A.R. Van Halleorg

I decided to randomly look at my own blog today and I realize that I haven’t blogged in a week!…I thought that was utterly terrible of me and completely slack, so here I am, writing a post at 12:32 AM.

Learning Italian : I bought a book this evening called 501 Italian Verbs. I thought that having a book of conjugated verbs may help me in establishing a better understanding of the language. It gives really great examples with most of the verbs to be able to know how they’re used, so it’s great! I’m totally loving the experience. I haven’t felt this way about learning something, since I started learning programming.

Script Frenzy : Well, I’m 50 pages into Script Frenzy now. It’s 15 days in and we have another 15 to go. I’m on schedule! I’ll probably hunker down and hack out the next portion of it over the weekend. At least get most of the rest finished. I’m looking forward to getting to be able to go back over it all and make it into a polished piece of art. Fantastic.

Southern Gals : I’ve recently discovered that Twitter is quite a dangerous world. Flying tweets left and right. Everyone vying for attention and sometimes…sometimes you get a random message from someone and you’re thrown for several moments. You wonder if they made a mistake, surely no one responds to a tweet!

But they do!…who knew. So this southern gal, (who shall remain nameless, *cough*GO HERE*cough*) decided that I was deemed worthy of a tweet back! And I’m shamelessly linking you to her website, because I can. *waves banner and gushes in a southern drawl* “I’m her biggest fan, y’all! One day I could even get an autograph on my banner!”

What was I on about? It’s late and my mind is wandering lol. Right, so it was pretty cool to be able to meet someone on Twitter who had very similar interests to me. It’s rare that I get to talk to anyone who thinks anything I think is of interest, let alone it be their idea! So after hours of brain picking and confusing conversations about nothing in particular, I decided she’s cool and is now invited to the inner circle of friends. *crickets chirp in the empty field* …okay, it’s an empty space, but I have to start somewhere!

Okay, I’ll write more tomorrow. I’m too brain dead lol

Have a good day/evening all!

Ahh, I think this is now day 4 or 5 of learning Italian and I thought I’d share my improvements over the last few days.

So one of the last things I had a big issue with was the inability to properly process the information and spit it out in written form. Well, I got better at it. The last written submission I sent in only had 1 mistake! It made me so excited! (not in a dodgy manner) And then to make matters even better for me, I finally got out my microphone and decided to record my speaking submissions and see how that went. Apparently I’m much better at speaking Italian than writing it. Not a surprise. I’ve always been better at speaking random languages than understanding them.

But, apparently I speak shyly when I speak Italian, which makes sense, because I haven’t yet learned where to put the emphasis on the parts of the words in order to speak it confidently. I’m just trying to focus on saying it right, before I get overly sure of myself and manage to epically fail at life. Like Post 1 in which I described my failed attempt at trying to be clever by switching words out. What can I say, I learn fast not to make that kind of mistake again.

Small nuisance with the program I’m using is that the speaking submissions tend to use very different words than the lessons themselves, which is really odd to me. It’s like…oh hey 3 lessons later, why don’t we randomly use camion instead of autocarro. Or borsa instead of borsetta. It just messes with my head, I don’t know why they do it. I’m going to assume it’s like when you randomly run into someone in Italy and they’re suddenly using some warped language and they want you to be on your toes just in case!

So that’s all I had to say about that for today, as the days go by, I’m sure that it’ll get more interesting.

Ahh, another day come and gone in the lovely world of learning Italian. It’s still random, I still don’t have any sound basis for wanting to learn it, but I can tell you one thing. I love it! I’ve always heard from people, especially here in Quebec, that Spanish is super easy to understand, especially if you know English and French, but personally I’ve always found it a little difficult to get my mind around. Which is odd, but eh. Italian on the other hand…seems like French has a pretty big Italian base to it and is MUCH closer to sounding French than Spanish does. Someone could explain something to me in Spanish and an Italian could explain the same thing and odds are that I’ll understand the Italian more than the Spanish one.

Sorry, I’m rambling a little, it’s pretty early in the morning and I haven’t slept yet.

Yesterday didn’t really have any huge dramatic episodes of corrections, but I also haven’t done the written submission portion of Lesson 2 yet. I’m almost having nightmares in my waken state just imagining the resulting commentary I’m going to be receiving once I do complete it. I can just imagine the grilling. Hopefully I don’t try anything clever and manage to get the singular/plural/feminine/masculine right this time. Now that I understand that the language is styled much like French, this will be much easier for me to understand. I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it that way before, but eh.

I’ll be sure to update as regularly as I can. As boring as it all is, it keeps me wanting to push forward and keep learning the language, just so I can rant about the whole experience and enjoy the fact that I’m understanding it more and more

All in all. I’m loving this! What a beautiful language.

Have a great day!

I’m in the process of randomly beginning to learn Italian. I don’t know why, I just woke up this morning and thought ‘I want to learn Italian’. So I went on to Live Mocha, which is where I’m relearning my German. I use this because it has a community of people who are also learning other languages and people who are native of the language you’re trying to learn can correct you and tell you what you did right/wrong. This is generally awesome and with my German I didn’t see much trouble when I received corrections. But I also used to know German, so I guess that helps.

Well, Unit 1, Lesson 1 of the Italian one is just nouns. It’s just knowing boy, girl, man, woman, you, me. And then saying stuff like..is rich, is poor, is whatever. But this thing also doesn’t tell you how to switch between feminine and masculine yet, because that’s in a later lesson. Well let’s just say that in my clever attempt to switch out nouns, I sent up a red flag among the Italians and suddenly I had tips on how to switch from feminine to masculine and some confusion was thrown in by also pointing out the difference between singular and plural terms.

That didn’t bug me. But their explanation for it was written in Italian. So you can imagine how difficult that was to try to decipher what they were trying to tell me was. My only saving grace was that French is very much based on Italian/Latin, so I got there pretty quickly. On the plus side, here’s what I learned.

1- By default, switch the e at the end of a descriptive word when dealing with a female actor. (pretty standard, we have this in French too)
2- Don’t be clever and switch things around until you have at least a minor grasp of the language or else people send you complicated explanations back with words you’ve never even dreamed existed.
3- Even when you see words you didn’t dream existed, having a backup language helps a lot.
4- Think about what I’m writing in my submission. If I don’t want them to correct me based on something I didn’t mean, then I need to be clear.
5- Take it all constructively and be even more determined.

Consider that my random useless post of the day. I just wanted to talk about it.

If any of you are using Live Mocha as well, go ahead and add me to your list! I’m arvanhalleorg on there.

Hope you guys are enjoying your day.