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by tommo123
4480 days ago
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I moved to Rome and got a job at a small Italian company with just a handful of other people. I'd never studied Italian before (but French and Latin, yes) and just simply turning up and having to struggle through reading and writing emails in Italian, talking to people in Italian, even terribly broken and incorrect Italian, has done for me in 6 months what would have taken about 8 years of non-intensive study. My grammar isn't great but that's for lack of actively studying it, I'm too busy. Even still, I self-correct all the time and my conversational and comprehension skills are comparatively through the roof. There really is no substitute for immersion and practice. The more familiar with something you become, the more you start to recognise patterns and where your own styles fall down -- you start to notice that others use certain prepositions in a context where you'd use a different one, and you check and self-correct. All the time you're getting better and more comfortable with the whole process; listening, speaking, pronunciation, stringing more and more complex sentences together. It's a holistic process and there is simply no substitute for jumping in the deep end, and the more organic and 'real' it can be, the better. A stale classroom a few times a week is almost doing you a disservice by making you think you're studying -- you might be better off saving your time until you can commit yourself to it properly (for e.g. reading a newspaper every day, speaking for an hour every day with a native speaker, reading and writing in forums/IRC in that language). |
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