SaySomethingin Italian (Beta)

That’s ok as informal Italian to the best of my knowledge

speak if you want

say it if you want

you speak it if you want

all are ok with the imperative 2nd person singular

parla se vuoi

the formal imperative is

parli

so the formal would be

lo parli se vuole

Just to make sure: Is the prompt “you speak it” (present tense) or “speak it (!)” (imperative)?

In any case these us what I would say…

Informal/tu (like Welsh ti)
Present
You speak if you want - (tu) parli se vuoi
You speak it if you want - (tu) lo parli, se vuoi
Imperative
Speak, if you want - Parla, se vuoi
Speak it, if you want - Parlalo, se vuoi

Formal/lei (like Welsh chi)
Present
You speak if you want - (lei) parla se vuole
You speak it, if you want - (lei) lo parla, se vuole
Imperative
Speak, if you want - Parli, se vuole
Speak it, if you want - Lo parli, se vuole

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It’s the informal and formal versions (vuoi for informal and vuole for formal)… At some point in the course it starts to introduce the formal stuff (marked by a “sir” or “madam” in the full sentence)… Usually around those phrases it’ll tend to push the formal versions. Annoyingly English doesn’t have any way to differentiate. But both would be a correct answer to the prompt, so when you say a different thing to the prompt just remind yourself you were right too :wink:

(I don’t know if you remember, but Welsh had this exact same issue!)

Here’s a bit of feedback from Thursday’s intensive day of Italian. No doubt people are busy cleaning up the text, but it may be worthwhile noting stuff that I’d like to tidy up if I was doing it.Working chronologically through the text:

Sound quality of the English after “non voglio smettere di parlare con te”: “if” comes out as "“ifshsh” and this is repeated.
There may be a problem with my ears, but the first time "di più’ was presented, the “di” was indistinct and I needed the written text to work out what had been said.(Diolch byth!)

With “presto impareró di piu con te” the English version starts with “if” in the first spoken version.

The oddities of diction in English were irritating, and it took me most of the day to work out how any fluent English speaker who was not an actual slave could say things like “if soon I will learn more with you” . (Pretty naive for someone like me who’s used to working with AI generated translations, but it shows the content overall feels reasonably OK). The inappropriate “if” is repeated a number of times and is not reflected in the Italian.

Just after Aran’s indoctrination session on chunking, (sorry!) there’s an extra repetition of the student’s cue “and easily”, and I wondered if this was intentional.
The same thing happens with “adesso volevi” soon afterwards.

The AI makes a bloomer with “volevi chiederme” = “I wanted to ask me”

Sound quality: With “voglio parlare da” the woman adds an “M” to “da(m)”.

Content: “Soon are you well” Eh?

AI: “I’m sure IF I can help you” instead of “THAT I can …” /“Sono sicuro di poterte aiutare” This looks like a peculiar back-translation from the negative expression “I m not sure IF I can help you”

AI: " I think could you repeat a little more slowly?"
This is an odd question and in any case the Italian looks like a statement: Penso che potresti ripetere in po più’ …

AI: “It is important time to learn” should read "it is important TO HAVE the time to learn " OR "the time to learn is important " ( é importante il tempo per imparare)

AI: I think to find/Penso di trovare “I think of finding”, surely?

AI: “How you are doing? Como ti sta andando?” - How ARE YOU doing?"

AI: This difficulty with idiomatic expressions is magnified when they are transmuted into, for example, “You are doing = ti sta dando”

Sound quality: The Italian for “it” is: no?/lo? Then kere?/Se lo?

I found the first four hours really rewarding, finding myself speaking proper Italian instead of my previous fake mix of Spanish, Latin and Inspector Montalbano (stronzo!). I was glad to have done it before the looming Japanese, which won’t be half so easy, and if I can find time between mending the hole in the roof and cutting brambles, I might have to cheat by going over the ancient stuff in advance - why waste an existing resource?
But as the long day went on I became increasingly frustrated with saying mainly just bits of sentences, often not adding much to the range of things I could say , and thinking if this was an evening class at 2 hours a week most of the class would have left after a fortnight, not just the kids with sweaty slippers. And by the end of my nearly nine hours I was thoroughly punch-drunk and almost angry with the exercise. On reflection though, even if you can’t yet say hallo, there is the option of getting out there somehow to taste Italian in the wild, and the course actually depends on some other more human interactions, even if they are with some other course (anathema!).
I came to SaySomething in Welsh too late to experience it properly but I feel there was more human content in it than this jumble of language islands (thank you Aran) which doesn’t yet amount to a habitable territory. I’m encouraged to try the day-a-month process and I feel it’ll give me at least a basis for a decent command of Italian.

Oh, and I was quite pleased with the presentation of bits of different tenses, though my feeling for them was probably enhanced by recognising them from Spanish and French.

"thank you Aran " above for the picture of language learning as a gradual coalescence of islands into a continental structure. Not ironic, though Chris saw it that way.

The prompt was: you speak, if you want. No Imperative. That was, why I was puzzled. I thought, the right answer was either " ( ti) parli, se vuoi" or “(Lei ) parla, se vuole” but not " parla, se vuoi"

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@brigitte If that was the prompt, your expectations were correct and “parla se vuoi” is a mix of the two.

Of course Kai is right about the similarity with the Welsh course because it’s impossible to know from the English prompt if it’s informal or formal. And if it worked with the Welsh course anyway, it sure can work fine with the Italian course.

However, having half sentence formal and half informal is different and, also considering that the course seems to never include pronouns, probably a bit confusing.

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Serious complaint here: I’ve finished throwing stuff over a wall, talking about a big world and how it’s not meant to be easy and I’m onto beautiful eyes and stuff under a bridge. No doubt soon it will be time to be proud of myself and to express regret that it was the whole family. But so far, I haven’t learned to reminisce about my children’s first week at school, describe someone else’s children as a handful or tell someone that they don’t look old enough.

I’d like some reassurance that these important gaps will be filled at some point ha ha.

In all seriousness, though, does that mean I’m about 2/3 of the way through the course?

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:grinning:

I also wonder if and where you’re going to meet your sister’s colleagues. Nella taverna, forse? :grin:

By the way, the sound of “llond llaw go iawn” is permanently stuck in my memory even though when I did the Welsh course I had no idea of what “a real handful” meant, and I actually forgot again.
I’d be curious to know how to say it in Italian! :sweat_smile:

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Thank you very very much @daimorgan for the detailed report - I will be going through it soon for the next version of the course which we’ll run once the post-Japanese test fixes are implemented. I’ll respond to it all then, so that it’s fresh in my memory when I need to edit the course!

Ah, thank you! I’ll pull it and see if I can scan for more similar patterns… (when I start the next version)

Uhm, let me see - I can see we have some “We want to become more patient with our children.”, “Shouldn’t we try to set a good example?”, “They still fight with each other.” but it seems you’ve already had those if you’re up to stuff under the bridge! Any complaints on missing classics should go to @aran :wink:

It seems so! :scream_cat: Of course with AutoMagic, it will keep giving you prompts forever, which can be quite fun and more difficult when there’s no pattern for what to expect…

My search thorugh the italian course has yielded no “handfuls” of anything unfortunately! But just to sate your curiosity I ran it through the course creation and it would have come out as “Sono proprio ingestibili” (which would have then been back-translated to English as “They are truly unmanageable”)

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Confusion on a phrase.
English prompt: I help you
Italian response: Ti auiti (help yourself?)

I was expecting Ti auito. However, I am just learning so could be wrong

It’s almost certainly a subjunctive - something that has almost disappeared from English apart from examples like “it is essential that he go” (rather than “goes”), or “be that as it may.” It’s used in wishes, and doubts, and subordinate clauses: the one that’s caught you out is going to build into something like “Do you want that I help you?” (Vuoi che te aiuti?), which is how Italian asks “Do you want me to help you?”

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You were correct to expect “ti aiuto” when presented by itself because it would be the most direct and common translation of “I help you”.

However sometimes the course presents blocks that build up to a different sentence where that translation does work.

I’m sure it is as @RichardBuck says, a congiuntivo and part of a longer sentence.

I guess one possible way to avoid the misunderstandings could be having the block built as “that I help you” so it would be a hint that in Italian it would become “che ti aiuti” instead.

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I am delighted to say that I just got my Black Belt in Italian on the new Say Something app!! I thought this was going to be the end of the journey, so I was very excited when I came on the forum a few days ago and discovered there was still more to come. And even more excited to hear that you are planning to add some listening exercises - I really thought that might be beyond the scope of the multilingual app, just because of the sheer scale of the job.

(Kai - as soon as I saw Italian and Finnish appear on the list of languages on the new app, I felt sure you must be involved somewhere behind the scenes. I am delighted to see that I was right. You and the team are doing an amazing job, bridging that gap between an AI created model and a human one. I am in awe of how much has been happening in just a few months!)

I’d been keeping my fingers crossed for an Italian version of the course ever since I first heard Arun mooting the idea of multiple languages, so I leapt upon it as soon as it became available. and since Xmas (having acquired a bluetooth connected hat as a Xmas present) io sto parlando italiano as I stride around the Chiltern Hills on my daily walk with my (probably rather confused) dog.

First I want to say how much I’ve enjoyed it. I had exactly the same feeling of my brain being pulled in seventeen different directions that I had with SSiW, but also the feeling that things that had gone in one ear and out the other when I tried a bit of Duolingo a few years ago were now actually sticking. The obvious strength of the spaced repetition method is that things like subtleties of pronunciation and what preposition goes with what verb stick to the point of just coming naturally.

I also liked the written elements on the new app. It meant that, early on when I was still looking at the screen while I was using the app, my brain didn’t have to remember what the whole sentence had been in English as well as what the Italian was. It also meant that I could check hard-to-distinguish sounds (like n vs m or l’ha vs la).

I think there is another strength of the SSi method that isn’t talked about so much. I love the way that you introduce pretty complex grammatical concepts without any explanation and leave our brains to figure (or look up) exactly what’s going on. You can build your vocabulary by reading or doing Duolingo but what SSi does, I think , is to allow your brain to build up a grammatical framework of a language that you don’t need to consciously think about - and that is what gives you mental flexibility to be able to start talking to people without being completely stilted.

However, I do agree with some of the other comments that this method of letting our brains figure out what is going on breaks down a bit when complex sentences are broken up into small pieces and then spliced together with other bits that don’t necessarily work grammatically. This occurs quite a bit when the subjunctive is introduced in Italian, which is a pity because then it undermines what the app is teaching us about when the subjunctive should be used. (There was a similar issue when different prepositions were introduced before verbs, (e.g. da parlare, a parlare) and then paired with a verb like penso, which should be followed by di, but that was a bit easier to figure out.) What I tried to do was add words into my responses to make it work - but that does presuppose that I’ve got it right!

I’d say (having dabbled a little bit with the (old) Spanish course when I was waiting for the Italian to come out) I actually found far FEWER obvious errors (weird noises, completely wrong words, over-long pauses for short responses etc) in the Italian course than I found in the early sections of the Spanish course. But I do have a few overall comments and a few bits of snagging feedback, mostly from the Brown and Black belt sections. (I am sorry, I haven’t managed to record exactly where they occur.)

  • There was a bit of a trend that, in short clips particularly, the female voice cut in just a fraction too late and carried on a fraction too long, so that the first syllable was lost and we caught the start of a syllable belonging to a longer clip. (To a lesser extent that happens with ‘Arun’s’ voice too, but losing the start of the English doesn’t matter as much.)
  • There are a lot of places where the phrase in English was something like, ‘I think, do you want?’ which doesn’t really make sense. I struggled to understand why you didn’t use ‘I think you want’, especially as the response in Italian would be the same either way.
  • I thought it was odd that you don’t introduce Vi forms of verbs at all by the end of the Black Belt section. I am guessing this is because Italian is unusual in having a You Formal that is distinct from You Plural, but a few phrases to introduce the fact that Vi forms exist would be helpful.
  • As someone who tends to go at things like a bull at a gate at times, I liked the idea of having a timer reset encouraging me to take a break. However, the App doesn’t seem to notice when we DO switch off and take a break, so sometimes the timer would go off just a few minutes into a session. It would be helpful if it could either recognise when we have paused the app, or if we could choose to manually reset the timer when we do finish a session.
  • There was a weird bit where “Arun’s” voice kept pronouncing ‘ago’ as something like AYgo. (It also made me laugh to hear his voice say ‘tomayto’ instead of ‘tomahto’.)
  • When ‘told’ is first introduced, and a few times afterward, the Italian voices both respond with ‘me l’ha’ on it’s own
  • An odd combination of ‘quest’anno o un’altra’ (instead of un’altro) towards the end of the black belt section

Hope all this helps, and looking forward to getting stuck into the next segment of the course. (Do we get ‘dans’ now? :sweat_smile:)

Catriona

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This is FANTASTIC feedback for us. You’re completely right about some of the odder things and some of the ways the build ups don’t work in more complex sentences.

We’re aware of a lot of this and it’s really helpful to hear that you managed to soldier on despite all this, while we work on the next version.

We think that it will probably be 6 months or so before a course passes from Beta to Live. And we imagine several iterations of each course in this period.

But we just wanted to get stuff out there because—as you’ve pointed out—the methodology still works!!!

The brain happens to be rather resilient to small disturbances!

Anyway, keep doing what you’re doing and good luck in your next language! :star_struck:

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There’s something which keeps popping up and I don’t Think it’s correct.
Voglio andartene as meaning I want to leave. I suppose it should be voglio andarmene o voglio partire. If I’m wrong pls correct me.

Adam

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Yup, thank you - I’ll mark it for deletion in the next version and do a scan for similar patterns!

Just came across something similar a couple of hours past Black Belt. Alzarci is introduced while working towards ‘Non abbiamo bisogno di alzarci’, but then because it’s an infinitive, the algorithm automatically starts offering ‘voglio alzarci’, ‘sto cercando di alzarci’ etc when I presume it should be ‘voglio alzarmi…’

It’s made me realise that the same thing almost certainly have happened earlier with ‘sedersi’ and ‘trasferisi’. I think at the time my brain decided that all reflexives must use si, but I knew ‘ci’ was (rougly speaking) us, so it jumped out at me and made me realise where I was going wrong.

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