puzzling over Pimsleur, translation, and a bit of frustration

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miket12
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puzzling over Pimsleur, translation, and a bit of frustration

Postby miket12 » Fri May 26, 2023 7:33 pm

I've been using Pimsleur Italian and reading a grammar book as I work to learn some Italian for a trip. I'm on level 3 and find it to be increasingly difficult to come up with the responses in the allotted time. Eventually I hope that I can have thoughts in Italian and for some phrases in the course I feel like I can do that.

I think I'm thrashing around a bit in this post trying to explain my question/issue so let me give an example. Take the two sentences "We must buy the tickets today. Have you already bought them?" For the 2nd sentence the Italian should be "Li hai gia comprati?" And from my understanding of grammar in the 2nd sentence
1) the pronoun is li and needs to go at the front of the sentence
2) the verb is formed with avere plus the past participle
3) since a pronoun is used instead of a noun the part participle needs to be conjugated to match the pronoun, so comparati instead of comprato
4) gia goes between avere and the part participle

So I recognize why the sentence is correct but when I am asked it for the first time, having not heard it before on the tape, I can't do all of this nearly fast enough. After practicing it a few time as it is asked in the lesson I'll remember it (at least for a while) but I wonder how much it will generalize to other verbs & sentences.

Is this difficulty just a factor of the stage I'm at (eg. beginner) and that I'm working with a translation program? Or for someone like me hoping to get to the A2 level is this what speaking a foreign language will be? I mean it's better than nothing, but perhaps not all that much better ;-)
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Re: puzzling over Pimsleur, translation, and a bit of frustration

Postby tastyonions » Fri May 26, 2023 8:04 pm

It will become clearer with time, repetition, and especially with more examples. It's hard to wrap your head around the grammar of a new language at first, especially if it's your first time learning a foreign language as an adult. Soon enough you'll be spitting out "ce" and "ne" and "lo" and "li" and "gia" automatically, as long as you keep working at it every day. :-)
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Re: puzzling over Pimsleur, translation, and a bit of frustration

Postby Deinonysus » Fri May 26, 2023 8:12 pm

Resist the urge to pause. Keep redoing lessons until you can respond in the allotted time. The amount of time Pimsleur gives you to respond is much more than the amount of time it will take for things to get awkward if you're having an actual Italian conversation but can't string your words together. When I'm doing Pimsleur I will often repeat a phrase several times before the time is up. It was hard at first but I got used to it.

Having completed Pimsleur in French and German and nearly completed it in Hebrew, I am able to respond fairly quickly to the sorts of interactions that are covered in Pimsleur. But it depends on time and familiarity. I'd probably be fine having a basic conversation in German now having not spoken it in years (finished 5 levels of Pimsleur with plenty of other study), but not so much with Icelandic (did the one unit many years ago, did fine on a trip to Iceland back then but never got a high level and didn't spend a ton of time on Icelandic, so I don't know how well I'd do today).
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Re: puzzling over Pimsleur, translation, and a bit of frustration

Postby iguanamon » Fri May 26, 2023 10:12 pm

Agreeing with my colleagues, Pimsleur is very good at what it does. I have completed Pimsleur Portuguese and Haitian Creole. It will not teach you the language but it will definitely help to get you further along the way.

As a beginning language-learner, it's important to remember that language-learning is about repetition. Sometimes, you will need more repetition than the course provides. Remember, despite the course hype, learning a second language is not as easy as it's made out to be. If it were, everyone would do it. There would be no second hand courses for sale that are in really good condition.

Learning a second language as a beginner means, in addition to becoming familiar with pronunciation; vocabulary; and grammar patterns... repetition is highly beneficial to getting the new patterns into the brain. I asked chat.openai to give me some example sentences in Italian using "gia" and verbs in the past tense. It gave me 10 sentences with the prompt "Give me example sentences in Italian using "gia" and verbs in the past tense".
chat.openai wrote:Certainly! Here are some example sentences in Italian using "gia" (already) and verbs in the past tense:
Ho già mangiato la pizza. (I have already eaten the pizza.)
Sono già tornato a casa. (I have already returned home.)
Abbiamo già finito il progetto. (We have already finished the project.)
Lei ha già visto quel film. (She has already seen that movie.)
Loro hanno già comprato i biglietti. (They have already bought the tickets.)
Hai già studiato per l'esame. (You have already studied for the exam.)
Gli ospiti sono già arrivati. (The guests have already arrived.)
Ho già chiamato mia madre. (I have already called my mother.)
Hai già letto quel libro. (You have already read that book.)
Hanno già iniziato a lavorare. (They have already started working.)
Remember that the verb "gia" (should've said "adverb") is used to indicate that an action has already taken place in the past.

This is what I needed to really hammer home a concept and why I like the dry, non-funny, boring courses like DLI... because they have drills! I'm sure if I asked again, the AI would give me 10 different example sentences. I could then plug them into Google Translate (for example) or a TTS and get a text to speech audio- not perfect and not ideal, but good enough.

A Pimsleur lesson is only a half an hour long. It cannot fit in a massive amount of drills. Re-listening and sometimes going beyond the course for drilling concepts (with which you may have trouble fully grasping) is key to consolidation and progress.

Nowadays, with all the aids that the internet has available for help with learning a second language, a course can certainly be supplemented more easily than in the past.

We all cobble together resources from a lot of different origins to come up with something that works for us. For example, there is a 630 page FSI "Post"* course for Italian dating from 1965 (I know, but Italian people are still alive today from that time period) available for free and legal download from ERIC. It is chock full of drills. The course has no audio available, but after a while now with Pimsleur, you may be able to pronounce Italian well enough not to need the audio to make it work for you- or try plugging the text into a TTS engine.

Sure, it can be scary to work outside the box, without a net and without a course that holds your hand. Sometimes it's exactly what we need to progress.
ERIC Blurb wrote:This Foreign Service Institute (FSI) introductory course in Italian is designed especially for use by U.S. personnel at overseas missions. The text is a field manual for instructors trained and operating under the supervision of an FSI Regional Language Supervisor. The fifteen units of the text cover basic vocabulary, pronunciation exercises, brief grammar notes, and conversation drills. Words and phrases used are intended for practical, everyday usage. (look for the red pdf download link at the upper right.)

There's also a course from 1969 called E.I.L Italian: An Audio-Lingual Course available on ERIC for free and legal download with lots of drills and of course, no audio either... you didn't think they'd make it easy for you, did you!
ERIC Blurb wrote:This basic textbook for Italian contains 10 units. The text is adaptable for use in an academic institution (Completion time is expected to be one year.), in an intensive program (completion time is about 90-120 hours.), or in independent study. The vocabulary is limited and only basic, essential, grammatical structures are included.

(I'm just putting these out there for you or others to use if you or they want. They're not critical for learning but they can help supplement other methods, and, they're free.)
Don't worry. You're doing fine. Keep up the great work!
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Re: puzzling over Pimsleur, translation, and a bit of frustration

Postby Le Baron » Fri May 26, 2023 10:29 pm

It's also not always beneficial (if ever) to be listening to something and trying to key into it by rebuilding previously completed grammar lessons in your head on-the-fly. For learned grammar to work it has to have been digested and then encountered many times. So as Iguanamon says: repetition.
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Re: puzzling over Pimsleur, translation, and a bit of frustration

Postby miket12 » Sat May 27, 2023 1:34 am

This is good information, thanks for it and the encouragement!

Extra repetition makes sense. I was able to use open.ai to create example sentences in both the past perfect and past imperfect tenses and it is able to create them in Quizlet format so I can just import and practice.
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Re: puzzling over Pimsleur, translation, and a bit of frustration

Postby Kraut » Sat May 27, 2023 11:51 am

Some nice tools to play with

-EDGE Browser

-https://de.pons.com/text-%C3%BCbersetzung/italienisch-englisch, also has the voices
additionally you can use Edge's voices

-"Simple Translate" will translate English texts to Italian and Italian Texts to English at one click (Google or Deepl)
https://www.bing.com/search?q=%22Simple ... 01&PC=U531
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Re: puzzling over Pimsleur, translation, and a bit of frustration

Postby leosmith » Mon Jun 05, 2023 4:47 am

miket12 wrote:I've been using Pimsleur Italian and reading a grammar book as I work to learn some Italian for a trip. I'm on level 3 and find it to be increasingly difficult to come up with the responses in the allotted time.
Did you mean lesson 3? Level three would mean you already did 60 lessons, so it would be strange if you just began to have these issues now imo.
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Re: puzzling over Pimsleur, translation, and a bit of frustration

Postby Pikaia » Mon Jun 05, 2023 1:45 pm

leosmith wrote:
miket12 wrote:I've been using Pimsleur Italian and reading a grammar book as I work to learn some Italian for a trip. I'm on level 3 and find it to be increasingly difficult to come up with the responses in the allotted time.
Did you mean lesson 3? Level three would mean you already did 60 lessons, so it would be strange if you just began to have these issues now imo.

What is weird about that? I had no issues with spitting out responses in time until 2/3 of the way through Pimsleur French Level 4, 110 lessons in.

Also I've noticed errors in the later levels of some older Pimsleur recordings. (The newest versions of French & Spanish have errors starting at Level 1, so I cancelled the online subscription and went back to the older versions my library owns.) But by Level 3, even the older French and Spanish occassionally throw in a verb that hasn't yet been introduced, or they forget to splice in the minimal time required to respond to a prompt.
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Re: puzzling over Pimsleur, translation, and a bit of frustration

Postby leosmith » Mon Jun 05, 2023 5:14 pm

Pikaia wrote:I had no issues with spitting out responses in time until 2/3 of the way through Pimsleur French Level 4, 110 lessons in.
Sounds like a problem with the course.
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