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?
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