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Week 1 – The Beginning

I would say that I’m a fairly decent person when it comes to learning languages. I found them easy to understand once I had a slight grasp of how the language worked grammar-wise and knew a few words. I suppose Italian is no different for me, other than the fact that I have the opportunity to speak it a lot more with my relatives.

I had the opportunity to visit my family in Italy last March. While I was there, I was fully immersed in the language and was able to have longer conversations in Italian despite my lack of knowledge of words. Ever since then, I have strived for longer conversations in which I can express what I’m saying more efficiently. I usually just do Duolingo, but this week I began to look for other methods to my learning.

Methods to my madness:

• Duolingo every day, complete as many lessons as I can successfully. If more motivated, practice for hearts if running out.
• Setting TikTok preferences to Italian, forcing myself to consume, watch, and listen to as much media as I can.
• Write down conversations that I have had during the day, but in Italian.
• Conversate with my friends in Italy as much as I can for as long as I can. Using both casual and formal terms and grammar.

Now these have been working decent so far, but naturally, there are drawbacks. Duolingo being one of the most popular language learning apps, has been highly criticized by many users and non-users. Some argue that it helps them immensely, others say that it teaches them the most useless sentences, words, and situations in which you can have these conversations.

I can see both sides of the story, seeing as one of my Italian “lessons” last month was on ghosts (fantasmas) and haunted (infestato/a) places.

That being said, the structures that they give you make it fairly easy to just replace certain words in the sentences in your lessons. An example that could be best used for other instances would be like the following.

Mi piace leggere e bere caffè quando piove. I like to read and drink coffee when it rains.

If you replace leggere, bere caffè, and piove, you will get a whole new sentence with the same structure.

Mi piace nuotare e stare fuori quando fa caldo. I like to swim and be outside when it it hot.

Of course, this is only one way of looking at Duolingo, others see it as being too formal, which can come in handy at times. I’m a Duolingo enthusiast myself, I find it to be very helpful in this sense where I can slot new words in and out of sentences I already know because grammatically, they should still work.

My TikTok preferences are a thing of their own. I’ve been having my friends in Italy send me Italian TikTok’s by creators who speak in a very casual manner, it’s all for the benefit of hearing different dialects and new words/expressions. This being said it is pretty annoying to WordReference a few words for every TikTok they send, and if it’s slang, it’s even worse. No harm in asking my friends but I just feel it can be a little overwhelming at times.

We’ll see how I do for the rest of this week, so far so good!