So much italian fries my brain

Arrrrrrrrrrh!

Amo questa bella lingua così tanto! Ma it just hurts my head so much from all this learning, i feel like my brain is frying! Is that normale? I guess I just want to understand it all so quickly and not have to do the hard work, but then I know the hard work is the most important foundation of lingua learning. I guess I will get it eventually, I just have to encourage myself to stick to it. I really want this, more than I have wanted something before. I want to surprise everyone back in italy with our much I’ve progressed, even being in an english country. I guess I really just need to believe in myself which is the main thing. I went on amazon this morning and purchased a dual language book of Le Avventure D’Alice Nel paese Della Miraviglie, e Le avventure di pinocchio. So hopefully that will improve my reading and pronunciation abilities.

Just had a big heart to heart with Matteo (il fidanzato) about language learning, because he had to do it from the opposite end, learn english from italian, and he said when he first met me and was having to speak english all the time he was always translating it from italian to english first, and it just always took so long, but then when he got here to london and started talking in english all the time and HAVING to actually speak it all the time, he started thinking it that language, so that cut out that whole long process of always having to translate in his head, he said his father said to him that you truly know a language when you start thinking in that language.                                                                                                                                                 But that when it comes to me I shouldn’t be so hard on myself when it comes to my language learning, that i should take it slowly and I will get there, and when we go back i should try and join in the conversations in la cucina con mamma e nonna! Which i shall definitely try to put into action when I get there! But as expatatbirth said to me in one of her comments, is that I should try to subconsciously pick it up as well, by having italian on in the background. I guess our brain is a wonderful thing with how the subconscious mind works. So I shall definitely start doing that. Domani will be my italiano grande giorno where after I go shopping in the morning to send some cake mixes to italy for mamma (since she can’t get Betty Crocker in Italy), I think I will do some exercises on duolingo, read some amazing blogs, listen subconsciously to gladiatori di roma and she if i pick anything up! 🙂 

Well it’s bedtime for me now! Got an early start in the morning!

Ciao tutti!

A Presto

Anna x

Ahhhhh selfie with the timer at il colosseo 

 

Capire so più che mi sono reso conto

Well oggi has been an interessante oggi con mia lingua apprendimento. I had another strano italiano dream, where I drove down this road to a area with a roundabout and le case everywhere, but on each la casa there was a small phrase that i had learnt in italian, so i could actually understand some of it, like È il sole, or random sentences like that.

Then di mattina Mamma skyped mio ragazzo e io, and I could actually understand a lot of what she said, not like usual when she skypes and I just sit there, looking at her speak and having no idea what she is actually saying, but this time i could actually understand some of it, not like enough to actually get what she was saying, but enough that I could understand the general gist of what she was parlando about. Some decent bits I could understand, like after she told Matteo e io that we were getting chubby from all the male cibo we were eating, she says to be “Basta caramelle Anna, basta caramele” now i love my lollies, i have the sweetest tooth in il mondo, so i replied “ma piace” I probably used the wrong form of “like” but she understood what I said and laughed. That’s always la problema when I try to parli italiano. I always get told i’m molto carino when I speak, then they laugh and my effort. It makes me so embarrassed when that happens, because I really do try my hardest, but when it comes to the crunch, half the time i forget all the great things I’ve learnt recently to be able to practise with, so then I tend to remain pretty quiet the majority of the conversations. I just wish I had more courage to Parli more!

Then Questo pommeriggio after I got home from lavoro I went onto my computer, which is my number one tool for lingua apprendimento, whenever I am on it, I always have about 3 tabs open dedicated to my language learning progression. Perchè most of my down time I spend on my computer, so if I turn that down time into ora italiana then I’m actually doing something productive rather than spending meaningless ore on Facebook. So as I was on my computer, lettura through Lucrezia’s febbraio blog I came across the blog posts she did reading Il brutto anatroccolo (The ugly ducking) so Io leggo through the written words, covering the english part with my hands, and piccolo did I know, capisco a LOT of what it was, certo there were some words that I couldn’t understand, but they weren’t many compared to what I actually could understand. So now I know I can read most of an italian book for the 6 – 8 anni age group! So that’s pretty exciting! I am planning to buy a bilingual version of alice in wonderland on pay day, which I think will be quite good, because it has it in italiano e inglese but I might look at getting some bambini picture books too, so I can practise with lettura them! Do help my reading skills. I was very proud of myself for how much I did understand, that means that even though I feel I have hardly progressed at all, it just shows that I have learnt so much more than I realised I knew. 

Ora è letto tempo!

Buona notte

A domani

Ciao Ciao

Anna x