Buondì.
I get lots of emails from OnlineItalianClub.com members, much of it complimentary: “Great site!”, “Thanks so much for your wonderful emails”, and so on.
One rather rude lady this week told me to please shut up about learning Swedish as no one was interested.
An hour later, someone from Sweden wrote to wish me a good holiday and warn me about his language’s dialects.
A lot of the emails are of the “How do I use your site?” variety.
That’s not an easy question to answer.
How to walk a thousand miles?
If you haven’t started yet, take a step.
Then take another.
Then repeat.
Or if you’ve already walked five hundred miles, just keep going – walk another five hundred and you’re done.
Except with language-learning, the question isn’t so much “How?” as “Why?”
If you’re an absolute beginner and have no idea where to begin, perhaps having never studied a foreign language before, some simple instructions could be useful:
- Click on this page
- Do the exercise
- Go back to this index
- Click the link to the next exercise
- Now click here to do some listening
- Look up unknown words in an online dictionary
However, just as you can be a virgin for decades but then become a former-virgin in flash, it only takes a short course or a few weeks of self-study to lose your ‘complete beginner’ status.
Each lesson you study, each exercise you do, will increase your awareness of what the possibilities are, and your knowledge of the path ahead.
Different people have different ways of learning.
And different preferences, likes and dislikes.
And different strengths and weaknesses.
And different objectives.
I, for example, can’t abide doing boring exercises and memorising stuff.
Italian teachers, take your pronouns and stick them where the sun don’t shine!
(That was for Julie, who’s been studying them at our school this morning…)
But I AM into listening to the TV news and generally perusing the press in the language I’m learning.
There just isn’t one way to learn a language that will work for everyone.
No single method, website, app, ebook or teacher has all the answers.
The best way to answer the “How?” question, if you ask me, is to think about “Why?”
If you’re goal is to interact naturally with native speakers, then you’ll need a little grammar, lots of vocabulary, and hundreds of hours of speaking and listening practice.
If you want to live in the country, maybe get a job there, or translate and interpret Italian into your own language, then you’ll need an expert knowledge and probably some sort of high-level qualification.
Which will, of course, take much longer.
But if you’re just learning Italian as a hobby, for personal satisfaction, or to pass the time?
Then focus on whatever it is that works best for you, and ignore the rest.
Instructions for the use of OnlineItalianClub.com
- Find something at your level
- Do it
- Find something else at your level, ideally with a different focus
- Do that
- Repeat
- When the material starts getting easy, start the next level
- Or if it’s too hard, drop down a level (there’s no shame in it…)
- IN THE EVENT OF BOREDOM, find something different, fast
- Re-evaluate your approach, goals and progress regularly
- Adjust course as necessary
OnlineItalianClub.com should have enough material to get you from zero to the point when you’re not taking baby steps any more (and so can get out there and make your own way!)
But if it doesn’t work for you, go try Duolingo.com instead – it worked really well for me with the Swedish!
Come back to us when you get fed up with being hassled by an owl.
Whichever site you use, start reading and listening to authentic Italian as soon as you can.
Take lessons, if you can afford it, as it’s much harder to build your speaking and listening skills without them.
And that’s it.
Just click something.
Click everything!
See what’s out there.
Make decisions.
Make other, better decisions.
Don’t stop (ever…)
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Catherine Kett says
I have been studying Italian for just over a year, visited last October, love the country and the language. Just wanted to say I love your blog and read it every morning before my Duolingo and will definitely do the live tutor when I am finished, currently at level 24. Sorry to hear someone was rude to you about the Swedish, I think your journey was very interesting to read about. My family is Norwegian and will probably learn that next. Thanks for all the helpful tips!
Daniel says
That’s kind, Catherine. Thanks for the positive feedback!
Daniel
Alan K says
I have no issue with your tales of learning Swedish. It’s your blog, you can say what you want and nobody is forced to listen. But for the love of your students I would like to see you stop promoting that pathetic joke of a skill-destroying, counter-productive, language-retarding site Duolingo, especially after the introduction of the ridiculous “crowns” system. And this is from someone who hit level 25 in Italian before the crowns system was introduced, so I know of what I speak.
It was, at one time, marginally, VERY marginally, useful for learning some new vocabulary and for refreshing that vocabulary. If you’re standing at a train station, then you may as well have the app out and be doing some exercises rather than staring into space, right? Wrong, because it’s diminishing your language skills not enhancing them, but I’ll come back to that.
It may have even been marginally, VERY marginally, useful for learning some expressions, though Duo was always about using stupid, non-real life examples on the basis that “they are more memorable”.
And so you get repeated examples of elephants eating sugar, knives in boots, ants dying of hunger and so on. And sure, maybe, MAYBE you’ll pick up a word or two here or there. And that’s fine for an A1, maybe lower A2 student though NOW, with the stupid Crowns system, students will be repeating such basic sentences as “lui è un uomo”, “la donna beve l’acqua” and so on literally hundreds of times to get to the top of a level. If you can’t absorb words like that LOOOONNNG before you get bored with those questions and possibly with learning the language, then you aren’t a student, you’re a goldfish.
It USED to be that once you had finished the tree you could go back and review particular topics. Look through the list of vocabulary on top of each lesson, and if anything felt unfamiliar then review it. The crowns system took away that ability, not that it was really a good ability anyway.
I have NEVER encountered an Italian teacher who has had anything positive to say about Duolingo. The one teacher that I had with you didn’t bring the site up and I didn’t know about it at the time, but every teacher I’ve had since then has looked like they swallowed a lemon when the name of the site has come up. And there’s a good reason why.
First, the instruction notes about the language that you’re learning sit somewhere between “patchy” and “non-existent”. In the case of the app, it’s the latter. It’s probably more important for them to have the unkillable owl popping in from the side to break your flow and tell you what a good job you’re doing. In English.
Second and most importantly, almost everything on Duolingo is about translation. Going from your language to the other language.
Speaking a language IS NOT AN EXERCISE IN TRANSLATION. To do it even passably well you need to cut the umbilical cord to your madrelingua and start THINKING in the other language, to recognise concepts in the other language and this is EXACTLY what Duolingo prevents, indeed actively discourages you from doing.
Duolingo’s frequent claims about baggage handlers in Guatemala learning 73 languages through the site sit somewhere between arrant nonsense and outright delusional. If anyone can go through a Duolingo course and then pick up even a basic newspaper article and read it, then unless it’s about a penguin murdering an elephant with sugar I will very much doubt their claim. What the site does, once you get beyond about mid A2 level, is hold you back like a set of chains by constantly dragging you back to English. Contrast this with, say, Clozemaster. The English translation of the sentence is there, in very small writing, but the intent is that you read the sentence and figure out what the missing word is from context. Or listen for it, if you have Clozemaster Pro and do the audio exercises. Is Clozemaster perfect? No. But at least it doesn’t actively hold you back from fluency.
This is usually where “But Duolingo is FREEEE” comes in, almost as if that forgives its many and varied sins. I could not care less about free, I care about good. (And there are other sites, like Clozemaster, which offer some basic features for free in any case but are rather less self-righteous about it.) And in any case, it isn’t freeeeeeee, it’s advertisement based. I have no issue with that because the funds have to come from somewhere, but let’s not kid ourselves that there is no cost to the end user in going through ads, especially ones which sneakily have the close button hidden away in different locations so that you have to look for it rather than hitting it automatically. (Which is, I grudgingly admit, a clever idea.)
The A/B testing system on Duo is an abomination, with people getting access to features or not based on random chance. (I, for example, had one of the unlucky accounts that never had access to the immersion system before they killed it in favour of things like, oh, say, different outfits for the owl), and there are features like being able to communicate with followers which have been broken for literally years. So… why do they still have that feature? Chissà.
Granted, Duolingo is probably a better way for A1 level students to get a general, introductory “feel” for a language than Clozemaster is, where you need to be at least at A2 to get a benefit from it. But a good audio / text combination like Oxford’s Take Off In… series or Assimil is better still. At least language concepts are actually explained, and the sentences are useful to you if you ever need to speak the language and don’t need to ask about a butterfly being stabbed in the zoo.
As I said, it’s your blog and you’re free to write what you want. However I’d regard Duolingo as being probably one of the most destructive sites in terms of effective language acquisition since the year dot, and I don’t think that you’re doing language learners any favours in promoting it. Sorry if that sounds rude, but the sooner that site is recognised for what it is (especially with the current system that it employs) the better off students will be IMHO.
Daniel says
Ciao Alan,
Man, you really feel strongly about this, huh?
When I first looked at DL I had serious reservations. Anne from Chicago will tell you that I was snotty about it when she suggested it (the Italian version) to me.
Many people have written to me saying they love it and use it all the time, but as you so clearly state, just because it’s popular, doesn’t mean it’s good.
Later I used it for Swedish, in the absence of any better alternatives, and found that, up to a certain point, it was helpful.
I did it all, then stopped and found other, better ways to learn. I haven’t looked back.
Occasionally I’ve recommended DL to my students of English too, especially the ‘no-hopers’, when I’m at a loss as to what else might get them going.
The ‘gamification’ is quite addictive, it’s habit-forming, dangerously so. For some people, that’s just what’s needed to get them going.
DL is far from ideal. But it’s much better than doing nothing, which is often the alternative.
If you read today’s post carefully, the gist was ‘do something, keep doing it, re-evaluate, change direction if necessary, keep going’.
As a starting point, for someone with no experience, or no other materials to choose from (as for me with Swedish), DL is one option.
People learn in different ways, but not everyone is confident and knowledgeable enough to make good decisions, especially at first.
So if the alternative is doing nothing, do DL!
But there are certainly better ways, on that we agree!