Ellie's Italian Log

[EllieJoONM]

Wednesday 2nd September 2015

Today my placement finished very early so I had a lot of time to dedicate to Italian. Here's what I did:

Assimil - Lesson 10. I'm putting all the new words that I don't know into an Anki deck.
Teach Yourself Improve Your Italian - Session 3. This and the previous two lessons are covering 'mi piace,' which I already know about, but I have learnt a lot of new words for hobbies so it hasn't been completely wasted.
La via grammatica - Chapters 1 and 2.
iTalki - I submitted a free writing exercise about my hobbies to be corrected.

Here is my corrected composition:

Mi piace...

Nel mio tempo libero mi piace fare molte cose. Innanzitutto, devo dire che il mio passatempo preferito è lavorare a maglia. Mia mamma mi ha insegnato a lavorare a maglia quando ero piccola, ma l'ho ripreso solo recentemente. Al momento sto facendo un paio di calzini per me.

Mi piace anche leggere, specialmente i gialli. Mi piacciono molto i libri di Agatha Christie. Studiando l'italiano, provo a leggere i libri italiani, ma li trovo ancora difficili. Al momento, sto leggendo 'La fabbrica di cioccolato' in italiano. Non so molte parole, ma conosco la storia a memoria.

Infine mi piace cucinare, particolarmente cuocere al forno. C'è una programma alla televisione che si chiama 'The Great British Bake-Off'. Mi piace molto.

[Sarnek]

Ciao Ellie e benvenuta nel forum.

First of all, I wish you the best of luck with learning Italian. For some reason, it always fills my heart with joy when someone wants to learn my native language.

Now, there's a mistake in your corrected post which probably wasn't noticed: [...] ma li trovo ancora difficili [...]. If wanted to be extremely fussy I could also point out that it would be better to use "conoscere" instead of "sapere" in "Non so molte parole, ma so la storia a memoria" -> "Non conosco molte parole, ma conosco la storia a memoria".
I don't think it's a mistake to use sapere in that case, but to my hears it just sounds better with conoscere for some reason.

[dampingwire]

If wanted to be extremely fussy I could also point out that it would be better to use "conoscere" instead of "sapere" in "Non so molte parole, ma so la storia a memoria" -> "Non conosco molte parole, ma conosco la storia a memoria".
I don't think it's a mistake to use sapere in that case, but to my hears it just sounds better with conoscere for some reason.

"Conosco la storia" does indeed sound a bit better (imho). I'd lean towards "non so molte parole", but you pays your money and you takes your choice I guess.

BTW: I noticed that you are only about 4 degrees further north than I am, so you might want to look into getting a satellite dish and pointing it at the Hotbird/Eutelsat system (near enough to the Astra system used by Sky that you can just aim in the same general direction as everyone else's dish and tweak from there ...). That way you can try out about 20 or so reasonable Italian channels, including RAI1,2&3.

[EllieJoONM]

Thanks both of you, I've corrected the text in my original post.

Thursday 3rd September

Today was a busy day so I didn't have much time to practise my Italian. Here's what I did manage to achieve:

Assimil - Lesson 11.
Anki
Read another chapter of 'La guerra dei gatti romani', an Italian book designed for A1 level learners.