Me Home). I've finished 7/10 chapters. I could have finished this a long time ago, but I keep forgetting about it. I don't have the text, so this is 100% a listening exercise. I've been relistening to chapters while driving in the car. My goal is to be able to figure out any unknown word/expression that pops up. So far, there was only one thing I had to ask for assistance because I just couldn't hear what was being said clearly enough to spell it (Ha schioccato le dita = She snapped her fingers). Everything else I've been able to figure out from context and hear well enough to spell it so that I could look it up online.
These books feel like a vacation for my brain, so I keep picking up new ones any time I can find them used for a good price. I'm planning to listen through a second time to make Anki cards of the unknowns, which is a much bigger pain in the butt to do for an audiobook, but since there aren't too many unknowns, hopefully it won't be too awful. I also find them tremendously useful for learning common colloquial expressions, like: mi sa che... (I think that...) vs. the other more "proper" ways that I know, like penso che, or really useful things like "Se fossi io a decidere..." (If it were up to me.../If I were the one deciding...)
I feel like I have a lot of different things going on at the moment so I wanted to make a list of what's in progress.
1) I am slightly more than 1/2 way through the edX course: Italian Language and Culture: Beginner (2019-2020). I was thinking that since I'm having such a hard time getting through the damn Practice Makes Perfect course book, taking this free online course would be a good way to patch up any missing parts. I'm finding that the course feels extremely easy and I have not yet come across anything I don't already know. I don't think I'm really gaining anything by doing it, other than the realization that my basic grammar knowledge isn't as bad as I thought it was, so I guess that's something.
This course is extremely well done, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has never formally studied Italian but wants to, or who is interested in a refresher/review. The dialogues are all done by native speakers, and nothing is dumbed down or oversimplified like what can often be found in introductory course books. The vocabulary introduced is surprisingly useful and not just the typical "the pen is on the table" kind of stuff. The professor also uses a lot of humor, which makes it more enjoyable.
2) I started transcribing episode 3 of Lucifer. The first two episodes felt brutal, but at 7 minutes into episode 3, this one is actually not feeling too bad. After getting repeatedly corrected on certain things (like the spelling of può darsi instead of podarsi, which is how I was spelling it ) I noticed that I'm making fewer spelling mistakes, and I'm getting better at using context to figure out what something should be, like l'ho vs. lo. I'm going to try to work on this more consistently instead of taking such huge breaks.
3) I have written one paragraph per day for the last 7 days (I missed one day because I forgot, so I did 6/7 days). I'm seeing that the key to getting myself to write (at least at this stage) is to keep the requirement short and sweet - even when it's evening and I'm almost out of steam, I can still usually manage to pop out a paragraph. My strategy this time around is to write the paragraph first in English. Then, I use the English version to help guide me when I'm writing in Italian. This is helping both me and my husband (who does the corrections) because it helps me to focus on what I want to say, and it helps him to know what idea I was trying to express when I end up creating a disasterpiece of verb tenses. When I tried to write in Italian in the past, part of the difficulty was just figuring out what to say, so getting my thoughts on paper in English is eliminating this issue.
What I'm seeing from the corrections is that my verb tenses (the more complicated ones like "I would have..." or "If I had...") are a mess. I feel like I should use the corrections somehow to improve these, but I'm not really sure how to go about using the corrections. I'm at max capacity for entering things into Anki. Any suggestions?
4) I'm looking up/making Anki cards for any unknown words/expressions in whatever Italian TV show I watch. I'm hoping that a renewed vocabulary acquisition effort will eventually lead to an easier time reading novels, and reduce the unknowns that I don't even realize I'm missing when I'm listening to TV/podcasts. Making multiple cards that use the new word/expression in different ways is helping to make me feel like I actually know these words for real, instead of only being able to recall them during an Anki session (but then not in real life).
I finished seasons 3 & 4 of Torbiti Delitti (Swamp Murders) and am now on season 5. I think I'll stick with this genre of TV show (crime procedural) because some of the vocab I'm learning from the episodes tends to repeat like: Lei è annegata/affogata = She drowned, or Lui è aggredito = He was attacked. Since this series has a lot of re-enactments, the narration tends to describe what the characters are doing, which makes it really easy to pick up words like il grembiule = apron.
5) L-R: (listening in Italian/reading in English) the novel: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Molto Forte, Incredibilmente Vicino). I'm not doing this everyday, so I've only done 3/10.75 hours. I wish the chapters were more evenly divided; for example, one chapter is 15 minutes while another is 1 hour and 10 min. Seeing that a chapter is only 15 minutes makes me think, "I can totally do this right now" but seeing that the next chapter is over an hour fills me with dread and I keep postponing it. I'm really enjoying the book and the process so I don't know why an hour commitment is such a deterrent. I suppose I could just do half a chapter, but I greatly prefer to do one complete chapter at a time.
6) Listening to the audiobook of a Diary of a Wimpy Kid Portatemi a Casa (Take Me Home). I've finished 7/10 chapters. I could have finished this a long time ago, but I keep forgetting about it. I don't have the text, so this is 100% a listening exercise. I've been relistening to chapters while driving in the car. My goal is to be able to figure out any unknown word/expression that pops up. So far, there was only one thing I had to ask for assistance because I just couldn't hear what was being said clearly enough to spell it (Ha schioccato le dita = She snapped her fingers). Everything else I've been able to figure out from context and hear well enough to spell it so that I could look it up online.
These books feel like a vacation for my brain, so I keep picking up new ones any time I can find them used for a good price. I'm planning to listen through a second time to make Anki cards of the unknowns, which is a much bigger pain in the butt to do for an audiobook, but since there aren't too many unknowns, hopefully it won't be too awful. I also find them tremendously useful for learning common colloquial expressions, like: mi sa che... (I think that...) vs. the other more "proper" ways that I know, like penso che, or really useful things like "Se fossi io a decidere..." (If it were up to me.../If I were the one deciding...)