Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

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StringerBell
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Re: Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

Postby StringerBell » Sat Sep 15, 2018 10:25 pm

Thank you, @cjareck, I may take you up on that offer of help if I get stuck!

I am excited to have this movie to watch. I recently realized that I'm not watching any TV/movies or listening to any music in Polish. I think it's time to do this. Part of me is a little nervous that it will be over my head, but I'm realizing that I understand way more than I give myself credit for.

I've been on a hunt for some good Polish music and so far I've found one song that I really like: "Cicho" by Ewa Farna. There doesn't seem to be an official video, but on youtube I found the song with the lyrics, which was very helpful. I learned a few fun phrases. I bought the song through iTunes so I can listen to it a million times and get sick of it!

Last edited by StringerBell on Sun Sep 16, 2018 8:35 pm, edited 6 times in total.
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cjareck
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Re: Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

Postby cjareck » Sat Sep 15, 2018 10:31 pm

I do not listen to contemporary music, so I can not help you in that matter. But if you wish to hear some old Polish patriotic and/or religious songs, just let me know ;)
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StringerBell
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Re: Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

Postby StringerBell » Sun Sep 16, 2018 8:32 pm

I wanted to take a moment to share some really cool videos that I've been using for a while on Youtube. I believe similar types of videos are available in many languages. They are short (4-5 minutes) and have real-time drawings of the concepts the narrator is explaining. It seems especially easy to find channels like this for science concepts, personal growth, and book reviews, but I bet that they exist for other topics.

I click the "CC" button to get auto generated subtitles, which seem to be very accurate. Today I copied all the text for the 5 minute Polish video I linked and looked up any unfamiliar words. I surprised myself by how much I knew and how well I understood. I also learned some fun phrases (which hopefully I understood correctly) like "kanapowcem" (couch potato) and "sprowadza się" (it boils down to / it comes down to)

I love videos like these because (1) they are really easy to follow even if I'm missing words because the illustrations explain visually what the narrator is describing, (2) they are really interesting, (3) they are short, yet I can do a lot with them, and (4) it's a good way to get used to the fast pace of native speech and pick up a lot of useful vocab. I even watch a channel like this in my native language (FightMediocrity, video at bottom)

Here are some of the ones I've been using:

POLISH:
Channel is called: Nieprzeciętne Życie


ITALIAN:
Channel is called: MinutiDellaTerra


ITALIAN:
Channel is called: SCIENZIATI subito


ENGLISH:
Channel is called: FightMediocrity
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Jaleel10
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Re: Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

Postby Jaleel10 » Mon Sep 17, 2018 7:09 am

StringerBell wrote:
Another thing I would suggest is to prioritize reading shorter stuff like informal articles vs. books. The benefits of this are:

(1) They are shorter, so there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, and finishing an article gives a sense of accomplishment as opposed to a never-ending book,

(2) The language tends to be more straight-forward and more practical, they tend to be written more like how people speak rather than books, which use a lot of literary language. I’m noticing that a lot of vocab and expressions I’m learning from articles are popping up in podcasts.

If you have a hard time finding a good source of articles on topics you’re interested in, you can try searching the Spanish WikiHow for How--To articles on something you are interested in or already know how to do (like how to get rid of a wasp nest, how to light a fire, how to train a dog, etc...). Even reading through twitter feeds, instagram posts, etc… is really useful because people tend to write those the way they speak. After reading this kind of stuff for a while, I think the books will become a lot easier.

When I first started reading articles, it was really challenging and it would take me a good hour to get through one. After a few weeks of reading these daily I can now blow through one in about 10 minutes, even with stopping to look up + copy+paste the occasional new expression into my list. So there is a real sense that I’ve made measurable improvements.


I really needed to read this. I wanted to move onto a young adult novel in the coming weeks but I read the opening chapter and in the very first sentence the dreaded imperfect subjunctive was used lol. I came across a few grammar constructions that I spent too much time 1) deciphering the sentences and 2) translating to English. This stresses me out more than it should because technically I am on a break from active studies :lol:

I have tons of informal material to read in Spanish, I guess I should just make a habit of reading them lol As soon as I finish the manga I am reading now, I'll try to read an article a day + a few tweets from the personalities I follow (because I swear I learn 10 new things a day on Twitter haha) and bump it up as I get more comfortable. The novel can wait.
Thanks, StringerBell

Oh and Polish is on my bucketlist, so it's nice to see someone studying the language and to have someone through whom I can live vicariously :lol: Good luck with your studies!
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Re: Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

Postby garyb » Mon Sep 17, 2018 9:25 am

Jaleel10 wrote:I really needed to read this. I wanted to move onto a young adult novel in the coming weeks but I read the opening chapter and in the very first sentence the dreaded imperfect subjunctive was used lol.


The imperfect subjunctive in Spanish and Italian is very much everyday language, so if it seems "dreaded" that's perhaps a hole in your knowledge of the basics that needs to be plugged. Spanish does have the second form (-ase etc.) that's less common in speech so might seem a bit scary when you encounter it, but it's still heard in daily speech (in Spain at least) and the two forms are grammatically equivalent.

I read novels because I enjoy them, but I do often think they're not the best resource for an intermediate learner and I might be wasting time with them when more "practical" material like articles can be better. It also depends on the book: dialogue is more useful than narration, and simple narration is more useful than very descriptive language, and some books are heavier on one than the others.
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Jaleel10
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Re: Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

Postby Jaleel10 » Mon Sep 17, 2018 9:44 am

garyb wrote:The imperfect subjunctive in Spanish and Italian is very much everyday language, so if it seems "dreaded" that's perhaps a hole in your knowledge of the basics that needs to be plugged. Spanish does have the second form (-ase etc.) that's less common in speech so might seem a bit scary when you encounter it, but it's still heard in daily speech (in Spain at least) and the two forms are grammatically equivalent.

I read novels because I enjoy them, but I do often think they're not the best resource for an intermediate learner and I might be wasting time with them when more "practical" material like articles can be better. It also depends on the book: dialogue is more useful than narration, and simple narration is more useful than very descriptive language, and some books are heavier on one than the others.


I might have been a bit over dramatic haha, it's more of a case that I have to think about why and how it's used - each time! Same with the past tenses. I understand their rules, I just need to see it more in context :oops: Oh and according to the Cervantes curriculum, Past Subjunctive is B2 Spanish so I don't feel too bad ;)

I think my problem could also stem from the fact that I was never a big reader, I never liked it. This might sound weird on a forum with a bunch of language learners, but not counting school, I have only ever read TWO novels in my life. It's only last year when I began to try and develop better daily habits that I started reading. It's something that never appealed to me in Afrikaans or English so it's hard finding the motivation to do it Spanish :lol: I have developed a good habit with my daily reading (in my native languages) so I am sure I will eventually develop it for Spanish as well.
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StringerBell
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Re: Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

Postby StringerBell » Mon Sep 17, 2018 6:24 pm

Jaleel10 wrote:Oh and Polish is on my bucketlist, so it's nice to see someone studying the language and to have someone through whom I can live vicariously.


Do you mind if I ask why Polish is on your bucket list? It seems like not many people choose to study this language (perhaps because it has a reputation for being so difficult) and most who do have some connection to it, as in their family came from Poland at some point or they moved to Poland, are dating a Polish person, etc... It's exciting to run into other people who have a desire to learn this language!
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Jaleel10
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Re: Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

Postby Jaleel10 » Mon Sep 17, 2018 7:11 pm

StringerBell wrote:
Jaleel10 wrote:Oh and Polish is on my bucketlist, so it's nice to see someone studying the language and to have someone through whom I can live vicariously.


Do you mind if I ask why Polish is on your bucket list? It seems like not many people choose to study this language (perhaps because it has a reputation for being so difficult) and most who do have some connection to it, as in their family came from Poland at some point or they moved to Poland, are dating a Polish person, etc... It's exciting to run into other people who have a desire to learn this language!


Well at the moment I have strange reasons for the languages on my bucket list :? Polish isn't too outlandish though. I basically fell in love with the language while playing Poland's 'greatest export' The Witcher 3, my favourite video game of all time and eventually I began reading the series of books it was based on. I immediately began deep diving into the lore of the games and the books and became completely enamoured by Polish folklore, culture, history and eventually the language.By the time I was knee-deep in my umpteenth Wikipedia article and YT video, I realised that I was so far removed from the what got me there in the first place haha But it was amazing, this made my decision for me - I was going to learn Polish! It would be so awesome to experience it all in Polish! And Polish sounds so beautiful.

Heck, if it wasn't for the fact that I wanted to achieve a high level in Spanish, I'd have worked Polish into my schedule. I had the MT course, short stories + audio and grammar book all ready lol but decided to stick to the straight and narrow.

It might not be the strongest reason to learn such a difficult language but hey ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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StringerBell
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Re: Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

Postby StringerBell » Thu Sep 20, 2018 10:07 pm

Jaleel10 wrote:Well at the moment I have strange reasons for the languages on my bucket list :? Polish isn't too outlandish though. I basically fell in love with the language while playing Poland's 'greatest export' The Witcher 3, my favourite video game of all time and eventually I began reading the series of books it was based on.


The Witcher is my husband's all-time favorite game ;)
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Re: Italian + Polish with comprehensible input

Postby StringerBell » Thu Sep 20, 2018 10:30 pm

POLISH update:

-At this point, I have officially spoken for 5 hours. (Possibly more, but this is what I can definitely account for). Some things I've noticed in this short amount of time:

The first conversation was extremely difficult. I had to speak word...by...word. It was painfully slow. One reason was that every time I thought about what I wanted to say, my brain immediately thought about saying it in Italian, and I had to continuously tell myself, "nope, wrong language, POLISH damn you!" Fast forward ~2 weeks and in my 5th hour of speaking, I had an extremely complex 1-hour conversation with my mom discussing the many health benefits and safety of Kratom and the nefarious DEA who is essentially in the process of illegalizing a bunch of harmless natural substances because now that pot is becoming legal they have less and less to do and are desperately attempting to justify their existence.

I had to come up with work-arounds for a few things I didn't know how to say, I had to say some things much more simplistically than I would have in English, and I'm sure there were grammatical mistakes by the truckload, but I was able to discuss an extremely complex topic totally in Polish. I even used a word that I'd just seen for the first time early that same day, so my memory isn't total crap after all. Rather than thinking word-by-word, I thought in phrases and sentences, and the only time Italian got in the way was when I let slip "lui" instead of "on" for "he". Otherwise, I didn't have any interference from Italian.

What's the take-away?

I think that I've been able to make some significant progress because at this point I've got over 800 hours of exposure to the language. I don't think I would have progressed like this by talking right away. Even though I didn't wait until my 1100 hours were done, I did wait until I felt like it was time and I was really ready to start, which made me feel really motivated.

Also, I want to remember the fact that I'm making slow and steady progress, that I can speak better now than I could even just 2 weeks ago, because it's really easy to focus on the things that I can't yet do or say or all the words I keep forgetting. None of those things matter. What does matter is what I can do.

ITALIAN update:
I have been reading articles daily and not speaking too much lately. Just when I was starting to worry that my speaking would start to suffer and I needed to do more, I had a 1/2 hour conversation with my husband in Italian, and he was shocked at how many new words I was using. I think it really has a lot to do with how much reading I've been doing lately - specifically articles - because they are written in a very informal conversational style, and I think they are helping me to acquire sentence structure and new verbs more so than just watching TV shows or listening to podcasts. There's something about seeing a word repeatedly in print that makes it stick better for me.

Also, I had a conversation with my Italian language partner the other day and I used the word "piuttosto" which is a word that I can never seem to understand; it seems like it's used in a bunch of different ways and I can never get a handle on it. I keep asking about it and looking it up but I still don't know what it means. But I found myself saying a sentence and it just really felt like it "fit". I can't even say why, it just felt right. Maybe it's not even important to know what it means as long as I can get a feel for when it works. (Take that, Anki!)
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