A language learners’ forum

humm. Interesting take on things. I find I have a problem in LE's when I throw the odd French word into a conversation with an Italian and also the reverse. Although normally it is because I can't remember the word in one language, but know it in another. So it isn't like I'm purposely trying to have a mixture of languages, but rather my brain is reaching into the bucket labelled Italian, couldn't find the word, grabbed one out of the French bucket and if it can't find it there it will just freeze because it knows it isn't supposed to be looking in the huge ocean/sea/lake/reservoir of English words.

Then often I say something like: Come si dice in italiano; Mélange, o Mixture? Because I want to dip my tiny little bucket into the vast ocean of Italian they have.

Normally I just sit on the beach beside the English ocean kicking the two small buckets of languages I have.

I haven't studied Italian, but often when I can't remember a Spanish word, I find myself trying the French equivalent. Part of that is normal interference, but it doesn't help that much of the time, the words really are the same.

Ramblings about doing a double Super Challenge:

I've been thinking about doing a SC for Italian and Polish. Before I commit to any new challenge, I need to finish my current transcription challenge, but I think that's very doable by Nov-Dec. Since I assume that the new official SC starts this January, that's when I'm planning to get started. I'm just going to keep track here in my log rather than use a twitter bot (mainly bc I don't use twitter and I've reached my limit with how much technological stuff I want to deal with at the moment.)

For now, I plan to do a full SC for Polish, and just the reading part for Italian, since I think I've maxed out what I can gain by watching TV/films. Not that I understand 100% everything all the time, but whatever bit I miss here and there doesn't affect my comprehension, so I don't think I'm at a level where watching more is my priority. Rather than do the watching/listening part of the Italian SC, I want to incorporate my writing challenges. I haven't yet figured out exactly what that will look like; I might assign a value (1 point) to each simple writing task and a higher value (3 points?) to more difficult ones and aim to reach a certain # of points. I'm sure there's a better way, but that's what I've got now.

I was crunching some numbers and the SC doesn't seem to be too difficult; 5,000 pages in 20 months = ~8 pages per day. I know I can definitely do that for both languages if I'm consistent. The films part is 150 hours in 20 months = ~25 minutes per day. That's basically one episode of Rodzinka.pl daily, which I should be able to do with no problem. I'm sure what seems easy now will end up not being quite so easy once I actually get started.

If after doing a SC for Polish I don't feel like I've made enough progress to feel good about the time and energy invested, then I think I'll feel better at calling it quits, because at least I'll know that I really gave it a good fighting chance. I'm hoping that by the end of the SC I will be filled with optimism due to the increase in my skills and want to continue... we'll see!

I'm more on the fence about doing the reading SC for Italian. I know that reading in general is a good thing, but I'm not really convinced that reading is the best way to improve what I want to improve, unless maybe I'm extremely careful to read only super crappy modern novels with a lot of colloquial language, which is most of the books I've been collecting in Italian. I believe very strongly that reading novels with flowery narration (or even children's stories) in passato remoto is not the way to learn conversational Italian. I think I've learned more useful phrases from the 6 Diary of a Wimpy Kid books (which is written in a conversational diary style) than I ever could from reading a stack of novels, since those are just not written the way people speak in real life.

Since my main goal for Italian is to continue improving my conversational abilities, I think writing is far more useful than reading at this point. I don't really need more input, I need more output. Yet, even though I don't really care about reading in Italian, I still want to be able to do it more easily, which is why I kind of want to commit to a SC.

StringerBell wrote:I've been thinking about doing a SC for Italian and Polish. Before I commit to any new challenge, I need to finish my current transcription challenge, but I think that's very doable by Nov-Dec. Since I assume that the new official SC starts this January, that's when I'm planning to get started. I'm just going to keep track here in my log rather than use a twitter bot (mainly bc I don't use twitter and I've reached my limit with how much technological stuff I want to deal with at the moment.)

Normally the Super Challenge starts in May and goes to the following December. So you've actually got even longer to finish up other things before the next one starts!

StringerBell wrote:I'm more on the fence about doing the reading SC for Italian. I know that reading in general is a good thing, but I'm not really convinced that reading is the best way to improve what I want to improve, unless maybe I'm extremely careful to read only super crappy modern novels with a lot of colloquial language, which is most of the books I've been collecting in Italian. I believe very strongly that reading novels with flowery narration (or even children's stories) in passato remoto is not the way to learn conversational Italian. I think I've learned more useful phrases from the 6 Diary of a Wimpy Kid books (which is written in a conversational diary style) than I ever could from reading a stack of novels, since those are just not written the way people speak in real life.

Since my main goal for Italian is to continue improving my conversational abilities, I think writing is far more useful than reading at this point. I don't really need more input, I need more output. Yet, even though I don't really care about reading in Italian, I still want to be able to do it more easily, which is why I kind of want to commit to a SC.

I watched a video by a french teacher earlier. She recommended novels with lots of dialogue, Georges Simenon was mentioned, children's encyclopedias or non-fiction that interests you; recipe books, marketing books, self-help books etc.

Lianne wrote:Normally the Super Challenge starts in May and goes to the following December. So you've actually got even longer to finish up other things before the next one starts!

Thanks! Rather than wait until May, maybe I'll start in January, anyway. If I'm not using a bot and I'm just keeping track on my own, I'm not sure it makes sense to wait just for the sake of being "official". I was also thinking of trying to condense the # of books read and TV shows watched into 12 months, because the idea of doing a challenge for 20 months feels like a really weird amount of time and I wish it were just a straight-up one year challenge.

So, 5,000 pages in 12 months (instead of 20) would mean ~14 pages/day, which I still think is doable. (I'm sure RDearman is shaking his head and thinking that it's a bad idea to do 2 SC simultaneously. )

StringerBell wrote:So, 5,000 pages in 12 months (instead of 20) would mean ~14 pages/day, which I still think is doable. (I'm sure RDearman is shaking his head and thinking that it's a bad idea to do 2 SC simultaneously. )

Yep. I think you underestimate the amount of effort and time required.

I would say festina lente. If you take to much on yourself simultaneously, you will fail and you will be disappointed again. Remember that you are perfectionist so it will not be just reading but probably writing down unknown words and so on. So the time needed will be much more than to read 14 pages

Yes, RDearman and Cjareck, you are both right. Maybe I will aim for the 8 pages of a 20 month long challenge but try to reach 14 pages if possible to avoid failing! When I was reading Polish in a more extensive way in the past, I didn't look up words (I used an English version as a parallel text chapter by chapter, and then read the Polish text w/ Poish audio, so I was able to cover a decent number of pages daily. I don't think I actually benefitted from doing that kind of reading but I only did a few books like this, so I'm curious to see if I'd benefit from doing a SC number of books. I will probably do a lot of reading as R-L to avoid getting bogged down looking up every word.

If I'm listening to the Polish audiobook but looking at English text (R-L), that doesn't count for reading, right? I'm a little hazy on what counts since a few of the rules don't quite make sense to me so I keep forgetting. Does just straight up listening to an audiobook count toward reading, or does that go toward the listening (watching TV) part of the challenge?

StringerBell wrote:If I'm listening to the Polish audiobook but looking at English text (R-L), that doesn't count for reading, right? I'm a little hazy on what counts since a few of the rules don't quite make sense to me so I keep forgetting. Does just straight up listening to an audiobook count toward reading, or does that go toward the listening (watching TV) part of the challenge?

I don't know what the official challenge rules are like, but in my log, I wrote:

In the rare cases I actually do LR (and not just write about how good (I think) it is), I count both activities. Some people say that it's impossible to focus on two things simultaneously (and possibly that it's counter-productive), while I really feel that either activity helps the other, and that the effect (for me) is doubled. I remember Professor Arguelles once arguing against it, but later (in a Youtube video) he suggests the opposite (something with using Assimil material where the teaching language is also a target language, as in listening to L3 while reading L2).