I will be starting Italian in just 18 days (in the new year), and have already started to gather some resources, so I figured it was time to introduce myself in the Italian study group, since I might be here a lot soon.
A bit on my little background with Italian: In 2006 I went on my high school Europe trip to Italy and France, equipped with an Italian phrasebook my sister gave me. I knew nothing whatsoever of language learning at the time, but loved my days in Italy and the sound of the language, and used my handful of phrases every chance I got. That fall when I started university, I took Introduction to Italian, but sadly I had to drop it after just a couple of months, because my course load was nuts and I just couldn't handle it. I never studied Italian again, but my interest in language learning had been piqued. So this time I'll be coming at it with a lot more experience, and with intermediate French.
My plan is to study Italian using both French and English resources, because I want some of the benefits of laddering but don't want to restrict myself so much by eliminating English resources altogether. I've been studying French on and off for, umm, my whole life lol, but daily in 2019, and I've seen some major progress. So my hope is that my French skills will help me a lot in Italian, since they share so much in common.
Some of the resources I'm planning to use either right away or pretty soon:
- Duolingo French -> Italian
- Assimil Le nouvel italien sans peine
- Pimsleur Italian (though my library doesn't even have all of level 1, just a bunch of different versions that have varying numbers of lessons, the highest apparently being lessons 1-16)
- Learning with Texts (probably getting material from Italian Wikipedia)
- my public library has a small selection of Italian kids' books, and a bigger selection of adult books, so we'll see how soon I'm ready for those
- Italian Netflix shows (original and dubbed, probably starting with Peppa Pig)
I'll probably spend some time soon reading the logs of people studying Italian, but if there's something you think is essential for someone just starting out, please let me know!