1353 Italian learning hints

Instead of peeping most of the time on the forum I’ll try to contribute with these hints for those who are actively trying to increase their language skills in Italian:

I found somewhere a link to [url]www.wordrefence.com[/url] which is a free online dictionary English to Italian/French/Spanish and vice versa. What I feel very handy when surfing Italian web sites and want to know immediately the meaning of a word is that the program integrates it
self as a tool bar in the Explorer browser with blank area for the word. You can choose to download it as Italian – English which will become the default value -- if you sometimes need the other way around there is a button for that. When enter the word new window will open with the translations -- I leave that open because if you write the word allways on the tool bar new window will be opened every time.

Then there is [url]www.yourdictionary.com[/url] which is much slower to use but has huge amount of all kinds of dictionaries free; they are selling something too.

Then a passive method of watching Italian TV programs but specially dubbed, to you familiar (engl., amer.) soap operas, action series, movies even the dubbing often sounds very funny or irritating, the help of this depends on how everyone learns (everybody knows this ofcourse) but here is my experience:

having taken some courses in Italian and visited several times mainly because of work I couldn’t speak much and understood more but did spend time with Italian collaborators though. Then early ‘90s I broke my leg skiing in Dolomites – got the whole leg casted for
two months - remained in small hotel in the mountain village (May-June) and had nothing else to do than watch TV (without satellite) and sleep.
After that period I got a shorter cast and drove down to Lake Garda to visit a business contact whos English knowledge in total is “knowhow” so I had to speak Italian with this guy and only afterwards I realised that we hour and halfs conversation in Italian.
So my conclusion later was that the passive TV staring had opened the word flow.

End of story.

Hopefully someone has use of this.

Paul

Category
Che significa? - Italian Language Queries

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 10/10/2005 - 14:06

Very smart hints!!
That's what every good teacher should preach.

Francesco
[url]www.learnitalian.bravehost.com[/url]

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 10/10/2005 - 15:59

Thank you for the helpful links. You know what I have to remember is the short vowels sounds for a, e, i, o, u - that has been one of the hardest things for me to not pronounce a long "a" sound, but the sound of a short "a". The other is masculine or feminine I'm getting it, but really, it is difficult. :confused: If you can start at a young age, that would be ideal, I'll just plug along. My goal to be pretty fluent when I return in 2007 for my visit. :D

Peggy

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 10/10/2005 - 16:52

[QUOTE=Sweetpeg]Thank you for the helpful links. You know what I have to remember is the short vowels sounds for a, e, i, o, u - that has been one of the hardest things for me to not pronounce a long "a" sound, but the sound of a short "a". The other is masculine or feminine I'm getting it, but really, it is difficult. :confused: If you can start at a young age, that would be ideal, I'll just plug along. My goal to be pretty fluent when I return in 2007 for my visit. :D

Peggy[/QUOTE]

In what kind of words do you tend to make it long then? There seems to be many with both long and short like casa. Finnish being my mother tongue it helps to pronounce italian because we also pronounce the letters as they are written like italians (some exceptions ofcourse), if it's long vowel we put two letters, like 'casa' would be 'kaasa'.

Well have a nice evening over there :)

Paul

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 10/10/2005 - 17:15

But then there is the word Cassa...which means the place you pay things at. So not sure on that thought.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 10/10/2005 - 18:06

Now that you asked when do I want to make a long vowel sound I can't think of any words :eek: Casa no, because of knowing a little spanish I knew how to pronounce that. Yikes, now I feel put on the spot, but for example and I know how to pronounce this correctly... prego, or grazie of course two I really do know how to pronounce. :p See what I'm trying to say.... I hope?

Peggy :rolleyes:

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 10/11/2005 - 04:07

I've got a CD course that starts with words in english and repeats them twice in Italian. The words are then built up into phrases and sentences with everything repeated twice in Italian. You don't need to look in a book. It starts with basic and progresses to advanced. I'm playing it endlessly in the car (drive a lot for work) and also at night when I'm going to sleep.
Learn in your Car Italian - got it from amazon.co.uk

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 10/11/2005 - 09:16

That would be a good idea - I'm in my car more than any other place besides work - and I could even listen at work. I'll check out amazon and see what they have. Once I hear words it will "click" then I will be able to move on to the reading. I do try to read Italian, but if I'm not sure how to pronounce I feel as though I'm losing a battle. When I do things, I just want to do them right and the best that I can, don't we all :D

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 10/11/2005 - 12:52

I found out that the old-fashioned way works with my students.
Whenever I teach them a new grammar rule, I hand out sentences for translation
from English into Italian. Many of these sentences are really similar, but by the time they have translated 40/50 sentences they have got hold of the grammar without too much studying. It takes some effort at the beginning, but eventually they end up asking me for more practice.

Francesco
[url]www.learnitalian.bravehost.com[/url]

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 10/12/2005 - 03:52

[QUOTE=Francesco]I found out that the old-fashioned way works with my students.
Whenever I teach them a new grammar rule, I hand out sentences for translation
from English into Italian. Many of these sentences are really similar, but by the time they have translated 40/50 sentences they have got hold of the grammar without too much studying. It takes some effort at the beginning, but eventually they end up asking me for more practice.

Francesco
[url]www.learnitalian.bravehost.com[/url][/QUOTE]
At the same time that I bought the CD course, I also bought a book called Verb Drills. This is great. There are loads of practice exercises that hammer home the lessons