Italian study group

An area with study groups for various languages. Group members help each other, share resources and experience. Study groups are permanent but the members rotate and change.
Haiku D'etat
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Re: Italian study group

Postby Haiku D'etat » Fri Dec 13, 2019 10:52 pm

mentecuerpo wrote:By the way, I unlocked the RAI TV with a dedicated Italian IP address.
I paid two years upfront, but I got an Italian dedicated IP that is exclusively for my use. I can watch Netflix Italy and unblock the Rai TV.
I will cost you $$ but to me, it is all worth it.

https://torguard.net/


Are there many subtitled (in Italian) shows on there? What is the quality? I'm interested in getting a subscription but I'd prefer having the option of subs. I can only access Un Posto Al Sole from the UK, but I find that far too difficult without subtitles.
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mentecuerpo
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Re: Italian study group

Postby mentecuerpo » Fri Dec 13, 2019 11:50 pm

Haiku D'etat wrote:
mentecuerpo wrote:By the way, I unlocked the RAI TV with a dedicated Italian IP address.
I paid two years upfront, but I got an Italian dedicated IP that is exclusively for my use. I can watch Netflix Italy and unblock the Rai TV.
I will cost you $$ but to me, it is all worth it.

https://torguard.net/


Are there many subtitled (in Italian) shows on there? What is the quality? I'm interested in getting a subscription but I'd prefer having the option of subs. I can only access Un Posto Al Sole from the UK, but I find that far too difficult without subtitles.


Netflix Italy that you can access with the VPN service offered by Torguard dedicated italian IP address will unlock Rai.it, but the content in rai.it is made for Italians so most likely will not have subtitles. Netflix Italian will offer many more language combinations including subtitles. Rai.it is suitable for A2 and above. On the other hand, the more you watch original content the easier it gets over time.
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Lianne
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Re: Italian study group

Postby Lianne » Sat Dec 14, 2019 10:36 pm

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!
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reineke
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Re: Italian study group

Postby reineke » Sun Dec 15, 2019 12:05 am

Peppa Pig! Peppa Pig!
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garyb
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Re: Italian study group

Postby garyb » Sun Dec 15, 2019 1:53 am

Lianne wrote: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!

As someone who learnt Italian after French, I'd say you're very well covered already! French definitely gives you a huge head-start. Even after a few weeks of studying Italian I could mostly follow easier input like news radio and documentaries and understand the gist of my Italian friends' conversations, which got some amusing reactions. I picked up the basics pretty quickly and I believe that Le nouvel italien sans peine was a key to my success. After that and the first half of Perfectionnement Italien I was quite conversational; I still struggled a bit with understanding colloquial speech, but films and TV helped with that. I'm not sure about in Canada but here in the UK at least the selection of native Italian content on Netflix is very limited (a small handful of films and a couple of good but very challenging series with a lot of Roman dialect) so you might need to look elsewhere for that. Dubbing opens up your options and is great for getting lots of comprehensible input, but the speech in them usually feels unnatural and too "clean" compared to how Italians really speak so native content becomes essential as you get more advanced. Not worth worrying about just yet of course, but keep it in mind.

I used Michel Thomas and some of Pimsleur too before Assimil, although Pimsleur just felt too slow after a while so I stopped it. They're good resources if you want to feel quick progress at the start and gain a superficial yet useful speaking knowledge earlier on, since they focus on structure and common expressions, while Assimil is more of a slow-and-steady delayed-gratification method suited to someone who already knows some basics. For someone who already knows French and doesn't need or want to speak immediately, stuff like Pimsleur and MT is maybe overkill, but you might as well use what you can get from the library.

Enjoy Italian!
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Haiku D'etat
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Languages: British English (N); Italian (B1)
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Re: Italian study group

Postby Haiku D'etat » Fri Dec 27, 2019 7:01 am

mentecuerpo wrote:
Haiku D'etat wrote:
mentecuerpo wrote:By the way, I unlocked the RAI TV with a dedicated Italian IP address.
I paid two years upfront, but I got an Italian dedicated IP that is exclusively for my use. I can watch Netflix Italy and unblock the Rai TV.
I will cost you $$ but to me, it is all worth it.

https://torguard.net/


Are there many subtitled (in Italian) shows on there? What is the quality? I'm interested in getting a subscription but I'd prefer having the option of subs. I can only access Un Posto Al Sole from the UK, but I find that far too difficult without subtitles.


Netflix Italy that you can access with the VPN service offered by Torguard dedicated italian IP address will unlock Rai.it, but the content in rai.it is made for Italians so most likely will not have subtitles. Netflix Italian will offer many more language combinations including subtitles. Rai.it is suitable for A2 and above. On the other hand, the more you watch original content the easier it gets over time.


There's an entire category on Rai.it dedicated to subtitles - https://www.raiplay.it/genere/Programmi ... b989a.html

I struggle with content made by native speakers, for native speakers, so I find it interesting that you'd consider Rai suitable for A2 and above. I've been watching Un Posto Al Sole regularly for a couple of years now, and some of the rapid speech escapes me.

On that subject, does anyone know of resources that have naturalistic speech that comes with transcripts? I found Ci Vuole Orecchio by Alma Edizioni to be very useful in decoding connected words, but I've exhausted that resource by now.
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mentecuerpo
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Re: Italian study group

Postby mentecuerpo » Fri Dec 27, 2019 4:42 pm

Haiku D'etat wrote:There's an entire category on Rai.it dedicated to subtitles - https://www.raiplay.it/genere/Programmi ... b989a.html

I struggle with content made by native speakers, for native speakers, so I find it interesting that you'd consider Rai suitable for A2 and above. I've been watching Un Posto Al Sole regularly for a couple of years now, and some of the rapid speech escapes me.

On that subject, does anyone know of resources that have naturalistic speech that comes with transcripts? I found Ci Vuole Orecchio by Alma Edizioni to be very useful in decoding connected words, but I've exhausted that resource by now.


The problem is not just rapid speech but also idiomatic expressions, and many times Italian dialect comes out.

On the other hand, I think that listening to conversations in movies and video clips and reading the transcript can make a massive impact on learning to understand and speak the language.

I have a subscription to Yabla Italian, Yabla French, and Yabla German. By far, Yabla Italian is the best of the three; it has tons of short original Italian language content clips, with the transcript in Italian and English. The transcripts are high quality, unfortunately, Yabla may be expensive, but it is all worth it if you use it consistently. Each episode last one to two minutes.

Listening to dialogues and reading the transcript can be as important as reading books to gain vocabulary. There is a considerable advantage of conversations provided in audio and video clips over books. With video, you are learning vocabulary that you can use in your daily interactions with natives. Books have many words that increase your vocabulary but, because the dialogues are limited, you may not get the same ratio of "street vocabulary" by reading books as video clips provide. Even if you have an audiobook, it may not have enough conversations. Therefore, the movies and video clips are most about conversation and dialogues between characters, less narrative content like what you find in a book.
Last edited by mentecuerpo on Fri Dec 27, 2019 11:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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mentecuerpo
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Location: El Salvador, Centroamerica, but lives in Phoenix, Arizona.
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Re: Italian study group

Postby mentecuerpo » Fri Dec 27, 2019 5:09 pm

Il Commissario Manara - S2EP9 - L'amica ritrovata - Part 14 View Series View This Episode
Difficulty: difficulty - Adv-Intermediate Adv-Intermediate Italy
Marta and Luca manage to figure out what happened, and Luca tells the story to his boss, Casadio. Manara gets out of the office with the excuse of a physical therapy session.

I also like Provaci Ancora Prof!

You can watch Il Commisario Manara and Provaci Ancora Prof! in rai.it extensive style and use Yabla for the intensive one.

Il commisario uses more idiomatic expressions and it is harder to understand compared to Provaci Ancora Prof, which uses cleaner Italian.

Have fun.
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synalepha
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Re: Italian study group

Postby synalepha » Sun Dec 29, 2019 8:47 pm

Hello everybody. I'm new to this forum. If you don't mind, I'd like to share some of my favorite channels from YouTube Italia that you might find interesting too and keep your motivation high:

Rick DuFer (philosophy) he also has a very interesting podcast called Daily Cogito that can be found on other platforms too.

Mortebianca (philosophy)

Ilenia Zodiaco (literature)

Zoosparkle (zoology)

Barbascura X (mainly about gross science)

Entropy for Life (biology)

WesaChannel (communication)

Barbaroffa (communication)

GioPizzi (politics and current events)

Caleel (nerdy stuff)

Barbie Xanax (cinema)

victorlazslo88 (cinema)

CARTONI MORTI (animation)

cimdrp (mainly about feminism and LGBT+ issues)

link4universe (physics, astronomy) warning: the guy has a foreign accent although extremely slight.
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synalepha
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Ladin of the Dolomites (advanced)
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Re: Italian study group

Postby synalepha » Mon Dec 30, 2019 5:12 pm

Also, there's this group of authors that releases most of their books for free, which you can download here. They're very talented writers who tend to be considered one of the most important literary phenomena of the last 30 years.
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