The Perfect Immersion? How can I go from low C1 to "native" in a year!

[drp9341]

Hello everyone!

WARNING: I fully concede that my goal is intangible, hard to define, and impossible to achieve. Like I said though, It's more of an objective that I want to challenge myself by getting as close to as I can, than it is a binary pass/fail "objective."

I'm being overly optimistic on purpose by suggesting that I believe a native level is possible to achieve in only a year, but I'd rather try to become "C2+" and fail, than aim for C1/C2 and succeed.

My goal could be defined as: "Becoming virtually indistinguishable from the average Italian (of my generation) from that area, in terms of language skills and cultural knowledge."

BRIEF SUMMARY
1. I am moving to Tuscany for a year to teach English
2. I have a great social circle, and family where I will be.
3. My Italian is B2+/C1, but since it's a heritage language, the CEFR scale doesn't accurately describe my "level." (I'll elaborate below.)
4. I want to reach a level where I can socialize, speak, write, listen, and read similar to an educated Italian.
5. My girlfriend is Polish, and she will be spending probably a week per month with me in Italy. She doesn't speak Italian, and we speak a mixture of Polish and English.
6. I can master the elements of the subjunctive and passato remoto that elude most natives when I leave Italy, so "C2" isn't as important as "feeling as confident using Italian as English."

PLEASE GIVE ME ADVICE ON HOW TO DO THIS AS EFFECTIVELY AS POSSIBLE

LOTS AND LOTS OF DETAILS
My goal could be defined as: "Becoming virtually indistinguishable from the average Italian (of my generation) from that area, in terms of language skills and cultural knowledge."

That's very ambitious, so let's break it down. I'm using this post as a way of "fleshing out" and "clarifying" my goals. Think of the following as the "diary posts" that will help you understand what it is that would best help me reaching my goals, since my goal (or goals?) are not unfortunately can't really be adequately evaluated by any CEFR exam.

Language Skills
1. Speaking
I'm a great "talker" in English. My friends and family always say I have "the gift of the gab" and, for better or for worse, I'm able to talk my way into situations, and end up with experiences and stories that I am afraid to tell for fear of being called a liar, or getting a reputation as someone who exaggerates. Most of this is due to my personality, but I'd say at least 25% of this is a result of my "way with words."

I want to be able to feel this way in Italian as well. I know this is only partially linguistic, a lot of it has to do with innate social skills and cultural knowledge.
So, in terms of Speaking we can say I wish to be able to...
1. Master "Pragmatics" and be able to use subtle linguistic, and tonal/verbal changes to make sure I transmit the precise idea I wish to communicate, leaving as little as possible up to context"
2. Tell stories as captivatingly in Italian as in English
3. Make jokes, even offensive jokes, like I do in English. (knowing full well what is the line, and how to dance around it, avoid it all together, or purposely cross it, should I see fit.)
4. Speak about, and confidently debate complex Political, Philosophical, Psychological & etc. topics with (~90%) of the skill I can in English.
5. This is the least important, but I will try, (as a "side mission,") to "loose" my accent so that people from other cities will mistake me as a native from the city where I'll be living in.


Listening
This is the skill I'm least worried about.
1. I understand heavy Toscano almost as well as I understand English, (thanks family!) I understand standard, "TV accent" Italian fantastically as well.
3. ER ROMANO - The huge wedge that separates me BIG TIME from a native speaker. I often watch TV with my friends, and in most cases, if I ask what was said, my friends also don't really know what was said. However, when it's someone with a Roman accent I often miss jokes, and have to really concentrate. I often don't understand complete sentences, and when I say "what'd he/she say?" I'm always the only one who missed it.
It was explained to me that Italians all understand "Er Romano" pretty well since it's popular on TV, and used in a lot of series. Of course, a real Roman could loose any of them if they wanted to.
I'm going to start watching more TV, and getting iTalki tutors from Rome, and have them speak to me in Romano, and explain somethings that escape me. I don't have time to spend an hour a day listening to that accent, so I should actively try to solve this difference as quickly as I can.
3. Because of growing up how I did, I am more familiar with Napoletano and other southern dialects than pretty much anyone I've met in Tuscany who doesn't have some sort of personal or familial connection to the south. (Tons of southern Italian immigrants moved to New York City decades ago, and I grew up hearing southern dialects on the street.)
4. Northern Italian dialects are super cool, and I'm truly fascinated by them, but they won't really help me with my goals.

READING AND WRITING
I've already started reading the Italian translations of a few books I've wanted to read. Translated books are easier for me to read. I can absorb more information since I don't need to spend as much time deciphering the meaning of all those 5 line long metaphor-packed sentences that Italian authors love to use. I will eventually start reading fiction by Italian authors, and then MAYBE progress to more classical literature, like Dante's Divine Comedy, although I think that memorizing a few of the key sentences, reading the spark notes, and learning about how it's affected Italy would help me reach my goal much quicker, and probably teach me more.

I want to start writing out political and philosophical blog posts in Italian, but my desire to write wanes from "-100" to "he has Hypergraphia." Nonetheless, I don't think that there's any other way to master the formal register as effectively as writing about it daily. The problem is getting corrections.


___________________________________
Wow. I feel like an author already.

One of my dreams is to be able to seamlessly blend into another culture. I would prefer it to be Spanish, but my situation in Italy is a polyglot hoping to achieve native fluency's dream, so I can't pass it up. Also, I truly enjoy my friends and the time I spend with everyone I know there, and I'm a firm believer that becoming a polyglot should never be a goal, but something that happens coincidentally. Each language I learn, I learn because it enriches my life by opening doors. I love the way German sounds, and it is my favorite language on a linguistic level. unfortunately I find German speaking countries to be quite boring, and love from a purely linguistic perspective can only get me to lesson 30 in Assimil.

__________________________________
My (current) Plan

1. Pay close attention to the errors my Italian students make in English, so that my time spent teaching English can be of some use.
(prepositions, articulation, word order, etc.)

2. Find a local who will...
a) Correct my MISTAKES
b) Correct the weirdly phrased Italian I produce
c) Help me by saying, "XYZ" sounds more natural than "ZYW"
Finding a person who fits the description of B and C will be very hard.

3. Write and get corrected twice a week.

4. STUDY TV shows, and ask the same questions to multiple native speakers, so that I can see if, and how their answers vary.

5. Start doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu or Boxing again, so that even when I have no one to sit around and grab a coffee with, I can still be immersed, and using the language in a different setting.

6. Finally buy a TV.

7. EITHER STOP USING THE INTERNET, OR FIND ITALIAN FORUMS (LIKE REDDIT) AND AUDIO/VIDEO COURSES OF ITALIAN INTELLECTUALS AND PROFESSORS THAT interest me.

8. Record my friends conversations, (yes they consent to it, they have been letting me do it for years so that I'll finally "stop speaking like an Albanian" hahaha) and pay attention to the way they use the language, and try to pick up as much subtle information as I can.

9. Be as social as I can be. Talk to, and listen to, as many people as possible, as often as possible.

10. See a speech therapist? (Or do a "Corso di Dizione" somewhere.)
The thing with accent is that it comes and goes. I don't want to always speak with a native accent. I want to be able to speak with a native accent if I want to. However, I will NOT sacrifice my personality, or act any different than I do regularly in order to impress people with my accent.

11. LEARN ABOUT FOOD!!!!! I know nothing about food. Even in English I have the vocabulary of a toddler when it comes to all things culinary. HOWEVER IN ITALIAN food is VERY important, and I've never met an Italian who talked about food less than I do - it really is a beautiful part of the Italian culture.


____________________________________
Basically, my goal is impossible to achieve. Nonetheless I would be overjoyed if I even got to 50% of where I wish to be at. I'm going to use the great social life, and the fact that lots of Italian culture isn't really foreign to me, to see how close I can get to achieving the holy grail of language learning. Which to me is understanding another culture, and blending into it well enough that you feel equally as comfortable in both worlds.

What would you do if you were me?

I have a year to do this, then I have other obligations. I want to do it right, and not waste time mastering the subjunctive which can be done afterwords considering I already use the subjunctive as well, or even better than most of my friends when speaking casually so it wouldn't help much in that regard.

Should I take a C1 or C2 prep course?

Should I spend my time 50/50 in terms of socializing and studying, or should I spend it 80/20? or 20/80?

I've never attempted, nor do I know of anyone who attempted anything like this. I am completely open to any criticism, advice, and nasty comments. I fully concede that my goal is intangible, and hard to define, and impossible to achieve. Like I said though, It's more of an objective that I want to challenge myself by getting as close to as I can, than it is a binary pass/fail "objective."

Maybe I can try making videos of me speaking, and keep a blog, language log and let people track my progress. Although considering how lazy and unorganized I am, I don't want to spend my limited resource (energy) on projects that won't benefit my "1 year to native" mission.

[drp9341]

Sorry for the length of my post, feel free to skim through some of the parts that may or may not seem relevant.

[MamaPata]

This is really interesting - I look forward to seeing how it goes!

I wouldn’t bother doing a prep course - they’re focused on getting you to pass the exams, which is not your priority. Beyond that, no idea, but I’ll be following your progress! I recently got to C1 in French and I’m trying to work out where I go from here. Our situations are very different, but this will still be informative for me

[Axon]

I'll preface this by saying that I give a lot of advice on high proficiency for someone still struggling to reach high proficiency. But I do read lots of linguistics papers and accounts from people who have achieved very high language levels, so I hope what I say can be helpful. At least nobody's called me out yet.

Accent:
Look into singing lessons, even if you have no great love of music. They're likely much cheaper than speech therapy or professional accent coaching. Also, it's a stretch, but you may also be able to find a university student that you can study with. Even at my engineering-heavy school, I ended up meeting a couple of people that were phonology freaks on about the same level I was, and if some foreign teacher had wanted to spend a while in the library talking about our California accents, we would have flipped. Send an email to the English departments of the local universities asking if there are any language enthusiast students interested in intensive tutoring.

Learning the culture:
Buy middle and high school textbooks for Italians. Read the required books that everyone has to read in school (or, like, ten of them. I've never read East of Eden or The Catcher in the Rye and I get by as an American.). During your active learning time, test yourself on that stuff. Write the kind of high school essays that Italians had to - everybody in the US probably wrote a five-paragraph essay on "Should Truman have dropped the bomb?" What's the Italian equivalent?

Sounding natural:
I've paid a lot of attention to the errors my students make in English, but it pretty much hasn't opened up any new ways of understanding natural-sounding Chinese. It has, though, improved my English teaching, so it's not a bad idea to keep doing it.
You'll need to challenge yourself on more areas of vocabulary than just food. I don't know how much you've picked up already (probably lots tbh with your experience) but, just like you with food, native speakers always have at least a couple of words to describe pretty much any topic or object. I don't mean very specialized words like "monistic" or "nanoarray," I mean words for more everyday objects that you may not be interested in, like "camera shutter," "papoose," "Phillips-head," "clay," or "scaffolding." Assuming you don't have near-native vocabulary already, you can learn these words by watching YouTube tutorials for things you've never done (edit a video, fix a bike, knit a sweater). Or go to a library and read "for Dummies" books on many topics.
Record some answers to questions like these (a ton more on this website) and get native feedback. Alternately, get a tutor to ask you these questions and even harder ones.

Definitely make videos, especially where you challenge yourself! It'll be a great feeling to be look back and see the improvement, especially because otherwise improvement is so hard to see at such a high level. Good luck!

[Flickserve]

Assume that you will mostly meet people around your age group. Probably you want to cover the same knowledge as what they did as kids.

So, the same books, the same TV programs, the same videogames, the same TV adverts , the same jokes in that era. Also relevant would be major news events of that period and the food they used to eat at home!

For the accent change, probably this would be very hard to achieve given you already stated a time limitation.

[rdearman]

As far as food goes, there are many good cooking channels on YouTube in Italian. Here are a couple I subscribe too. Let me know if you find any more. Also if you can get hold of them Camionisti in trattoria is a great show about food.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCW2xLi ... JhFOz0kokw
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWOAiV ... YpLcTvI4Zg

[iguanamon]

Having just read your latest post in your 2 year long Polish immersion, I was struck by this passage:

The only regret I have is not learning "in moderation." I obsessed over Polish, couldn't handle the stress I was putting on myself, and just stopped studying it after I was able to socialize and do basically everything. I did what many immigrants do, and settle for a functional level. Nonetheless, I never settled for poor pronunciation or grammar!!! So I sound like I'm much more proficient than I really am, which is pretty cool.

Then I read the first post here and it looks familiar. My advice is to concentrate less on a full frontal assault on the language and work on living more of, if not most of, your life in Italian. Try to get more involved in the life of the community. Get a lot of local friends and acquaintances. Volunteer in some worthwhile community endeavor that puts you in touch with a group of local people. Make the effort to socialize outside of your age range with a diverse range of people. You should also challenge yourself in the language, perhaps by learning a skill (in Italian) in your free time by attending the equivalent of evening classes in something... sculpting, painting, cooking, creative writing- if you could find a writing course... that would be ideal.

Also, I think you should do formal language study but your formal study should compliment and inform your interaction and not overwhelm it, learning as you go and being inspired by your experience to go beyond- not the other way around. In this way, perhaps you may avoid the burnout you experienced with Polish and you can get to where you want to be in a more holistic way, in a sustainable manner, by not forcing it so much. Forcing it will probably mean that you will most likely end up with a similar result... which still ain't bad, but not quite where you want to be .

Hopefully, Tarvos will reply. She has a first hand experience with your situation. Anyway, it's a wonderful opportunity. I wish you the best of luck and look forward to seeing your progress!

[drp9341]

So today I went with my Father, 'Uncle'and Cousin all around New York. They are here for 10 days, and I'll be spending basically all my time with them for those 10 days.

My father and 'Uncle' speak VERY strong Garfagnese, my cousin is a few years younger than me, and is a "country boy" and speaks pretty heavy Garfagnese, but nothing like my father or grandparents.

I've spent the whole morning since 5:30 am listening to and speaking with them, and I've reverted to saying things like
"ma ti lo ri(h)ordi te quando noi si fece..." or even doing the following to the infinitive like "come si fa ad andà lì?" I even said "erimo" instead of "eravamo."

The Italians staying with me for the 10 days are really mechanical. We spent the morning doing mechanical related stuff, and running to stores for supplies for construction job. I forgot tons of words for nouns. We were talking about tools and motors, as well as other random stuff like steel beams and the strength of ropes, and I felt like I was having a million flashbacks a second.

I spent some time with just my cousin gossiping about people we knew from when we were kids and what became of them, and I realized that there's still a lot of regional words that mean something different nowadays (think of queer as a good English example!) and there's some words that I understand but he doesn't. (For example, I forgot the Italian word for basement, and I used the toscano word my grandparents use, and my dad had to translate it to Italian.)

Look into singing lessons, even if you have no great love of music. They're likely much cheaper than speech therapy or professional accent coaching. Also, it's a stretch, but you may also be able to find a university student that you can study with. Even at my engineering-heavy school, I ended up meeting a couple of people that were phonology freaks on about the same level I was, and if some foreign teacher had wanted to spend a while in the library talking about our California accents, we would have flipped. Send an email to the English departments of the local universities asking if there are any language enthusiast students interested in intensive tutoring.

ACCENT
I actually tried applying singing lessons for Italian, and it really didn't help much in my case, but I think foreigners SHOULD use a vocal coach for Italian, I'll elaborate on this in a separate post if you remind me.

My foreign accent isn't primarily articulatory, it's because of my lazy rhythm and intonation. If I say individual words, or expressions that I've heard a million times, I supposedly sound native according to people from the same place as my father's family. (***BUT ONLY IF I'VE BEEN SPEAKING ITALIAN FOR AT LEAST A DAY!!! I can't just go from speaking English all day, and say an Italian word without a foreign accent.)

Learning the culture:
Buy middle and high school textbooks for Italians. Read the required books that everyone has to read in school (or, like, ten of them. I've never read East of Eden or The Catcher in the Rye and I get by as an American.). During your active learning time, test yourself on that stuff. Write the kind of high school essays that Italians had to - everybody in the US probably wrote a five-paragraph essay on "Should Truman have dropped the bomb?" What's the Italian equivalent?

Awesome Axon! This will require some research, but I'll definitely do this. I know one or two Italian school teachers.

Record some answers to questions like these (a ton more on this website) and get native feedback. Alternately, get a tutor to ask you these questions and even harder ones.

This is awesome. I'll do this with my Non-Toscano friend who is the most hard-core Italian purist I've ever met. Thanks dude!!!

I'll preface this by saying that I give a lot of advice on high proficiency for someone still struggling to reach high proficiency. But I do read lots of linguistics papers and accounts from people who have achieved very high language levels, so I hope what I say can be helpful. At least nobody's called me out yet.

One thing I like about this forum is the lack of trolling and the laid-back, non competitive environment. Sometimes the "experts" miss the forest for the trees. That's why little kids often times give the best advice!

[drp9341]

Having just read your latest post in your 2 year long Polish immersion, I was struck by this passage:

The only regret I have is not learning "in moderation." I obsessed over Polish, couldn't handle the stress I was putting on myself, and just stopped studying it after I was able to socialize and do basically everything. I did what many immigrants do, and settle for a functional level. Nonetheless, I never settled for poor pronunciation or grammar!!! So I sound like I'm much more proficient than I really am, which is pretty cool.

Then I read the first post here and it looks familiar. My advice is to concentrate less on a full frontal assault on the language and work on living more of, if not most of, your life in Italian. Try to get more involved in the life of the community. Get a lot of local friends and acquaintances. Volunteer in some worthwhile community endeavor that puts you in touch with a group of local people. Make the effort to socialize outside of your age range with a diverse range of people. You should also challenge yourself in the language, perhaps by learning a skill (in Italian) in your free time by attending the equivalent of evening classes in something... sculpting, painting, cooking, creative writing- if you could find a writing course... that would be ideal.

Also, I think you should do formal language study but your formal study should compliment and inform your interaction and not overwhelm it, learning as you go and being inspired by your experience to go beyond- not the other way around. In this way, perhaps you may avoid the burnout you experienced with Polish and you can get to where you want to be in a more holistic way, in a sustainable manner, by not forcing it so much. Forcing it will probably mean that you will most likely end up with a similar result... which still ain't bad, but not quite where you want to be .

Hopefully, Tarvos will reply. She has a first hand experience with your situation. Anyway, it's a wonderful opportunity. I wish you the best of luck and look forward to seeing your progress!

Thank you for this.

I really am trying my best to not make the same mistake twice, however I'll explain why this "mission" is fundamentally different.
With Polish, I was even after 6 months, unable to enjoy social situations with Polish. I was putting pressure on myself to "study" so that I could get better at "using" Polish. This lack of socializing with Poles in Polish made me a little disillusioned, and made me feel like I was wasting my time studying Polish. I started developing friendships that were conducted through languages I was already fluent in, and serious Polish study started to seem much less important.

In Italy, I know what I'm walking into. I can already speak the language very comfortably, and I have a great social network there; a social network that requires that I speak Italian. I think the less stressful, and less "quantifiable" efforts that would have to go into achieving this goal would make it so I wouldn't put so much pressure on myself. Also, the presence of a social network, and the fact that I'm constantly faced with the reality that can't express myself the way I can in English, will make me much more motivated to achieve this goal.

Knowing that "I'll be able to do 'xyz' now if I study," is infinitely more motivating than "if I keep doing 'xyz' for the next few months maybe I'll have fun using only Polish."


I'm going to talk to some people right after I finish this post, because I want to know if there are any "High School Equivalency" "GED" night school like classes for people who need to improve their reading and writing. This might be a dumb idea, but I'm probably going to take an Italian history course that includes writing at the nearby University if it's not that expensive, (Italian universities charge students different amounts based on their calculated level of wealth.)


I'm gonna get involved in as many social activities as I can also. I'm thinking about taking Italian classes, but I'm a really annoying student. I know what I don't want, but I can't say exactly what I do want! We'll see how Italian classes for foreigners go though!

[dampingwire]

An extended period in Italy speaking (almost) only Italian will surely sort out any accent issues. I've not watched much Italian TV over the last year or so, but I don't remember too many dialects cropping up. Accented Italian, certainly (and full blow Sicilian in things like Montalbano) but otherwise it usually seems like "proper" Italian to me. I have essentially zero comprehension of southern Italian dialects, so when we were in Sicily last year they just thought I was a northerner

The cultural stuff will be slightly tougher, I suppose. TV/radio/life will help a good deal - although you'll have to endure things like "Affari Tuoi" just because everyone else will be talking about it; hopefully you won't have to sink to the depths that (I imagine) Gogglebox Italia must be

As for the "books everyone has read" then La Divina Commedia and I promessi sposi should be top of your list. Some relatives visited five years or so ago and for some reason both of those cropped up and both the older (60s?) and younger generations (late 20s) were clearly familiar with them. You can find more by hunting out the annual 'What cropped up in the Maturità' articles, like this.

Oh, and follow football and F1.