Learning an intermediate language - Italian

Hello all,

On my blog I have written articles about difficult and simple languages before and I realized that I didn’t write anything about intermediate languages yet, so I will try to dedicate an entire post to them now. As I mentioned earlier, there are probably much better divisions of languages based on their difficulty. I do not challenge them, but I find that up until now, all the languages that I’ve learned fall into three simple categories: simple, intermediate, difficult – depending on how far a language you already speak at a native/advanced fluency level is from these languages.

For me an intermediate language (or a language that I find to be intermediately difficult to learn) is:

• A language that is outside of my native language group, or outside the language group of a language that I already speak well, but still within the same general family[1]
• The grammar is at least 50% identical with the languages I already speak at an advanced/native fluency level
• Another 30% of concepts present in the grammar are concepts that can also be found in the languages I already speak but are used rarely or formulated in a different way
• At least 10% of grammar concepts are completely alien to me
• There is a large number of cognates in the language, but different pronunciation might leave them unrecognized at first
• The sound system is at least 50% identical[2] with the languages I already speak
• Literal translations are often possible
• Cultural difference is not a substantial issue

From a strictly analytical point of view, if you look at English and Italian for instance, you almost can go as far as saying that they are two distant dialects of Indo-European. They both share large amounts of Latin or Greek based vocabulary, Italian vocabulary has received a lot of influence from English, there are numerous grammar concepts that overlap, a lot of expressions in Italian can be directly translated into English, often literally.

The problem is that there are still way too many differences to allow flawless communication, differences which for instance two people speaking Spanish and Portuguese to each other wouldn’t encounter. In my opinion a more than 20% difference in grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation makes a language an intermediate one.

Italian

Italian is the first intermediate language that I’ve learned to advanced fluency and I will try to base my explanations around it.

In 2005 I went to Italy on an exchange study trip and stayed there for 5 months. I had only a very basic knowledge of Italian when I went there and I know this claim will sound outrageous, but me and all of my friends who really wanted to do so have learned Italian to advanced fluency in 3 and a half - 4 months. I know this exactly because we had oral university exams in a number of university courses where we had to speak and answer questions for 30 minutes each exactly after 3 and a half months after arriving to Italy.

I tried to analyze how we/I did it and these are some of the key reasons:

• We were in Italy, living with Italians, speaking in Italian most of the time
• I personally had no internet connection at home to get me distracted
• From almost day one I bought books in Italian and started to read them with a dictionary, looked up every word, wrote its translation into the book itself and reviewed the new vocabulary every day
• I watched a lot of TV
• We had a great university course that introduced the complete Italian grammar to us in 10 lessons. I think the course was designed to perfection for foreign exchange European students living in Italy. It would’ve been too fast for anyone else
• I learned the grammar tables by heart at the beginning of my stay
• Achieving flawless passive fluency as soon as possible was the key

Achieving passive fluency

Basically what I tried to do in the beginning was to build myself a basic structure in the language that was based on all the cognate words that I figured out how to recognize, plus the grammar tables that I memorized and used this structure to start communicating and understand what people around me were talking about or what was written in the books that I was reading. After lots and lots of practice and daily input/output this artificial structure eventually shaped itself into real language.

When I came home, I tried to figure out whether there would be any shortcuts to the whole system. I found out that I learned mostly by listening to what other Italians were saying and learned from the expressions they used. In order to be able to do that I had to first understand what they were talking about and to do that, I necessarily had to have a larger vocabulary base.

I started to read books and translate and note down every single word I didn’t know and reviewed new vocabulary every day, which was very effective in the long run, but also very tiring and this is where I think a shortcut can be made. What I realized later was that after I had figured out how to recognize cognates that were masked by Italian pronunciation or spelling, I wasn't left with that many words that I had to learn (words that were completely alien to me) and I started to type all of these words into an excel file. The file is almost useless to me now, because I wrote it after I have learned Italian, but could be possibly very useful for an English speaker studying the language.

I know there are several methods that incorporate wordlists and unfortunately I am not very familiar with them and might be repeating what someone already wrote somewhere else but what I think makes the difference in my word list is that it is not a simple excerpt from a dictionary or a course book, but is based on my personal living Italian language and words that made it necessary for me to communicate and understand advanced fluency Italian. In the list, there are no cognates (or only a minimum), only words and expressions completely different that I had to learn. I realized that even at advanced fluency, there was only a limited amount of vocabulary and expressions in Italian that I use daily and that is what is in the excel file. I know that the list is not complete, but I tried to write it over several months after I had returned back home and it more or less should be 95-98% of the vocabulary that I had to learn as a speaker of English and Slovak in order to speak Italian the way I do now. Now in the recording that I did, my Italian isn’t all that great, but I haven’t been in Italy since 2005 so you’re going to have to take my word for it, that I spoke it much better back then :)[3]

If you are an English speaking student of Italian and you memorize this list, you should have a passive vocabulary base necessary to understand everyday advanced fluency conversations and learn from native speakers by observation. I think observation and imitation is the best way to learn almost anything, but in order to be able to do that you need to understand what you are observing and I think this word list might be a very good starting point.

Pronunciation

The sounds of intermediate languages are generally very close to the languages you already speak well so learning them should not be a problem. As far as I know, words in intermediate languages are relatively long, so even if you mispronounce something, you should be able to get your point across in the beginning stages. 

In order to get better and work on the details, I would recommend going online and look for some good pronunciation practice websites. If in country of course, practice with natives as much as you can, try to visualize them as you speak and imitate a lot.

Grammar

A lot of people go against learning grammar and instead suggest learning an entire language by feel or other methods completely excluding grammar explanations. I am an advocate of this approach when it comes to learning very difficult languages, but as far as easy and intermediate languages go, not learning what we call ‘grammar’ would be a big mistake. I think what we really do while we learn ‘grammar’ is mostly learn to understand the 30-50% portion of the target intermediate language that is different from our native languages.

Apart from the fact, that speaking correctly requires the knowledge of grammar (Italian children also need to learn what is correct and what is not) learning the grammar of a different language is a great shortcut to being able to understand the language sooner and allows us to start improvising in the language sooner as well. When it comes to speaking, after memorizing grammar, I was still very far from being fluent or being able to understand people right away, but I could listen for these grammar patterns in other people’s speech and then try them out daily in my conversations.

There are many approaches to studying grammar, but what I personally did was, that I memorized the Italian grammar tables by heart. I roughly familiarized myself with the basic concepts to have an idea what I was memorizing and while I was reading books and looking up words in them, I was also looking for these grammar patterns that I memorized before. Reading books is a wonderful way of learning because if you listen to radio for instance, the speech is often too fast, but in books, the sentences stay in one place, you can compare grammar patterns that occur in different places of the book and have the pleasure of reading a hopefully interesting story as well.

Grammar instruction for our western languages has evolved close to perfection and with the diversity of available methods today, almost everyone should find what he or she finds suitable. As I mentioned our university course in Italy for instance was based on a course book with only 10 lessons that explained the Italian grammar perfectly, so learning grammar is not necessarily a tiring task.

The vocabulary list

This list is only for English speakers learning Italian, but as I said, I have it translated into 8 other languages and I am adding more. Today, I will only post the Italian verb list and see what people think. If it is workable I will post nouns, adjectives, proverbs and grammar lists as well.

The vocabulary list is very easy to work with. The light green color indicates that the word is not a very frequent one in my opinion. In case the verb is irregular, I wrote the corresponding past participle next to it. 

Download Italian verbs list

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[1] ex.: I speak English and Slovak, an intermediate language for me is Italian

[2] All percentages are based on my rough personal estimates

[3] I have later added Spanish, Portuguese, Slovak, Russian, Mandarin, German, French and Hungarian parts to the file and I will try to post the whole list in a series of posts later.