More about learning languages

I have previously written about my attempt to learn Italian through reading The Adventures of Pinocchio here. Learning languages remains the second most attractive hobby to women (after reading), and I think it extremely useful for following international politics.

Overall, I found that after copying the Adventures sentence by sentence into Google Translate for twelve chapters, I still could barely understand even a few words, which was a surprise to me given my success with this method while learning Mandarin by watching subtitled Mandarin videos. I think my mistake in learning Italian was attempting to get the meaning of the text by translating sentence by sentence rather than word by word or, if necessary, phrase by phrase. By translating sentence by sentence, I was relying too much on the automatic translation and could not easily associate words between languages. I think this method worked so well with Mandarin is that I typed out each sentence from a combination of both listening to subtitled videos and remembering characters, rather than simply copying and pasting characters from a source.

I thus changed my learning habits for Italian by installing the Google Translate browser extension. This extension easily allows one to translate a text word by word and, if necessary, phrase by phrase. I also, when necessary, now copy and paste unknown Italian words into the WordReference dictionary, much as I do unknown character combinations for the Yellowbridge Dictionary when learning Mandarin. As with Mandarin, I make sure to look up each unknown word, so as to make the words better stick in my mind.

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