Learning an intermediate language - Italian

Hello all,

On my blog I have written articles about difficult and simple languages before and I realized that I didn’t write anything about intermediate languages yet, so I will try to dedicate an entire post to them now. As I mentioned earlier, there are probably much better divisions of languages based on their difficulty. I do not challenge them, but I find that up until now, all the languages that I’ve learned fall into three simple categories: simple, intermediate, difficult – depending on how far a language you already speak at a native/advanced fluency level is from these languages.

For me an intermediate language (or a language that I find to be intermediately difficult to learn) is:

• A language that is outside of my native language group, or outside the language group of a language that I already speak well, but still within the same general family[1]
• The grammar is at least 50% identical with the languages I already speak at an advanced/native fluency level
• Another 30% of concepts present in the grammar are concepts that can also be found in the languages I already speak but are used rarely or formulated in a different way
• At least 10% of grammar concepts are completely alien to me
• There is a large number of cognates in the language, but different pronunciation might leave them unrecognized at first
• The sound system is at least 50% identical[2] with the languages I already speak
• Literal translations are often possible
• Cultural difference is not a substantial issue

From a strictly analytical point of view, if you look at English and Italian for instance, you almost can go as far as saying that they are two distant dialects of Indo-European. They both share large amounts of Latin or Greek based vocabulary, Italian vocabulary has received a lot of influence from English, there are numerous grammar concepts that overlap, a lot of expressions in Italian can be directly translated into English, often literally.

Hiking in Slovakia – High Tatras

Waterfalls, mountain lakes, mountain streams, amazing views and weather

I went back to Slovakia during the summer and after a very very long time visited the High Tatras. My log is mostly about languages and I know that posts about climbing mountains or river tracing might not be interesting to all of the readers, but this trip was so amazing, that I decided to at least share some of the pictures we took. My high school friend bought a flat in Tatranska Strba, only a couple of stations of rack railway away from Strbske pleso (the main tourist hub), so we decided to go there on Friday evening and start the trip on Staurday morning. 

High Tatras are amazing in any weather and any season, but that Sarurday there were almost no clouds in the sky and the temperature was around 25 degrees, making the conditions very suitable for a good hike. When we arrived at Strbske pleso, we decided to take the yellow route to the Furkotsky peak, which had a lot of interesting sights on the way. The entire hike was about 22 km long, but was definitely worth the effort.

Interview with Luca Lampariello

Dear all,

a few weeks ago my good friend Luca Lampariello was kind enough to do an interview with me on his blog and I am very happy to say, that I can now return the favor and do an interview with him in return. Luca is a friend of mine whom I met about 3 years ago and based on our mutual passion for foreign languages and I think mutual respect as well, we became good friends. He speaks several languages at a C2 level and has been by many people proclaimed to be one of the best polyglots on youtube – a statement to which I subscribe.

I was thinking for a while about the topic, that would suit our interview best, since I didn’t want to talk about motivation or general language learning strategies, but rather something more specific, something that would be interesting and useful at the same time. I know very well, that I have lost the capability to acquire a 95-100% native pronunciation in a foreign language, but I think Luca is one of those people that still can do it and since it is something that interests me very much and something I personally can learn a lot from, I decided to ask Luca questions related mainly to his accent acquisition techniques and native-like pronunciation development.