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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Iām 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 Iām wrong - the new courses contain around 200 hours of learning taking you to around a B2 conversational level in the European Framework.
Black Belt isnāt the end - there is more to follow, but just shows that youāve attained a high level already. Try to use your Italian as much as you can āin the wildā if possible.
Well there are something like 3000 discrete items that are āintroducedā 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 youāve generated each phrase 10 times.
So thereās plenty of content in there.
However, we think that after 100 hours of learning youāve really done enough. Everything from then on is just additional reinforcement.
The reality is as soon as youāve done 30 hours you can be getting into conversations, watching movies in target language etc.
Listening to podcasts etc.
Weāre 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, youāre 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: āto sit downā sedersi is introduced, followed by the prompt āI want to sit down.ā 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? (Iāll also want to access the German when it becomes available.)
(If it makes a difference, I am in the United States.)
@gwenyth-sharwood Itās on the new version of the app, which can also be accessed online, but itās a different bit of the site:
āthe new app, the one thatās available as a mobile app - SaySomethingin - or as a web version app.saysomethingin.comā
Edited to add: thatās quoted from a different thread on the forum, which is why itās 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 āI seated usā; or maybe Iām wrong and it has no coherent meaning. Either way, it canāt be āI want to sit down.ā
In general (and I have a big feedback dump to make for Italian that I am trying to get around to), thereās 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 (Iāll need to check my notes to be sure) is āda viaggareā. As soon as they introduced this in order to build up āSono stato abbastanza fortunato da viaggare in Africaā (Iāve been lucky enough to travel to Africa), I immediately knew they were going to give me āvoglio da viagareā and āpenso da viagareā and that in the next phase, they would revisit it with the (I think correct) forms āvoglio viaggareā and āpenso di viaggareā.
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 (Iām thinking maybe āsentirsiā but Iām not certain).
This kind of thing is why I havenāt touched the Chinese course and wonāt do so until itās out of beta. Pedagogically, the method is amazing and Iām 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 Iāll go for it and not worry too much).
Iām also extremely happy and grateful to use it for languages like Japanese or Finnish, where Iām 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 donāt 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 weāll go live today, but itāll depend on tech team availability
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There are a few mistakes in the Chinese, for sure. But itās 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 (thereāll still be some, but this should help)
-hopefully a complete fix for the course going out of sync
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Grazie!
Hereās Tomās stream for anyone who wants to come and say hello!
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For āthe best wayā, the app has āil modo migliorareā instead of āil modo miglioreā.
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Good catch!