Just had a good one. When Aran says “The Italian for ‘since’ is…” all I heard was the sound of a motor or something like that. Then the male voice says something that sounds like ‘kee tow’ but the text correctly reads ‘da’. There was no female voice. All the following sentences seem to be okay.
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I would like to know that too please
Actually I’m now with the black belt and would like to know if there is something on top of it or simply I’m there and that’s it. I see that new words and expressions are being added as I go but wonder whether that’s the last point in the Italian journey.
Cheers,
Adam
I think this approach works really good. I had some knowledge of Italian prior to starting this course and though sometimes I felt sort of surprised what words came up it took me only a while to understand whys and what fors that approach had been adopted. It makes a lot of sense and I find it easier to retrieve conjugated forms than using any other method.
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I’m plagued by the same question. Is there something beyond or above black belt? Up to what point the course takes a learner and if there is something more to come. How can Italian course ba stacked up versus say Spanish one.
As I understand it - @thomas-cassidy can correct me if I’m wrong - the new courses contain around 200 hours of learning taking you to around a B2 conversational level in the European Framework.
Black Belt isn’t the end - there is more to follow, but just shows that you’ve attained a high level already. Try to use your Italian as much as you can “in the wild” if possible.
Well there are something like 3000 discrete items that are ‘introduced’ with quite a lot of repetition of course
And there are something like 12-15,000 phrases in the new courses.
We expect learners to be invited to generate a phrase around 10-20 times before they have it truly instant
Which means - at around 4 phrases per minute we have quite a lot of phrases.
Something like 600 hours until you’ve generated each phrase 10 times.
So there’s plenty of content in there.
However, we think that after 100 hours of learning you’ve really done enough. Everything from then on is just additional reinforcement.
The reality is as soon as you’ve done 30 hours you can be getting into conversations, watching movies in target language etc.
Listening to podcasts etc.
We’re actually working on listening material this year and should be integrating that into the app by the end of the year.
Once black belt has been reached, you’re about halfway through the new items by the way.
And once all new items have been introduced, the app goes into infinite play mode during which phrases are generated at random from the complete set of available material in the course.
So, if you just keep on playing there will be plenty to keep you going!!!
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Anyone who wants to play along with our first little intensive Italian test next Tuesday:
Snagging: “to sit down” sedersi is introduced, followed by the prompt “I want to sit down.” I answered voglio sedermi which AFAIK is correct; supplied answer was voglio sedersi which I strongly suspect is dodgy.
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I use SSIW on my laptop, on the website. I cannot find how to access the Italian. The drop-down menu (top left, when you click the SSi logo from the Welsh home page) lists only Welsh, Spanish, Manx, Dutch, and Cornish. How can I access the Italian? (I’ll also want to access the German when it becomes available.)
(If it makes a difference, I am in the United States.)
@gwenyth-sharwood It’s on the new version of the app, which can also be accessed online, but it’s a different bit of the site:
“the new app, the one that’s available as a mobile app - SaySomethingin - or as a web version app.saysomethingin.com”
Edited to add: that’s quoted from a different thread on the forum, which is why it’s a bit disjointed - it was the quickest way for me to get you the right link.
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I had that one noted down too. I wonder if it might mean “I seated us”; or maybe I’m wrong and it has no coherent meaning. Either way, it can’t be “I want to sit down.”
In general (and I have a big feedback dump to make for Italian that I am trying to get around to), there’s a whole little routine the app seems to go through after a new word is introduced that IMHO needs a few tweaks, as you can see the errors coming a mile off. One example I think I remember recently (I’ll need to check my notes to be sure) is “da viaggare”. As soon as they introduced this in order to build up “Sono stato abbastanza fortunato da viaggare in Africa” (I’ve been lucky enough to travel to Africa), I immediately knew they were going to give me “voglio da viagare” and “penso da viagare” and that in the next phase, they would revisit it with the (I think correct) forms “voglio viaggare” and “penso di viaggare”.
The problem with reflexives that you mention seems to come in the same phase and is just as predictable for the same reasons. I think there was at least one other example with a different reflexive (I’m thinking maybe “sentirsi” but I’m not certain).
This kind of thing is why I haven’t touched the Chinese course and won’t do so until it’s out of beta. Pedagogically, the method is amazing and I’m thrilled to use it with languages like Italian that are similar enough to Spanish that I trust myself to figure out and filter out the mistakes (same goes if you release a Dutch course, which is similar enough to German that I’ll go for it and not worry too much).
I’m also extremely happy and grateful to use it for languages like Japanese or Finnish, where I’m curious enough about them to want to learn some but have no ambitions to speak them to a very high standard. If I learn a few incorrect forms, who cares? As long as I can communicate.
But Chinese is a language I still want to speak really well one day and in spite of having once lived in China for a couple of years, I don’t trust myself to spot these little mistakes.
Hey everyone! Sorry for the silence - I will catch up and reply to all of you very soon, but just letting you know that there is an update about to go out which should catch a bunch of these phrases.
The filtering tools are improving which will hopefully have an effect on all other courses as well.
Hopefully we’ll go live today, but it’ll depend on tech team availability
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There are a few mistakes in the Chinese, for sure. But it’s really not a problem. Almost all of the phrases are not just correct, but also very natural.
And the brain does a really good job of picking up the patterns from incomplete information.
The further you go in the course, the more you get it.
Italian v.1.1.0 is live! You should see:
-Some fixed audios (there will definitely be many more to fix)
-a decrease in weird phrases (there’ll still be some, but this should help)
-hopefully a complete fix for the course going out of sync
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Grazie!
Here’s Tom’s stream for anyone who wants to come and say hello!
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For “the best way”, the app has “il modo migliorare” instead of “il modo migliore”.
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Good catch!