No time to read this? Why not find something to study instead? A1 – Beginner/Elementary | A2 – Pre-Intermediate | B1 – Intermediate | B2 – Upper-Intermediate | C1 – Advanced | C2 – Proficiency | What’s my level? | Italian level test

+++

Buondì.

With apologies to the person who wrote to me after last week’s article, Frustration, then joy, telling me she wasn’t interested in chess, and so had – I assume – ignored the analogy I’d crafted for language learners.

‘Chiedo scusa’ but there’s much to be learnt about the approach to and processes involved in learning Italian from other areas of learning.

Chess – there, I said it again, ‘chiedo scusa di nuovo’ – is played regularly by approximately SIX HUNDRED MILLION clever people, almost all of them much smarter than me.

There’s one little lad in China who’s just starting out, but he’s only six and, anyway, will have outstripped me by the weekend.

Just the website Chess.com has two hundred and fifty million registered players, many of whom (like me) probably never use their site or app. But still, it’s a big number.

Compare that to the estimated two million people learning Italian, and the perhaps eighty or so million who speak it.

It’s no surprise then that just dipping my toe in the vast torrent of chess blogs and articles generated by chess professionals, enthusiasts, coaches, app/website owners and so on has exposed me to loads and loads of learning ideas.

Most of them I was already familiar with, obviously, being a language-learning professional and general smart-arse. Although suprisingly awful at chess.

However, if you have no idea how to improve your Italian, spend a few hours researching how to learn or improve your chess game, or whichever other ‘passatempo’ grabs you.

I guarantee you’ll either be stimulated to try new things, or reassured that you’re likely already on the right path. Either one is good.

Below are a few things that drew my attention from this week’s efforts to drag myself from the depths of chess despair (it’s very hot here, so I’m stuck in the house with the air-conditioner and not much else to do.) They’re in no particular order:

– Don’t try to memorise chess ‘openings’ (sequences of inital moves and responses, with many variations) but aim, instead, to understand the underlying ideas (Hah! Easier said than done!)

– Don’t fret about your ‘ranking’ (which would be your ‘level’ in language learning), as there’ll always be hundreds of millions of people who are better than you (don’t I just know it.)

– Focus on ‘process’ rather than ‘outcome’ goals, i.e. doing a certain useful activity often, rather than setting targets, which may be unreachable in the short term.

– Spend a third of your time ‘playing’, another third on analysing your played games to learn from them, and lump all the rest (theory, Youtube videos, memorising…) into the final third.

I know already to beware of people selling particular learning approaches, for instance ‘spaced repetition’. There are apps for that aimed at chess players, just as there are for language-learners.

Italian has an endless supply of irregular verbs and other complications. Chess has an infinite number of possible moves and positions.

Is memorisation, even aided by a ‘spaced repetition’ app, going to be the most useful approach? I very much doubt it.

One obvious problem is knowing just what the most useful things to memorise are. Which, for instance, are the most useful irregular Italian verbs to burn your brain cells on?

Beh, the answer is not ‘none’, but nor is it ‘all of them’.

I remember memorising ‘andare’ (to go) on a red, double-decker, London bus, back in 1997, on a particularly long commute.

With the infinitive written on one side of a piece of paper and the present tense conjugation (vado, vai, va, andiamo, andate, vanno) on the reverse side.

I suppose I’d have had a few dozen more slips of paper with other verbs on, all stuffed into an envelope, ready to be fished from my backpack and reviewed whenever the possibility arose.

Did that help me learn Italian in advance of moving to Bologna the following year?

Not really, no.

But it passed the boring bus journey, and gave me a feeling of doing something useful, even if it really wasn’t so very helpful.

Language is complicated, and the best way to get a feel for a new one is to begin to immerse yourself in it, the easiest ways being courses/texts/listenings suitable for beginners, or whatever your level is.

Plus, you have to ‘play’ for a third of your time, remember? Interacting with a native speaker online is a good way to do that, and what I do weekly for my Swedish (along with near-daily listening).

Anyway, what I’m suggesting is, if you don’t know how to learn one thing, try to learn something else! Then see if there are any transferable techniques.

Can’t cook? (This for the lady who isn’t interested in chess.) Maybe get a friend to show you their favorite recipe, give you tips on ingredients, utensils and so on. Then, another day, try it yourself at home. You’ll learn a lot, even if you burn your pans. And/or yourself.

Will learning thousands of recipes make you an expert chef? Probably not. Neither will watching ‘The Bear’, for that matter.

All that said, yesterday I did try to memorise something. Stefi, my wife, main woman at our Italian school and editor of EasyItalianNews.com, tested and encouraged me.

What did I memorise, and why?

Turn away now, not-interested-in-chess lady, as I will FROM MEMORY type what I learnt yesterday afternoon and dreamt about most of the night.

So the white player (could be me, could be the other guy) begins the game with e4, which means he (it’s usually a he) moves the pawn in front of his king two squares forward, from e2 to e4 (chess colums are labelled from a to h, rows from 1 to 8).

What are the typical responses? What are they called (for future research/memorisation)?

In order, from the c (third) column to the e (fifth) column, the black player might move Nc6 (‘N’ is the knight/horse’s head) two places forward and one to the left = Nimzowitsch Defense. I cheated and just checked the spelling of that one.

Much more commonly, still in the c column, black could move his pawn forward one square (c6 = Caro-Kann Defense) or two (c5 = Sicilian Defense).

Or what about the d column? Jump the pawn in front of the black queen two squares forward and you have d5 = Scandinavian Defense, which pleased my wife, as her mom is Swedish.

The e colum has two typical openings for black, e6 = French Defense, and e5 King’s Pawn Game.

There, I remembered it all! Well done to me.

Later, with Bug wailing in front of a blaring TV, I tried an online game, was drawn as black, white (who apparently ranked lower than me) played the hoped-for e4 first move, so I thought ah-hah, I’ll faze him with the uncommon and unspellable Nimzowitsch.

I only knew the first move (Nc6, remember?) but it solved the ‘no idea where to begin’ problem, and did indeed faze my opponent, who spent rather a lot of time thinking, then did a series of duff moves.

Did I win the game? Nope. Gave my queen away, very stupidly, and couldn’t recover. Lost sixty points off my already-poor ‘rating’, too.

But still, I was pleased to have learnt at least something, so more confident in my future learning approach.

The plan is, if white, always play e4 (for now), while if black, I’ll experiment with the defenses I’ve memorised. Which should help me understand black’s moves when I’m white, if you see what I mean.

So now I ‘just’ have to memorise and understand the typical sequences. At least the first few moves and likely responses for each. There are, what, five biggies? Plus the curve ball, for unsettling people.

Maybe I’ll try one each day, or more likely one a week. Haven’t decided. Probably the later. But now, when I’m white, play e4, and see black move his pawn to c6, I’ll think – Caro-Kann!

Did I mention focusing on ‘process’ rather than ‘outcome’ goals? The processes here are focusing on the inital move, then the typical sequence, and playing regularly, trying them out when I’m black, recognising them when I’m white.

So, what’s your learn-Italian plan?

You have one, right?

Alla prossima settimana!

P.S.

And here’s a reminder to read/listen to Tuesday’s bulletin of news from EasyItalianNews.com.

Reading/listening practice will help you consolidate the Italian you’re studying, expand your vocabulary, and build vital comprehension skills.

EasyItalianNews.com is FREE to read/listen to.

Subscribing, and so receiving all three text + audio bulletins of ‘easy’ news via email each week – on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays – is also FREE.

Just enter your email address on this page and click the confirmation link that will be sent to you.

+++

OnlineItalianClub.com | EasyItalianNews.com | Shop (ebooks) | Shop (online lessons)

OnlineFrenchClub.com | OnlineSpanishClub.com | OnlineGermanClub.com

+++

No longer interested?

All bulk emails we send (including this one) contain an unsubscribe link, usually at the bottom. Scroll down to find it, click the link and select ‘unsubscribe’. That will permanently remove your email address from our mailing list.

No time to read this? Why not find something to study instead? A1 – Beginner/Elementary | A2 – Pre-Intermediate | B1 – Intermediate | B2 – Upper-Intermediate | C1 – Advanced | C2 – Proficiency | What’s my level? | Italian level test

+++

Buondì.

I’ll keep this super-short today, as work stuff got rather piled up while we were at the beach last week. Plus, I have teachers and bills to pay, and an online Swedish conversation at noon. Hurry, hurry!

Also, while I prefer to start work at eight a.m., it’s now after nine, this because of driving Bug to his petting zoo on the other side of town. That takes an hour, there and back. Then I do it again to pick him up in the evening. Two hours out of my day, most days. Rush, rush!

While driving, I reflected on all the car makes and models that were unfamiliar to me. These days it seems like every vehicle looks the same, all in boring grey, white or silver tones, all made in China, or Korea, or some place far from here.

Cars were a lot more distinctive in my youth. Remember the original Mini, for instance? Or the Ford Capri? I tried to persuade my dad to buy one of those, but we ended up instead with the extremely weird-looking Renault 12. It was canary yellow, too. How my teenage friends laughed when I pulled up in it!

Ah, there’s something I recognise! In front of us, the distinctive shape of a Scandanavian-manufactured station wagon, no longer new, as evidenced by the idiosyncratic design and a missing V on its rear.

“Guardate,” I joked to my passengers, “un’O L V O!”

But neither Stefi nor Bug was looking, or had any interest in my witterings.

“Una famosa macchina SEDESE,” I tried again.

Silence.

“Senza la V…”

I gave up.

Così, that’s half of my allotted time used up.

I’ve been playing chess on and off for more than fifty years. My dad taught me the rules when I was seven or eight, but not how to win. Once he’d beaten me a few times, he lost interest, or I did.

I played at school too, and mostly lost. One of my so-called friends, name of Julian, used to surprise me all the time with the sort of tactical moves (forks, pins, etc.) that they teach beginners but that I was blissfully unaware of.

Julian’s dad was a researcher at the university, and used the forerunner of the internet (this was in the early ’80s) to get his child instructions on completing the Rubik Cube, which Julian memorised, learned to use, and refused to share with anyone unless they paid him. Guess it must have been his father that showed him the chess moves with which he was constantly able to surprise me.

Over the next forty years or more I continued to be awful at chess, always taken aback by my opponents’ basic tactics, never having any real idea of what move to play next, and very, very prone to what the chess community call ‘blunders’, that’s to say dumb errors which could be avoided with a little thought.

It was always very frustrating, but I could live with it, at least as long as my kids were still kids, so occasionally beatable.

Now, though, with the youngest of the pack going off to graduate school (since the pandemic he’s improved his own chess skills to a point at which he has no further interest in playing a duffer like me), I could no longer live with the shame of being terrible at chess!

Doesn’t this remind you a bit of many older-adult language learners? They failed to learn a foreign language at school, and have made no significant progress in the decades since. Doubtless I’d have been the same, if I hadn’t ended up living and working “all’estero”.

The parallels continue. Tom mentioned Lichess.org so I took a look at their resources, downloaded the free app, and proceeded to get even more frustrated!

I tried the ‘puzzles’, for which you gain or lose points depending on whether you solve them (sounds a bit like Duolingo…), but my ‘puzzle rating’ sank rapidly.

After a while I noticed a small-font note on the ‘puzzle home page’. I put on my glasses to read it, and learnt there were over 150 puzzles I’d failed at and should therefore ‘play again’.

40 years of lost games, 150+ failed puzzles.

Light dawned!

There was something about my approach that meant I still wasn’t learning, as I’d hoped to. As I’d always hoped to.

I decided to ‘play again’ all the 150 failed puzzles, until I figured out what that something was.

Some of them I had to do two, three or even four times. Even after having failed, seen the answer and worked through the moves, the solution was still gone from my head when it came to try yet again.

There were a few that I never understood, but over the course of a fortnight or so, I got through the whole lot. The ‘play again’ link disappeared. Since that day, a week or two ago, I’ve done the ‘puzzle of the day’ each day, without messing it up once. My ‘puzzle rating’ is back up!

So what finally went right?

My approach was basically ‘do the most obvious move and see what happens’, whereas what I eventually settled on was ‘keep staring at the smartphone but TOUCH NOTHING UNTIL YOU’RE 100% SURE!’

It took a while (150+ attempts) but the revised approach is becoming the new normal, and mostly works.

Joy!

Next I decided to tackle the ‘no idea what to do next, especially at the start’ problem.

The first part of a chess game is called the ‘opening’, which I was aware of, despite not actually knowing any. Hence time wasted scatching my head and a series of poor moves which invariably left my pieces and pawns open to capture.

Lichess.org has a ‘learn’ section, so I searched for ‘openings’ and found hundreds of lessons. One particular opening, the London System, was described as being easy to learn, a sort of Chess ‘paint-by-numbers’, no need even to think about what black is up to. Just play these simple moves. It sounded ideal!

Done with openings (yes, I’m aware that this is only a beginning), I decided to try practising actual games with a computer opponent, to see if having a clear-ish idea of the first few moves helped any.

I recall buying a couple of early-generation chess computers in around 1988 or 1989, neither of which I could ever beat. FRUSTRATION!

And when I first got the Lichess app I tried a couple of games but ‘blundered’ too frequently and lost rapidly each time. Ditto.

But now I had a plan, two plans in fact: ‘just play the opening moves you’ve memorised’, then ‘keep staring at the smartphone but TOUCH NOTHING UNTIL YOU’RE 100% SURE!’

Still though, I lost.

The problem wasn’t the opening, it was still the compulsion to make the next obvious move, without checking for ‘blunders’ first.

Over and over again I ‘blundered’. Couldn’t help myself!

Tom suggested, over lunch, that I analyse my games to see where I was going wrong. But I already knew where I was going wrong: I just wasn’t thinking before acting, or – often – at all.

Teacher, teach yourself!

So I did.

If the problem is that I’m moving before I’ve thought enough, then a solution should be to impose a minimal time limit before allowing myself to move. And spend it thinking, obviously.

I hypothesised this to Tom, who was sceptical, telling me that the usual approach was to move as rapidly as possible (most chess games have a time limit, so moving fast avoids losing due to time running out). Rather than playing more slowly, as I seemed to be suggesting.

But with the computer, no time limit! So I decided to try.

Managing the timer in the ‘Clock’ app on my Android smartphone – to start and stop the timer after each move – was fiddly.

After some trial and error, I settled on a minimum of 45 seconds per move. Timer on, study the board, look at the computer’s move, look at options for my own move, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP! If I’m ready, I move my piece. If not, I keep thinking while the phone BEEPS incessantly, then move.

The timer forced me to think, and mostly I remembered to set it, except on a few occasions when I got carried away by the exciting board action and moved impulsively, with predictable results.

Monday I beat Stockfish (the algorithm’s name) level 3 several times, not losing at all.

Yesterday I battled Stockfish level 4, but after half a bottle of wine and with Bug making a row, I wasn’t at my best, so lost.

But JOY: zero puzzles to play again. Approach problem diagnosed, and on the way to a fix.

All is well in the world!

I am, I feel confident in declaring – and after just a few weeks of effort – better at chess than I’ve been my whole life.

It’s very pleasing.

And here, kiddies, are the language-learning takeaways from my ramble:

1. Anyone can improve
2. If you’ve failed in the past, could be the approach was wrong
3. Figure out what the problem was
4. Figure out what you could do differently that might help
5. Do it
6. Evaluate the results
7. Keep doing whatever works, while adding attempts to resolve other problems

Once you figure out the approach, and learn to recognise difficulties to resolve or avoid, teaching yourself isn’t so hard.

Where to start depends on you – what you’re good/bad at, what resources you have available.

Try a few things and see what WORKS. Be objective.

Don’t obsess about grammar. Just as I could make progress with just a superficial knowledge of one ‘opening’, rather than trying to study them all, so too can you speak/understand Italian better with just one or two tenses.

Your grammar doesn’t even have to be correct. Just good enough to get basic meanings across.

In fact, the less time you spend studying openings/grammar, and the more time playing/speaking and listening, the better.

Now I’m really late. Gotta go!

Alla prossima settimana.

P.S.

And here’s the inevitable reminder to read/listen to Tuesday’s bulletin of news from EasyItalianNews.com.

Reading/listening practice will help you consolidate the Italian you’re studying, expand your vocabulary, and build vital comprehension skills.

EasyItalianNews.com is FREE to read/listen to.

Subscribing, and so receiving all three text + audio bulletins of ‘easy’ news via email each week – on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays – is also FREE.

Just enter your email address on this page and click the confirmation link that will be sent to you.

+++

OnlineItalianClub.com | EasyItalianNews.com | Shop (ebooks) | Shop (online lessons)

OnlineFrenchClub.com | OnlineSpanishClub.com | OnlineGermanClub.com

+++

No longer interested?

All bulk emails we send (including this one) contain an unsubscribe link, usually at the bottom. Scroll down to find it, click the link and select ‘unsubscribe’. That will permanently remove your email address from our mailing list.