One of my plans is to open a EU warehouse in Italy this year. I’ll need to brush up on and improve my Italian so I can actually function as a business person there.
I already know basic Italian from taking classes but truthfully I struggle learning in classrooms with my ADHD. I just couldn’t pay attention very well and I do so much better self learning.
Luckily I can on person to person practice with my girl who is Italian so the self taught part should work well when I can actually use it daily and practice in person.
I saw they have a lifetime pass for unlimited languages for a reasonable price. Anyone use this successfully for Chinese or any other language?
I’ve tried out Rosetta Stone – in my opinion it’s not the worst product out there (there’s audio, and you’re not memorizing grammatical rules) but there are better ways to learn a language.
Here’s a negative review of Rosetta Stone from Canadian polyglot Steve Kaufmann, Kaufmann has his own product to push (Lingq) but I think that his criticism of Rosetta Stone is valid.
I do use Lingq to learn languages and if I were going to learn Italian I’d use Lingq too (starting with the Italian mini stories series). But there are other products and free material that you could also use to learn Italian effectively. They key thing is that you have audio with some kind of accompanying script so you can look up unknown words. Once you understand the material, you can listen to it repeatedly on the go, making use of any “dead time” you have. The key to learning languages is comprehensible input, and if you’re busy the best way to get enough input is to get into the habit of listening to Italian while driving/taking the bus/between sets at the gym/painting your toenails/walking your pet hyena/whenever you have five minutes of free time.
Buona fortuna!
I’ll also attach for encouragement (discouragement?) this vid of a teen polyglot girl from Turkey speaking Italian
The issue I have with polyglots giving advice about learning languages is, generally, they are somehow really good at it. So, whichever way they learn works. It does, for them.
I hear this a lot. I guess it’s natural reaction to someone fluent in 5, 10 or more languages: they must have a talent for language learning. But this usually isn’t the case. A few observations:
Speaking multiple languages is normal is some parts of the world. It’s something any normal human can do.
The comprehensible input methods most polyglots use is similar to the way children learn their first language and adults in placing like Papua New Guinea learn new languages. They’re effective for anyone.
Polyglots in general can’t learn languages by using any old technique. Many, before discovering effective learning techniques, studied languages for years in the classroom and made little progress. Many were told they had no aptitude for languages. Put a polyglot in a classroom and drill him or her in grammar etc and the results will be just as a abysmal as for anyone else.
I speak and read a bunch of languages and I’m sure, like most other polyglots, I don’t have a special ear for languages, or a prodigious memory, or any other language-related talent
I’m sure this is the case. However, it doesn’t explain why polyglots who offer advice about learning languages give different ways to learn them. They can’t all be right.
If we’re talking about “real” polyglots who’ve acquired a high degree of fluency in the languages they’ve studied (as opposed to just being able to chat in the language with a limited vocab of a few thousand words), the polyglots I’m familiar with all share a common focus on comprehensible input in some form (some prefer reading, others listening, some supplement their learning with some review of grammar and vocab, others don’t, some think having a teacher is useful, others don’t, etc). But without that core of comprehensible input, I don’t think anyone, polyglot or not, could effectively learn a language.
Maintaining interest is crucial in learning a language (or anything else). And here people differ: some people like to start interacting in the language with other people at an early stage, others, like me or Kaufmann, are happy to more or less master a language by ourselves before going out and using it. But again I think the core of comprehensible input is still there if you look at any effective language learner whether they prefer, for instance, learning by themselves or by going out and chatting to people on the streets
Rosetta Stone is a program designed to scam people who think that one simple computer game can make them fluent in a language.
There is no one program that will bring you to any degree of fluency, but Rosetta Stone (and Duolingo, Babbel, etc. “put sentences together based on these pictures” apps) sit at the very bottom of the effectiveness ladder. You don’t learn a language by putting together random, out of content phrases. Nor through vocabulary lists and grammar patterns. You need to acquire a language, not learn it, and Rosetta Stone will not make that happen.
You’re going to need more than one quality program, done in tandem, to get anywhere in any language. Pimsleur is available from a lot of libraries and therefore “free”. It too is boring, but you get somewhere with your learning (after you manage to get through too many lessons about how to proposition a married a woman). I made it though Pimsleur German 5 and found that I had a very solid structure of the language when I was done. I could figure out the gist of the Easy German podcast (which I started listening to when I was at Pimsleur German 3 or so) and I could pick out key words from the DW slow news podcast. Both of those podcasts are upper intermediate level. I didn’t understand everything, but I understood enough that I wasn’t just giving up either.
People on the internet love to complain that Pimsleur doesn’t teach enough vocabulary. As I said, no one program is going to get you fluent. Ever. Anyone that says their program will is selling you something, like a language program that isn’t going to get you fluent. But Pimsleur gives you the structure of the spoken language, with which you can go on to understand a lot more “complicated” texts (and reading is a breeze for a Roman-script language if you already have the spoken language in your brain), allowing you to then build your vocabulary.
Think about building a foundation first, then putting on the finishing details based on your interests second.
For post (and parallel to) Pimsleur learning:
memrise is free for randomly stuffing words and phrases into your brain. It doesn’t work so well on its own.
The Easy Languages Network has a pretty good podcast called Easy Italian (you can get transcripts and worksheets for a few bucks a month on Patreon). This is going to be after you finish level 3 of higher of Pimsleur or the content will be too hard to grasp any of. They also have YouTube videos with Italian and English subs.
If you’re going to buy an “explicitly teach the language” type program, I’d go for Babbel before RS. At least Babbel makes different courses for different languages (culturally relevant, but also completely different courses based on the key things in the language)
I strongly encourage you to work on listening and speaking before bothering with reading a writing. Reading and trying to speak before you can listen is what causes bad accents. If you’re going to spend the money to improve speaking beyond the basics (Pimsleur, for example, really doesn’t teach that much beyond the very necessary structure), get Glossika. It’s pricy, but if you use it daily, you’ll be surprised at how quickly new phrases come to you.
And LingQ was also mentioned above. You’ll need a solid foundation before using that, but that’s a great resource for overall listening and reading.
