The man who learnt a language by listening to the radio

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Buondì.

On Monday I published Episodes 10, 11 and 12 of this year’s FREE Summer Series, which aims to cover the fifty or so years of Italian history from the end of WWII up to Berlusconi and the euro.

Previous years’ Summer Series covered ‘La storia di Roma’ (30 articles), ‘Il Medioevo’ (30 articles), ‘Il Rinascimento’ (30 articles), and last year’s ‘Dal Risorgimento alla Seconda Guerra Mondiale’ (30 articles), so 120 articles + online audio.

This year’s FINAL summer series will add another 32 texts to that total. By the time we’re done in September, there’ll therefore be 152 FREE history articles with online audio available on the club website for any learner who wants them, no registration, passwords, or logins required.

Find them all here, or follow the links below to go directly to this week’s new material:

• Episodio 10. La televisione italiana
• Episodio 11. Il monopolio della Rai e la lotta per la libertà di espressione dei canali indipendenti
• Episodio 12. La Vespa e la libertà di movimento per tutti

Così. News from Italy?

Erm, not that much, other than that where I live it’s very, very hot.

And humid. We’re all suffering. Our cub sweats profusely and seems uninterested in eating the wholesome and abundant meals I prepare him.

Though he has a couple of teeth now, and the weather hasn’t stopped him sharpening them enthusiastically on anything he can reach – crumpled beer cans, the coffee table, me…

Nights are worse for us all, in particular because Bug, not having eaten much dinner, wakes up hungry at around midnight or one a.m., and howls  at top volume while his keeper rushes to the food preparation area to warm something up in the microwave.

Tummy filled, peace is restored for a few hours, until he’s hungry again, and repeat.

This morning I got out for a walk, the idea being to move my body, which has started to put down roots into the soft furnishings.

Also to remind my cardio-vascular system that it’s theoretically capable of doing more than just ticking over while I slump, dripping, in an armchair.

Down to the park, round the lake, then home again, used to take me about thirty-five minutes, though now, after ten months of night shifts in the small-animal-care facilty, and with temperatures reaching 100 Fahrenheit later in the day, it’s more like forty-five,

The slower pace does at least allow more time for listening, so, as I walked along with my earbuds in, checking out the ducks, swans, geese, and occasional attractive jogger, I pondered how my listening comprehension skills are stronger or weaker according to how crappy a night I had.

It’s a real effect, I promise you. On mornings when I’ve slept the requisite number of hours, I can ‘get’ a lot of what I hear, often to the point when I don’t even notice myself doing it, I’m just listening to the news, the fact that it’s in Swedish, or French, or whatever, being irrelevant.

While on other mornings, the days when dragging my worn out body and brain to the park is just a means to avoid doing anything that would require energy and alertness, what I hear though the earbuds is often just noise.

It might as well be Chinese, a language of which I know nothing. Or the sound of the traffic. Or ducks quacking.

Other things affect where I’ll be on the spectrum of ‘understanding’, of course, most obviously how much of a particular foreign language I know, but also my level of interest/attention/focus, and more in general, the topic of the ongoing conversation or monologue.

Try it for yourself. Get some earbuds or headphones, download an app for a radio station or podcast in the language you’re learning (you could try https://www.raiplaysound.it/ ), get your gym shoes on, and head for the local park.

Objective? Apart from the health benefits, that is? Absolutely not to ‘understand’, and certainly not to feel bad about not-understanding (which is inevitable and ubiquitous), but just to observe.

Is it just noise? Does it vary? Are there occasional glimpses of sunlight through the clouds of incomprehension? Do you follow more easily when what you’re hearing is something familiar? i.e. a news story that you’ve already heard in your own language?

Just observe, don’t stress, don’t strain, rather let it all pass by, as if you’re watching water flowing down a river towards the sea.

One benefit is that you GET USED TO IT. Not, I mean, to actively listening and beating yourself up about the stuff you don’t understand, but to the sounds and rhythms of the language, the way people speak it, the topics they talk about, and the ‘meta’ of your audio source.

For instance, that podcasts tend to start and end with music, or that radio has news bulletins each half hour and weather forecasts for places you couldn’t locate on a map.

With time, being used to it, and being unstressed about not understanding, your ability to piece together bits and pieces, within the larger context that you can now predict, leads – rather magically, I’ve always felt – to ACTUAL UNDERSTANDING.

It takes a long time, obviously. Hundreds, maybe thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of hours. Maybe the rest of your life.

But then, you have the rest of your life, and what you choose to spend it on is entirely up to you. Did you have other plans?

Remember though, however good you get at listening to a foreign language, your understanding will always, always be partial.

Native speakers don’t understand everything they hear (no, they really don’t, not even you, it’s an easily-provable fact). They’re just used to it.

Which is precisely my point.

And if your pet frequently keeps you up half the night, you’ll get used to not understanding that much even quicker, as you’ll be too tired to care.

So anyway, I did the Swedish news headlines, which finished just after the mid-point of the path around the lake, then switched on France.info, to see what the French are arguing about these days. Politics, obviously, it always is. But I’m interested in politics, so that got me the rest of the way home, trying to figure out who the interviewee was and which party he must represent.

I once met an old man, at an opera house in Ankara, in Turkey, who spoke really great English – which was very rare in that city in the early ‘nineties, which was why I was there.

I asked him how come, and he said his family had had the BBC (British state radio station) on every day when he was a child, and that he’d continued listening to it as an adult.

A man who learnt a language just by listening to the radio!

Occasionally Swedish people ask me how come I can understand Swedish fairly well, and even speak some, enough to be provocative about politics, at least.

Is it because my mother-in-law is Swedish??

You’re kidding, I reply. Then tell them that…

Alla prossima settimana!

eBook of the Week, ‘I racconti di Canterbury’ (B2/C1), £4.99

This week’s half-price eBook ‘easy reader’ is ‘I racconti di Canterbury‘, a selection of Geoffrey Chaucer’s pilgrims’ tales from medieval England. Improve your Italian comprehension skills as you read/listen to them, just £4.99!

Why read the Italian version of a classic of world literature instead of actual Italian literature?

Well, why not? Sometimes a familiar tale is reassuring when faced with the complexities of reading and listening in the language you’re learning.

Besides, you can do both! We have ‘easy reader’ versions of some of the classics of Italian literature, too!

Geoffrey Chaucer nacque a Londra nel 1340 circa, figlio di un importante mercante di vino. Per gran parte della sua vita, fu in contatto con la corte reale di Londra, tra cui quella di Edoardo III che gli consentì di compiere diversi viaggi in Francia, nelle Fiandre e in Italia.

“I racconti di Canterbury” sono una raccolta di racconti in versi. La cornice narrativa, che permette ai personaggi di raccontare le proprie storie, è un pellegrinaggio da Londra verso Canterbury per visitare la tomba di Thomas Becket.

• .pdf e-book (+ audio available free online)
• .mobi (Kindle-compatible) and .epub (other ebook readers) available on request at no extra charge – just add a note to the order form or email us
• 8 chapters to read and listen to
• Comprehension questions to check your understanding
• Italian/English glossary of ‘difficult’ terms for the level
• Suitable for students at intermediate level or above
• Download your Free Sample Chapter (.pdf)

Remember, this week ‘I racconti di Canterbury‘ is 50% discounted, so just £4.99 rather than the usual ‘easy reader’ ebook price of £9.99!

Buy ‘I racconti di Canterbury‘ just £4.99! | Free Sample Chapter (.pdf) | Italian literature | World Literature | Catalog

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P.S.

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The bulletins are FREE because people who value them send in donations, mostly small amounts, $5, $10, $25, and so on.

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