Buondì.

Someone emailed me this week with a question:

“Do you also recommend watching TV without Italian subtitles?”

To which I replied:

“It depends on the person. If you’re a beginner, you won’t understand much, but if you’re OK with that then fine. Italian subtitles help you get the general idea, so are better than not watching TV at all. And the worst option is Italian audio with English subtitles, which is a waste of time.

Authentic materials ARE hard, so maybe plan a few months of listening with graded materials first, to build your skills. There are loads of listenings on the club website, besides the paid for material in our shop.”

A few elaborations on that emailed reply:

1.) Building listening skills requires that you practice actually listening, for many hours. Personally I aim for hundreds of hours, for each of the languages I’m learning. It takes years, so I begin immediately, not only after I’ve learnt all the grammar.

2.) Besides time, you clearly need lots of listening practice material. For many learners, resources for their particular lanaguage and level are either expensive, hard to get, or both. For example, there was little or nothing that was much use when I was a beginner in Swedish. In general, there’s not a mass of free material for any of the languages I’m learning, except perhaps Italian, which we do ourselves.

3.) And it’s for that reason that people will turn to ‘authentic’ materials, so TV, radio, podcasts, and so on. BECAUSE of the absence of free material that’s written to be suitable for my level (which is changing, remember) in Swedish/Turkish/French/Spanish, I make it a habit to listen to the radio in those languages, ideally daily. Other people prefer TV, and watching TV series in the language you’re learning is something I always recommend to my students.

4.) But as I pointed out in my email reply, authentic materials are ‘hard’, both initally and on an on-going basis. Understanding Swedish/Turkish etc. radio is never ‘easy’ for me, it just gets more ‘familiar’, and so ‘easier’. I know it’s doing me good because I can measure the improvement (for example with free test materials at different levels), and it costs nothing. So as long as I have time, I’ll continue.

5.) HOWEVER, and IDEALLY, I would not have began with authentic materials only and exclusively but worked up through practice materials designed for students at my level (A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2), introducing the radio and TV series as appropriate, initially in small doses and occasionally, later in bigger chunks and regularly.

Conclusions?

If you once tried watching an Italian movie or TV series, or listening to the radio, and threw up your hands in disgust because you couldn’t understand anything (or worse – switched on the English subtitles), do try again: “initially in small doses and occasionally, later in bigger chunks and regularly”. It’ll do you good, I promise.

If you have access to FREE materials that are designed for learners, for example on the club website or our ‘easy’ news bulletins, then you would be foolish to neglect them. Start with the baby steps, saving the big-girl stuff for when you feel ready.

And for all those people who do no listening practice at all because they are busy memorising verb conjugations or learning vocabulary items they’ll probably never use, what can I say?

Remember how people used to learn languages, for example Latin and Ancient Greek, and perhaps living languages too when you were at school, but back in the days before low-cost airlines and the Internet?

Listening wasn’t a priority, right? For the ‘dead’ languages it would have been pointless. For the modern ones, there was little or no opportunity even if we’d wanted to.

So we studied/translated grammar and memorised lists of words. But language-learning today? Most people have the idea of using what they’re learning in conversation, and ideally understanding what’s said to them by the people they’re interacting with.

Their goals are obvious, but they have no idea how to achieve them, other than repeating what they may have tried (often without much joy or result) forty years before.

Most learners should be TRAINING THEMSELVES TO LISTEN AND SPEAK, as priority no.1.

And listening and speaking effectively are NOT functions of studying grammar and memorising lists of words, but separate skill areas.

If you want to speak and listen in the language you’re learning, you have to do those things, regularly.

Everything else is a distraction.

A lunedì.

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Buondì.

How to learn new words? I had this conversation with Alberto, an Italian that I teach for two hours online each Wednesday evening.

He’s a star, has learnt a lot in the six months we’ve been working together, and is very responsive to new ideas, especially learning how to learn (he wasn’t the most interested student at school twenty-five years before, he tells me). In part he’s motivated by the fact that his girlfriend is ‘advanced’ in English. He’s keen to show her what he can do, and she encourages him, which is nice.

Alberto and his lady watch The Crown, with no subtitles, as I advised. And now he’s started his first real book, non-fiction as he doesn’t have time to waste on stories, he says.

He plans to read a couple of pages each day, when he gets in from work. I asked how it was going. Slowly, he told me. Finishing a page takes ages, as he’s constantly stopping to look up new words.

Well don’t, I suggested. Just read on. Just keep swimming, as Dory advises. You’ll get through the book more quickly and…

I’ll press pause on that conversation because I already know all the objections (I have this discussion often.) They all boil down to this:

“I won’t understand the text if I don’t check the unknown words.”

To which I usually reply, in detail, with examples, (I could write a book about this) that:

1. you may or may not understand that sentence, that paragraph, that page, without looking up the word, but if you don’t try to do so without the dictionary, you won’t ever know, will you?
2. some of the words you don’t know are vital, and learning them would be a good investment of your time. Most aren’t though. Looking up all of them means time wasted, and remembering words you might never see again is pointless
3. how will you know which words are vital and which are pointless?
4. FREQUENCY. Just keep reading. If a word crops up again and again, it’s a goodie!
5. and each time you see it, each time in a context, you have another chance to figure out what it might mean…
6. The ideal approach to reading in a foreign language? Never look up anything, unless you’re signing or writing a contract. And only then, if it’s an important clause that will cost you money if you get the wrong idea
7. “But what about all the words/sentences/paragraphs/pages I don’t understand?”
8. Why are you reading? To improve your reading skills or to learn random items of new vocabulary? Choose one answer only
9. And does ‘improving your reading skills’ require that you understand everything you read?
10. Practising piano doesn’t mean playing every note of a concerto perfectly first time. Reading is a skill, just like piano playing. It takes time and effort to develop the multiple sub-skills that go into it
11. And one vital sub-skill of ‘reading’ is ‘dealing with unknown items of vocabulary’, which is normally done by ignoring them (descriptions of scenery in a detective novel), or if it’s something that seems critical to the text, hypothesizing what it might mean and looking for confirmation of that as you read on, a process which is otherwise know as ‘guessing’

I could go on, but Alberto got the point, I hope. I’ll ask him on Wednesday.

N.b. The one time when it IS useful to memorise lists of vocabulary, so actually ‘studying’, is when you’re at a low level, say beginner or near beginner. Because you know virtually nothing of the language, focusing on common ‘lexical sets’ (numbers, foods, jobs, etc.) is one of the most obvious ways forward.

Learning numbers is a no-brainer, because everyone needs numbers. Dates, too, and telling the time. And prices. But do you need percentages, decimal points, fractions, formulas? At some point, the idea of knowing ‘everything’, or trying to, becomes ridiculous. Your brain remembers what it needs, once it’s been exposed to it enough times. Everything else is a distraction.

And how will your brain know what it needs, you ask?

Through reading, listening and speaking practice, of course.

A lunedì.

P.S.

Saturday’s free bulletin of ‘easy’ Italian news is here.

Notice I wrote ‘easy’, not ‘slow’, which is a much better-known competitor. ‘Slow’ will cost you $19.90 USD billed monthly, whereas ‘easy’ is free.

Why don’t we do ‘slow’, despite people nagging at us for buttons that will reduce the speed of the audio and so on? Is it because ‘slow’ was already taken?

Nope, it’s because we’re professional language teachers FIRST, and website operators only second. And you know what? In the world of ‘proper’ language teaching, students are routinely exposed to normal-speed audio, also to different accents, also to speech with background noise, etc., the objective being to TRAIN them for the challenges ahead, rather than CODDLE them with unnatural practice material which resembles nothing they will encounter in real life.

This is not to imply that our competitor’s materials are in any way other than professionally-produced and useful. They offer a free trial, so go make your own decision.) What prompted this P.S. was our own readers begging me to slow down the audio recording.

The world’s best-selling foreign language textbooks use normal-speed audio from the lowest levels. But how is that possible??? How could students miraculously understand what is being said???

Simple. The audio stays the same no matter what the level (say a weather forecast from the radio), but the TASK is modififed to suit the level of the learner.

Listen and tell us what the temperature will be in Roma and Milano today (from a long list of cities) = a task suitable for near-beginners, who need only fish out the city name and a number from the river of sound they’re exposed to.

Listen and tell us which days in the next week would be best for: a.) going to the beach b.) flying a kite c.) staying home to study Italian = a task suitable for intermediate-or-above learners who need to practice understanding the general meaning of the text and identifying different data points, under controlled conditions, so perhaps in preparation for an exam.

How do we make our ‘easy’ news bulletins ‘easy’, if they’re not ‘slow’?

Easy. There’s no task. To design a task, we’d need to know your level, right?

But there IS a transcript, which gives you the option to read/listen at the same time, to listen first and check what you’ve understood afterwards, or even to read first then listen. In effect, you’re deciding your own task.

Those options, by the way, are discussed on our Advice page.

Hope that clears things up? Want ‘slow’? Then pay our competitors. Or save $19.90 USD a month and stick with ‘easy’ but ‘normal speed’.

Our site, by the way, is partly or wholly-funded by donations. See who helped.

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