In today’s article, I’m going to share with you some tips that will help you progress in Italian. I’ve already shared some suggestions some weeks ago in How to progress Italian (Part 1), so don’t forget to have a look at it.
Ready? Let’s start!
a. Listen to Italian songs
This activity doesn’t take much time, it’s fun and effective.
Pick an Italian song you like, listen to it one time, trying to grab its meaning. Then, listen to it a second time while reading the lyrics. Look up all the words and expressions you don’t know. Then, listen to it and sing it along. Keep doing this until you haven’t learnt it by heart.
Learning Italian songs helps you improve pronunciation, and recall new vocabulary and new sentences.
b. Speak Italian every day
You can do it on your own, with a friend, a language partner, a teacher or a stranger. The important thing is that you speak Italian. When speaking we don’t have much time to think to what we want to say, like in writing, so it’s important to practice speaking every day so that it becomes easier with time.
You can choose a topic right before talking, so you can check and learn some vocabulary that you’re going to use, or you can start to talk about a topic and when you don’t know how to say something, you can look things up in a dictionary or write them down and check them later.
A thing that can be helpful is trying to talk about one of the topics you wrote about a week before. In this way, you can practice speaking while at the same time test yourself to see if you can remember words and expressions. And, of course, don’t forget to record yourself.
c. Set goals and keep a diary of your progress
Decide what you want to learn and write down a plan. Let’s say you want to learn some basic vocabulary concerning food. You can write down: Day 1. Learn the names of 15 vegetables. Day 2: Learn the names of 16 fruits. Day 3. Learn 10 adjectives related to fruits and vegetables. Day 4. Learn basic sentences to buy fruits and vegetables, etc. It’s easier to reach out goals when you write them down and follow them. Just remember to set realistic goals.
At the same time, keep a diary with all the progress you’ve made. This helps you keep yourself motivated. At one point, you might feel stuck with your learning but if you’re learning something every single day, you should still be able to see results. Maybe you’re progressing slower than you were before because you’re learning more advanced topics but you’re still doing some progress. So, be sure to highlight it in your diary and keep going on.
d. Challenge yourself but not too much
I know that many people today are searching for a quick and easy way to learn a language but if we look at research results, we find out that this is not a good idea. Why is that?
Well, research confirmed that if something is too easy for us, we get bored easily and we generally don’t learn much. By contrast, when something is too difficult, we get discouraged, we give up and, so, we don’t generally learn much. What we need is just the right amount of difficulty. According to research, if we make 15% of mistakes, we know that we’ve reached the right amount of difficulty.
So, try to always challenge yourself with new topics but do not exaggerate.
And this is it. In my opinion, these are the most useful things and activities that you can do to progress in Italian.
What do you think?
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Credits
Original image by geralt
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