Italy or bust (2016 Italian mission)

[garyb]

I definitely agree about learning Italian through French, and how seeing the similarities and differences between related languages helps you separate them. That's what I did (I used Michel Thomas first but after that I worked through the French-base basic and advanced Assimils) and I believe that helped me get quite conversational quite quickly.

[tastyonions]

Lessons 11 and 61 in Assimil today.

Yesterday while cooking dinner I was listening to RAI 6 and I discovered an excellent radio program for anyone who is learning Italian and would like some slow and clear yet interesting native content. It's called "Alle otto della sera": http://www.alleottodellasera.rai.it/

Each program features a single expert in a particular subject expounding on the topic. There are cultural, historical, philosophical, and scientific topics, and many of the programs have many parts. Each episode is about thirty minutes long, including some musical interludes.

[tastyonions]

Lessons 13 and 62 in Assimil today.

I have been adding about fifteen or twenty cards to Anki per day. Most of them are French -> Italian but I mix in some cloze cards to work on prepositions as well.

Today I was checking out a video on the Treccani channel on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbQN-wpIXc

For the most part I was simply listening, since I was at work. I thought that one of the panelists was an anglophone because of his accent, but then I looked at his name card in the video and found that he was Swedish, ha! I have actually made the same mistake before when hearing other natives of Nordic languages speak Spanish. Maybe if I ever learn Norwegian I will be able to make finer distinctions.

[tastyonions]

Lessons 14 and 63 in Assimil this morning. I also had a session with my Italian tutor. She had me describe the events in the first two parts of a story that I had read beforehand. It was about a guy's trip to Florence, so we went on some tangents in the conversation about trips I had taken elsewhere and "il calcio fiorentino," which I had not realized from the story was a different thing than "il calcio" simpliciter. I can feel my fluency slowly improving from week to week, though there are still tons of mistakes and holes that I tend to fill with calques from French or Spanish. Onward and upward!

[tastyonions]

I'm visiting my parents for the holidays in Texas. Have a couple of lessons scheduled, one in Spanish and the other in Italian, that will take place while I'm here.

Assimil and Anki progress is still right on track. Lessons 16 and 65 today.

Man, talk about "fighting interference." I was just in a Verbling Italian group and I was the only one there who had any Italian to speak of. There was a Brazilian guy who was speaking a mix of Spanish and Portuguese to me and I was trying my hardest to respond to him in Italian without slipping into Spanish myself. Definitely a challenge.

[tastyonions]

Still on track with Assimil every day. I've decided to continue with "Italian With Ease," but only do the active part since I am finding that redoing the passive wave has been really easy anyway, and start "Perfectionnement Italien" to help kick up my passive skills. So today was IWI lesson 20 (active) and PI lesson 1.

I ordered my first Italian book. It's the 2015 edition of the "Libro dell'anno" series from Treccani: http://www.amazon.it/Treccani-Il-libro- ... 812005276/

Should give me lots of vocabulary for discussing current events and politics.

[tastyonions]

Still basically on track with my two Assimil Italian books; I think I missed a day during Christmas vacation. Today is lesson 31 in IWE and lesson 10 in PI. I have yet to look at the text for lesson 10 today but I listened to it and it sounds like a tough one. There were a few whole sentences where I got basically nothing.

As I mentioned in another thread, I bought a better microphone yesterday, which I have set up. I'll make some recordings of myself speaking Italian and post them here soon.