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.

A quick one today, as I’m travelling – from Britain back to Bologna, Italy, if you must know.

My flight is with Irish budget airline, Ryanair, who’ll charge extra for just about everything they possibly can, though not yet for use of the onboard toilet as previously mooted by their CEO.

I refuse to pay more for extras, at least with a company that goes out of its way to upset me, so for my return flight my ticket permits me just a ‘single small bag that must fit under the seat in front’.

Cramming it with with second-hand books, soiled undergarments, computer, smartphone, and the cables and adaptors necessary when travelling abroad isn’t easy, but traveling so lightly is kind of liberating.

Talking of books, a peripheral goal for my trip, the main purpose of which was to see my aged parents, was to get a copy of the final volume of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, ‘The Mirror & the Light’.

They have it at my local library in Bologna, but it’s a huge read, approximately a thousand pages, and what with work and Bug-minding duties, that would take me more than the permitted four-week loan time. They have an online service, but the time allowed to read a thousand-page ebook is just two weeks, which I’d never manage in Italian.

I got the first volume in the trilogy the last time I was in the UK, in English, so zipped through its five hundred or so pages in just a few days. Having enjoyed that one, I borrowed the second volume, in Italian, from the library.

Henry VIII, one of the principal characters in the tale, is ‘Enrico’ in Italian, and the Italian dialogues felt more typical of a historical novel than Mantel’s clever English phrasing. But all good – it was a page turner too, even in Italian.

So I was pleased when I walked into a charity shop in Truro the other day (that would be a thrift shop in the USA?) and saw the final volume prominently displayed, and priced at just £3.99 to boot (about five US dollars).

The only trouble? It’s a hardback, so enormous, and takes up half the volume of my ‘single small bag’. True, I could have spent the same amount to buy the ebook version from Google Books and read it on my phone – which I’m fine with –  then fill my pack with teabags, instead. But the local hospice, or whoever runs the thrift store, doubtless needs my cash more than Google does. And ‘real’ books look nice on a shelf.

Anyway, the point of the above is to introduce the topic of reading a book written in your native tongue vs. reading in a foreign language.

My wife (Stefi, who runs our Italian language school) reads a lot in English, more so than in Italian or Swedish, her two mother tongues. Why? I suppose just because most of her favourite authors write in English, and she’s in the habit of it, having done it most of her adult life (we met in London in the ‘nineties.)

I’d say she’s pretty rare, though, even amongst people who are near-native-speaker level in a foreign language or languages. Unless you’re really used to it, reading in the foreign language is always going to be harder, and likely much slower, than reading in your mother tongue.

Either you’re willing to put up with that or you aren’t, but you can always console yourself that while a foreign language book might take three times as long (or more) to finish, it’ll be doing you good in terms of language-learning.

Reading in your foreign language, even if you understand much less that way, exposes you to a vast amount of new vocabulary (a lot of which you won’t know – but just chill about that) and gives you loads of examples of the typical grammar structures used in narratives.

For instance, the Italian ‘passato remoto’, which is barely used in speech (it’s not standard in spoken Italian, though you hear it in certain regions) but is ubiquitous in fiction. Read a few pages of a novel and you’ll figure it out easily enough. If you’re not going to use it in speech, a casual knowledge of the tense, picked up from reading ‘gialli’, is all you’ll really need.

Reading a book, once you get the knack of it, gives you the sort of familiarity with your foreign language that courses, text books and apps often cannot, assuming you’re reading appropriately. If nothing else, it gives you a feel for the language, and helps you know what’s important, and what isn’t.

Not read a novel in a foreign language before? It’s never too soon to try, though obviously the less you know of the language, the harder it will be. To avoid disappointment, manage your expecations before you begin.

I usually advice choosing something ‘light’ and familiar. When I was teaching myself Italian (by reading trashy novels) more than twenty-five years ago I read plenty of translated John Grishams. No offence intended, John.

The trick, by the way, is never to use a dictionary. Most of the words you don’t know won’t be worth the investment of time needed to understand them better, and anyway, there’ll be so many that if you investigate each one you won’t get past the first few pages.

What seems counter-intuitive at first, but works well when you get used to it, is to just keep reading, to just keep turning the pages.

You should feel free to skip the descriptive sections (the many shades of fall colors, the different types of trees, blah blah) but pay attention to the dialogues, and especially to who is doing what to who.

Follow the story as best you can and resist looking things up. Trust me on that, even if it doesn’t feel right at first. Or you won’t get very far.

+++

HOW TO READ A BOOK IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Choose something ‘light’, that you’ll you enjoy.

‘Read’ it, rather than ‘studying’ it.

Ignore complexity, unless it’s vital to the plot.

Keep turning the pages, until you get to the end.

+++

Simple as that, really. It’ll probably take a couple of months the first time, which is why it’s important to choose a book you actually want to read, one that’s structured in such a way you’ll feel an urge to find out what happens next (thrillers, romances, etc.)

Oh, and just to say, series are good, as once you’re familiar with the principal characters, the context,and the writer’s/translator’s style, each volume is easier than the last.

Alla prossima settimana!

P.S.

Don’t forget to read/listen to Tuesday’s FREE bulletin of ‘easy’ Italian news, will you?

The regular text + audio bulletins are a fantastic, FREE way to consolidate the grammar and vocabulary you’ve studied, as well as being fun and motivating!

Take a look at their website to get started on improving your Italian immediately!

And/or get all three text + audio bulletins of ‘easy’ news emailed to you each week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, subscribe (they really are FREE) by entering your email address on this page and clicking the confirmation link that will be sent to you.

+++

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

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.

The key to success with foreign languages is very simple, though chances are you won’t appreciate me telling you.

Yet this is the most important lesson I’ve drawn from over forty years of learning foreign languages, and more than thirty years of teaching English as a foreign language.

But first some context, so as to increase, ever so slightly, the chances of my number one language-learning tip being of some help.

Imagine you’re a professional interpreter, hard at work rendering live speech in a language you know extremely well into another language you know extremely well, to impressive effect.

Or you’re a historian, browsing through thousand-year old parchments, records of a foreign court, looking for evidence to support some thesis you hold dear.

Or, closer to home, you’re turning the pages of an Italian newspaper or book.

Or watching a trailer for an Italian TV series.

Or doing a conversation lesson with an Italian native speaker teacher.

There’s a spectrum of certainty involved here: of the probability that what you read, that what you hear, that what you can say, is known, and that you’re certain of what you know.

With the first two examples – the interpreter and the historian – we can expect that they know what they’re doing.

Whereas for the language student, for ourselves, that expectation is the opposite – we’re ‘studying’ (hate that word) precisely because our level of uncertainly is elevated.

That’s to say, we understand much less of what we hear and read than we’d like to, and can express ourselves only with some or much uncertainty.

We are all of us somewhere on the ‘uncertainty spectrum’, whether nearing total uncertainly (imagine an academic text in Chinese) or nearing total certainty (an academic text in your native tongue, on a subject you’re familiar with).

We might assume that a student beginning a new foreign language would be at 0% certainty while an experienced professional translator, interpreter or teacher of that language (and most educated native speakers) would be at the other end of the line, at 100% certainty.

And yet it’s not like that. Language is so complex that there are always going to be points of uncertainty.

The interpreter’s skill is to render speech – in real time – into an approximately equivalent flow of language that clients can follow and appreciate. Fleeting points of uncertainly must be dealt with as they arise, but such are the characteristics of human speech that doubts will likely be smoothed out later. It’s the overall understanding that will matter.

The historian will be familiar with the period, the actors, the topics, and will have a good idea of what she’s looking to find in the mass of dusty material. Her language skills matter, of course, but there are many parchments, they’re written in an archaic style, and may not anyway be faithful. Her real skills will involve recognising what might or might not be relevant, and focusing only on those things.

I’ve never ‘studied’ Portuguese or Norwegian, but they’re not dissimilar from languages I have some experience of (Italian, French, Spanish, Swedish), so I’d expect that – were I to browse a newspaper in those languages, or spend a few minutes listening to the radio or watching TV, I would not find myself at 0% certainty.

Some things would be familiar, some words the same or similar, some structures likely to mean the same as in other languages I know (auxiliary verbs with past participles are easy to recognise, articles too.)

In short, I may officially know nothing of the language, while in fact having some ability to extract meaning.

Following me so far?

How to move along the spectrum then, from near uncertainty, to near certainty, or to whichever intermediate point feels sufficient for your needs?

The common, indeed almost universal approach is to ‘study’ (hate that word) the components of the language, with the hope that at a certain point the individual pieces will magically come together to form an intelligible whole.

Like watching the shattered pieces of Humpty-Dumpty reassemble themselves into a talking egg character.

Most teaching and self-study works that way. Almost no one tells you that it’s nonsense. Livelihoods depend on it not being so, after all.

The problem with the reverse Humpty-Dumpty approach is that language is not an egg, not in the same way that an egg is an egg, with an integral shell and contents which have a particular biological function.

An egg might produce a chick or be a meal for someone, an automobile has the function of getting you from A to B, a website is a tool with an overall form and one or more purposes.

But language is massively complex and infinitely variable. No two speakers will have exactly the same linguistic resources, or interests to communicae.

Yesterday I rode in a truck with a friendly Italian neighbour who is helping us install air-conditioning in advance of the scorching summer heat.

We chatted. He’s a firefighter from the south of Italy. I’m a British language teacher. My Italian is very different from his, but we got on.

At a certain point though, he asked me whether my wife (Stefi, who runs our Italian school) was British too, which amazed me somewhat, as he spent half an hour talking to her just the other day, she being in charge of the air-conditioning project.

How could he not know that she’s ITALIAN? My best guess is that, as a southern Italian who’s spent his adult life working in the north, he’s just used to interacting with a wide variety of people, many of whom speak differently in one way or another. He doesn’t notice much how they speak, or care. He puts out fires, or prevents them.

Italians (and non-Italians who live in Italy) call the firefighters when they forget their keys, he was telling me. Locksmiths charge a lot to break into your home, while he and his colleages do it as a public service. They don’t rescue many cats from trees, though, which must be an English thing.

Back to the point. Language is infinitely complicated. Trying to ‘study’ it all is therefore pointless.

Think about that and – assuming that you’re learning a language with a view to actually using it, rather than just for the joy you gain from the process – you’ll realise that there’s absolutely no point in studying all the many things you’ll never need, even if it were possible.

Insomma, what you can reasonably hope for is to acquire the elements of Italian, or whatever language you’re learning, that are useful and reasonably frequent. The small, infrequent pieces of the shell will be hard to remember, anyway, so why bother?

So what you might end up with is a reasonably egg-shaped Humpty-Dumpty, but with lots of holes. You might only be able to see ten or twenty perecent of him, the rest being thin air, but that will be enough to folllow his adventures.

I started this by writing “The key to success with foreign languages is very simple, but chances are you won’t appreciate me telling you.”

The key to success with foreign languages is becoming – as my firefighter acquaintance and I both are – experienced at guessing what’s going on.

The interpreter, the historian, and anyone who’s ‘studied’ more than one foreign language are all going to be relying – to a greater or lesser extent – on their ability to fill in the gaps between the visible pieces of Humpty-Dumpty.

Try this for yourself – find a website in a language you have never ‘studied’ and see how much you can make out.

Don’t use a dictionary, just guess. When you get bored, look at some other website in the same language.

Do this for ten minutes, or for as long as you can tolerate the unertainty.

If you’re doing this right, then what you’re doing is focusing on the CONTENT. You’re guessing at what you read or hear, and making hypotheses – that word must be X, this link could be Y…

The key to foreign language success is guessing. You have to get better at guessing. You really have to!

And when you’re more skilled at guessing what you read and hear, you’ll also be skilled at learning from what you read and hear.

Any time you’re using a dictionary, you’re not guessing, of course. So you’re not getting better at guessing, therefore not working towards the point at which you’ll be able to learn the useful frequent parts of the language you’re learning – by guessing.

To get better at guessing at the meanings of words, phrases and grammar structures in the contexts in which you find them, you need to read and listen regularly, of course.

Which is what people object to. I’ll read and listen AFTER I’ve learnt the language, they tell me. First I have to study the grammar and learn lots of words!

But which grammar? Which words?

Sure, with a really foreign, foreign language you could totally benefit from the reverse Humpty-Dumpty. Up to a point.

But with a language that’s similar to one you know, and for an unfamiliar language once you’re no longer a beginner, there’s no substitute for getting stuck in to reading and listening texts, whether ‘graded’ (prepared specifically for your level) or ‘authentic’ (a website, a newspaper, a radio broadcast).

Until you do, you won’t be acquiring reading/listening skills (guessing being the most important one) and so won’t be approaching the point at which you can learn the language just by using it.

Guessing at the parts you don’t know means tolerating uncertainly, which takes practice at first, but is worth it.

Get better at guessing at the parts you don’t know and you’ll be a more competent reader/listener/speaker, and so able to tackle ever more complex material.

And the more you read/listen/speak, the more you learn.

The uncertainty never goes away, by the way. But it will cease to bother you, when you’re used to it.

Alla prossima settimana!

P.S.

And here’s the usual reminder to read/listen to Tuesday’s FREE bulletin of ‘easy’ Italian news, which is excellent guessing practice in its own right…

The regular text + audio bulletins are a fantastic, FREE way to consolidate the grammar and vocabulary you’ve studied, as well as being fun and motivating!

Take a look at their website to get started on improving your Italian immediately!

And/or get all three text + audio bulletins of ‘easy’ news emailed to you each week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, subscribe (they really are FREE) by entering your email address on this page and clicking the confirmation link that will be sent to you.

+++

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