Let’s get our priorities straight today.
First some free Italian exercises for you to try.
Then, news of my attempt to learn some Swedish using only easy readers and parallel texts.
So, here you go, three ‘refurbished’ exercises to try. Enjoy:
Which Word? – Dropdown Menu Exercise
Which Word? – Sentences Gapfill
Which Word? – Text Gapfill
Oh, and by the way, thanks again to everyone who wrote with corrections from the last set. You know who you are. Keep them coming!
Now, yesterday afternoon I had my second attempt at studying Swedish (you’ll remember, this was the language onlineitalianclub.com members picked out for me to try?)
Here’s proof:
I tried using a parallel text to study Swedish
(If you don’t see the picuture, click here to read this article on our site.)
On Sunday, when I began with Swedish, I listened to and read our easy reader in that language all the way through, several times.
The idea was to set an achievable task – finish the book, without stressing about understanding everything (anything…)
Yesterday (Tuesday), I thought I’d experiment with our parallel text version of the same story.
We have lots of these in Italian, by the way, so you can try the same thing – there are free sample chapters.
As you can see from the picture, I printed out the book (cost just a few cents in paper and toner) and stapled the pages together so that I could look at them side by side if necessary.
Mostly it wasn’t.
I found that, 48 hours after Sunday’s workout, I could understand quite a lot of the text and remember a lot of the words I’d figured out then.
Of course, I glanced across at the English version fairly often, to check my understanding and to get help when I got lost.
Some sentences I just skipped. Life’s too short.
You can also see in the picture that I was making notes, just trying to figure stuff out.
For example:
PREPOSITIONS
i sverige, i London
flytta till Sverige
slut = over?
mellan = between?
med = with?
om = about? when?
och = and
men = but
at = for
ber = if
pa = for/in/by i.e. pa engelska
PRONOUNS
jag oss
du
han de
hon
In an hour or so, I got to the end of Chapter 3 (out of nine), so I still have a way to go.
But the ‘parallel texts’ approach was very stimulating and I plan to continue, at least for now.
When I’ve done with the parallel text version, I plan to go back to the easy reader version and listen a few times more, focusing on the pronunciation (which is WEIRD) and also to consolidate what I hope to have learnt about the language.
And then?
We’ll see.
A venerdì.
P.S.
At our new online shop, easyreaders.org, there is now a good selection of easy readers and parallel texts for Italian, French, Spanish, plus a few in other languages.
I have three in Portuguese ready to publish when I find a minute, so if anyone’s planning a trip to Portugal or Brazil…
There’s another in Turkish (which I’ll definitely do myself).
Japanese and Arabic readers are at the formatting stage, and just in are drafts in Russian and Hebrew…
So do join the easyreaders.org mailing list, get your 33% coupon code, and stock up on ebooks for learning languages!
