Learning Italian

Meet my new best friend! – the Duolingo owl.

I haven't posted since the opening post [link], and don't expect to post very frequently for some months yet, because frankly not much is happening on our end toward the pilgrimage. I did purchase Rick Steve's Italy 2014 a couple of months ago, and have skimmed in it from time to time, including putting little thumb-tab markers on the sections having to do with our destinations, and Anne has done quite a bit of Internet research on the places we will be going – a lot of Youtube videos posted by other travellers – but beyond that basically at this point we've paid our money and are just in the “process” of THE LONG WAIT. Yes, anticipation is growing, slowly, and I trust that behind the scenes Magnificat is doing all kinds of work toward our trip, but other than that....

Oh, with the new year, Anne and I started trying to get in somewhat better shape. I'm not going to speak for her ;-), but I've managed to pack back on basically all the weight I lost ten years ago, which is not good at all, and I can definitely feel it. So we're both trying to eat healthier (the holidays always hit me hard), and pretty soon we will start a walking regimen. I like to walk a roughly two-mile course in the neighborhood basically at the crack of dawn – it's a good way to wake me up – but right now the mornings are just too bloody cold or rainy. Not every morning, of course, but I am a creature of habit to the point of obsessive-compulsive, and if I can't be pretty sure of doing it every morning, I just can't make myself do it some mornings. So right now I'm getting up and doing a mixture of calisthenics – pushups, ab crunches, “leg curls” (pulling my knees up to my chest – or as far as they will come with my gut in the way), deep knee bends, lunges, jumping-jacks. I also want to somehow get back into doing the kata I had learned back when I was training in karate. I sure thought I'd never forget those, that they were too thoroughly ingrained to ever go away, but guess what? – I was wrong. I kept them up for a year or two after bowing out of the dojo at a second-level brown-belt,* but then a summer came and laziness took over, and a few months later when I tried to pick them back up – Ooops. That was now about two years ago. I need to contact one of my old fellow karate-men and get them to demonstrate the kata I had learned all over again – I bet they'll come back to me pretty quickly. Maybe I'm wrong about that, too. Given the steadily advancing capabilities of technology, I could even film video clips of each on my iPhone.

Which all – very typically for me – rambles far away from what actually sat me down to write a post! Which is the other think I've started doing in long-term prepping for the trip, learning at least some Italian. Sure, we're going to be an English-speaking tour group, and just about everybody in Europe has at least some English, especially if they deal with “tourists,” but I'd like to be able to have at least some interaction with Italians in their own language. Maybe pick up a newspaper and have at least some idea what it's saying. Of course, I'm too cheap to invest in a full-blown Rosetta Stone course. And Italian is not even taught at NSU for me to sit in on informally. So I started looking for something free on the Internet. Actually, it was a student who ended up cluing me in on Duolingo, a free app for the iPhone (and the iPad) that is FANTASTIC.

I've been working with Duolingo for a couple of weeks now, and I'm convinced that this is the absolute best and easiest introduction to a language that there could be. It's highly interactive, working with all aspects of the language – visual, reading, listening, writing, speaking – in a very effective mix of exercises that build on each other. It allows for frequent review and exercises to strengthen retention of the bits of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary that have been covered to whatever point you've advanced. I don't know how deep into the language it will eventually go, and I'm sure it ultimately will only give a foundation – it is free, after all! – but I am confident that at the end of the course I will have a firm foundation for further development. This isn't the first time I've studied a language – I had two years of French in high school, had courses in French and German for reading knowledge in graduate school, along with a similar course in Latin (and even did one of my doctoral minor fields in Medieval Latin Language and Literature, which got me enough post-graduate hours to teach Intro Latin for a couple of years in a girls' prep school as well as one semester in college); I self-taught myself enough Old English to do what little original research I had to for my dissertation in Anglo-Saxon history; and have tinkered with other languages from time to time (Welsh, Old Irish, Greek, even Klingon and Elvish!), including Italian, without making much progress, if only because it was “for play” (really, the only language I have kept any kind of semi-fluency in is Latin, although every once in a while I pick something up in French and surprise myself that I can still basically "gist" it as long as it's not too complex) – but I say with no hesitation now that I feel I am making faster, more effective progress in Italian with Duolingo than I ever have in any other language in any context at any time in my life.

As I said above, Duolingo is available as iPhone and iPad apps – I just checked and it's also available as an Android app. I've been using both the iPhone and iPad apps interchangeably – it keeps your place in your account, not on the device – and it's just as easy on either, pretty much the same, in fact. I just checked and there's also a web site [http://www.duolingo.com/] that seems to have a few features not available on the apps but I haven't tinkered around with them. In any case, there are some kind of rewards and bonuses that you can earn, and use to buy … well, not much of anything – I'm not really bothering with that so far either. I'm here to learn Italian, not put clothes on the owl! (Little bugger can stay naked for all I care – some friend I am!) Finally, to keep you on track, Duolingo sends you regular emails reminding you that the best way to learn a language is to work at it steadily, every day. That's true, and the other thing keeping me from advancing very far in any of my other linguistic endeavors has been that I will hit it hard and heavy for a few days, maybe even a couple of weeks, then …. Hopefully that reminder will help keep me going.

Here are a few screen shots from my iPhone to give you a sense of the various exercises.

Drag and drop.  One thing I think they could improve is the fact that capitalization of certain words in the bank below automatically narrows down what the first word in the sentence can be....

Tap and talk.  It also may be a little too forgiving of slurred words and outright mispronunciations, but it has occasionally made me repeat myself so it won't let just anything go....

You can tap the speaker to make it repeat -- and the turtle makes it repeat it slowly, word by word.  Bet you can't do that on a Roman street!

It can distinguish between real mistakes and typos.

Better than Bitcoins!  (Probably really worth more, too....)

Ciao!

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* Why make it so far and then quit? One reason was that I grew tired of hurting all the time. Something was sore, bruised or pulled or sprained, all the time. That gets old. The other reason was that, well, karate is a martial art – it's about fighting – and I sucked at that side of it. Like in many other areas of my life, I can be really good at the theoretical side of things (i.e., kata, practice drills, etc.) but absolutely inept at practical application. (For instance, I was great in the classroom or the office as an engineer, my now-thirty-years-past first career, but I have no natural feel for it at all, being all thumbs and clueless in the lab or on the plant floor with the workers who had a thousand times more practical knowledge than did I. And knew it.) Karate is not, as I was treating it, “exercise with benefits” (the reward of advancement in rank and a new belt). Perhaps I could have pressed on to a black belt based on form while getting my butt kicked in fighting during the black belt test, which I could have been at in about six to nine more months, and there was even talk of testing me on form alone, but I ultimately could not reconcile my feeling that I would not truly deserve the honor of a black belt, especially if I didn't even fight for it. So I bowed out gracefully. I have thought at times about going back, then a) I remember how much I ached all the time; and b) a year or so after quitting I had the heart attack, and am now on Plavix. Even accidental blows to the head when you're on blood thinners are not a good idea. One of my fellows – ten years older than myself, but a wiry little guy, not overweight like me – went from start to finish (and, as far as I know, still trains – I haven't talked to him in a year or so) while on blood thinners, but the risk of a brain bleed is worth it to him. It's not to me. (Finally, and I'm not going to say much about this, but there are aspects of the “black belt culture” that don't really fit my personality, and as I got closer and closer to it, I grew less and less comfortable with it. Don't ask, I'm not going to elaborate.)