hi steve goffman here and today i want
to talk about how i study italian and
how i learned italian
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now
uh i did a video on
what i did to learn german how i study
german how i learned german
to the extent that i speak german
because it's not one of my strongest
languages
now i'm going to do the same with
italian
and
i don't i haven't scoured up all my
bookshelves to find all the books that i
i used for italian but the process was
essentially the same
and that is again
you know i had traveled in italy i had
hitch type in
hitchhike in italy uh with the knowledge
of spanish that i had i was kind of
communicating with people in italy
uh and it's always a language that had
you know a great appeal to me because
italy is such a lovely country there's
so many lovely places to visit and food
and music and lively people and so i
wanted to be good in italian and of
course i wasn't i was communicating
communicating but at a very basic level
so
i can't remember when i decided to
to make a greater effort with my italian
but i will show you some of the things
that i did
so
first of all
the one thing i remember
is that i got a hold of the
linguaphone
series
for italian
and linguaphone is i don't know if they
still exist i guess they do it's
extremely expensive for what it is
because
essentially what you need is text with
audio
and
a glossary that's all you need you don't
need all the exercises it's fashionable
now to have pre-reading questions and
post reading comprehension questions and
all kinds of things that are quite
unnecessary in fact that spoil the
pleasure of reading
uh so there's a lot of useless exercise
stuff in here but
i had to find something for italian so i
don't know if i got a deal on it or if
it was sort of surplus somewhere but i
do know that i went through this
and listened to the audio many many
times and this is before i got into this
you know
the realization that you have to listen
repetitively over and over again
instinctively that's something i did and
i can remember listening when the family
arrived in milan and
vaguely
this would be at least 30 years ago that
i did this so i went through this
now um
then
with my experience in german of finding
you know readers
with glossaries
um you know i found books like this
first
italian reader for adults
and
i have never liked i do have i don't
know where they are here i can find them
you know sort of bilingual books where
you have let's say the italian on the
left hand side and the english on the
right hand side i've never found that
very effective because
what i need is the words the individual
words that i don't understand i don't
want to have to read through the english
to find the spot that corresponds to
where i am in the italian text what i
want is like here's this word i don't
know what it means what does it mean
in former days that meant
you know readers with glossaries as i
showed you for german
the disadvantage is that very often
the word you need is not in their
glossary or
the word that they introduced in the
glossary is a word you already know
so
to a large extent that has now been
made obsolete by online dictionaries by
link and things of that nature but i did
a lot of reading of
and i just couldn't find them but oh
here we have prime letter italian
here's another one but there were lots
more and and
always you know readings with
glossaries now
obviously if you know french if you know
spanish a lot of vocabulary
is freebie in italian
people always make a big deal about
false friends
to me
there's the odd false friend in these
languages it's not a big deal
the
common vocabulary is a much greater
benefit in learning a language and the
odd word that is a false friend you
quickly find out if you use it in the
wrong context and so
you make adjustments but it's false
trends in other words
uh common vocabulary is a good thing not
a bad thing
um but with the italian now
grammar of course this is a great little
grammar book which you go by i go back
to over and over and over again because
all the little pronouns
uh uh
are difficult because they're different
different from what i am used to in
other languages and so you kind of
review the rules and then you watch for
them when you're reading and then you
listen and stuff like that
a big a big boost to my uh italian
was the discovery of il naratore which
is a an audio book publisher very small
based near um
i think he's near uh
verona
but he's up on the hillside
and he's there and he puts out wonderful
audiobooks
and he does a wonderful rendering of uh
ipro messi sposi now
a lot of people especially italian
people they had ipromescis posie which
is a classic of italian literature they
had it at school they don't like it it's
boring but for me it's what i like it's
exotic it's another century it's another
country and of course with uh the
wonderful uh
audiobook version that
maurizio does it's lovely
and i can remember jogging when i was in
palm springs listening to ipro messi's
posey in italian he also does a
wonderful version a wonderful version of
pinocchio and the advantage with both
those texts is that i can import the
text to link i can look up words and
phrases so i'm no longer
you know in many cases you know if you
get a book
like a modern book like this alberto
moravia
uh there won't be
you know you can't just get the digital
text to import in the link but if you're
dealing with um classics you can import
the text
look up words and phrases you can listen
to the audio and and so you're learning
in a way that's agreeable it's easy
that's much easier than struggling with
bilingual textbooks or even books with
with glossaries
so
that was my path with italian
and but i'm not where i want to be in
italian for example if i want to read
umberto ecky echo umberto ecco which i
do
there are too many words that i don't
understand
and so if i start reading them and if i
look through this book i'll see a lot of
underlinings where
you know i underline the word with the
sort of optimistic intention of
eventually looking it up in a dictionary
which i never do
ideally i would be able to read those on
links so i can look up every word
and save words and phrases and learn
them so with that i'll just show you
very briefly
uh
what i have done with italian on link
and and then i'll kind of
finish up with a few words okay let's
have a look at what i've been doing
in link which has really made the
learning of a lang of of any language
including italian a lot easier than it
was 30 years ago when i decided to
improve my level
of italian so if i click on my thumbnail
here
and um
you know i haven't done anything
recently but if i go to my
all time
we'll see that i have 22
500 or 22 236 known words
that i was particularly active
in terms of adding to my known words
total back in 2008
and have been active at various times
uh this is the known words now
if i look at my links created number
there's only five thousand of them
so that the bulk of the words that are
on my known words total
are words that i saw in the text but
didn't need to look up because i knew
them
and so a link eventually
sort of determines what your vocabulary
level is
as you will go about saving words that
you need to learn
uh if i look at words of reading that
i've done on link i haven't read a fair
amount but i've also read a lot of
italian away from link so i think hasn't
been my main
[Music]
place to study italian although
you know 61 000 words
back in the summer i guess the end of
2013 is not insignificant
but uh that gives you so if i look at
the gradual growth of my known words
total
picked up a lot at the beginning and
have continued to increase gradually but
i really haven't been very active so
that's really the
picture of my activity uh when it comes
to
italian on link
so um you know where do i want to get to
with with italian you know i can
communicate in italian
uh to some extent but not as well as i
would like i don't speak it as well as i
would like
i understand quite well
but if i pick up a book like this like
i have actually
uh
i think
i think this is one where i found the
audiobook so i could listen to the
audiobook if i read through it on every
page
i can see because i've underlined them
i can see five or six or so
words that i don't know so i'm not good
enough
in my reading i would like to be better
and if i weren't learning arabic and
persian
then just as with all the other
languages i would love to spend time to
get better
in italian
but i have sort of brought my italian up
to a level where it's not just sort of
semi-spanish it's actually italian
but limited
and but i
am at a situation where if i were to go
to italy or if i had the opportunity or
the need to use the language or have i
just decided to spend a month
indulging in my interest
and the enjoyment that i get from
italian then i could
you know bring it up and and so it's
kind of on the same level as german in
other words a rusty b2
that i could easily bring up to a a
better level of b2 and that's where i
hope to get my languages to
as i continue to explore new languages i
will leave you with a couple of
interviews that i've done in italian so
that you can gauge
you know the
difficulties that i continue to have in
italian thank you for listening