Update 1

3 January 2021

Firstly, happy new year to everyone! While it IS just an arbitrary line drawn in time, it certainly does give a feeling of a fresh beginning, that hopefully this year can be better.

In line with this concept of immersion, I watched a movie in Turkish. A couple things to note about the movie is that it made me realize that Turkish speakers speaks fairly quickly. I had to put the movie on 0.75 speed to be able to try and replicate what the characters were saying. I did, however, learn a few words from that, like “hoca” meaning teacher, but the experience of watching the movie showed me that there’s still work to be done to get even mildly conversant in Turkish. One thing I’m proud of is that, since I know how verbs are conjugated, I was able to notice where the verb of the sentence was placed.

With Italian, it was much of the same. I started a show in Italian, with 45 minute long episodes, so I think what I might start doing is watching an episode and then a short Italian lesson. For the most part, I want to stay away from strict grammar lessons, since I can already get a good sense of the grammar based off what I know from Spanish and French, but there are some concepts that are unique to Italian, like the Preposizioni Articolate, definite articles that combine with the prepositions. Even within the articles, there are some differences from Spanish and French, like the article gli, used before some odd consonant clusters. But again, for the most part, I want to stay away from grammar and get a feel for it through immersion. The lesson I watched yesterday, for example, was about the ten most common verbs in Italian. I should probably watch that again, since I find myself struggling to remember the verbs, but the reason I want to know these verbs is so that I can recognize them in the show and get a sense for what the sentence is saying.