Welcome to the Listening Time podcast.
Hey everybody, this is Connor and you're listening to episode 139 of the Listening Time podcast.
I hope you're all doing fantastic today and I hope that you're enjoying all of these episodes and that they're helping you practice your English and specifically your listening and your vocabulary and And most of you know that I'm also a language learner.
I love learning languages.
It's something that I do as a hobby, in my free time.
And in today's episode, I want to talk about the fact that I'm learning Italian now.
I just started learning Italian less than two weeks ago, actually, at the time of recording this.
So it's very new for me, but I want to talk about this today because I'm sure that it will interest a lot of you, if not all of you, to hear a little bit about my experience so far and my goals and my reasons for learning Italian.
So I'll talk about all of that today and I'm sure it will be an interesting episode.
And before we get started, remember that you can get my advanced episodes in which I speak fast at normal speed if you become a Listening Time family member.
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That's patreon.com slash listening time.
And if you want access to my new podcast in which I speak to different Americans from around the country, different English teachers, about a lot of different topics, and I provide the transcript and the definitions of key words and phrases that we use, then you can also find the link to that in the episode description.
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All right, let's get started.
Are your ears ready?
You know what time it is.
It's listening time.
Okay, let's talk about me learning Italian.
So, First of all, let me tell you why.
Why am I learning Italian?
Well, this is part of a challenge that I'm doing, a challenge that I have for myself.
So what's the challenge?
Well, I am going to study Italian for 100 days and I'm studying for two hours a day exactly.
There might be a few exceptions to that, where I study an hour and a half one day, but then I make up for it the next day and I study an extra half hour.
By the way, when we say that you make up for something, we're saying that you compensate for something.
So if I do a little less studying one day, I can make up for that or compensate for that the next day by studying a little bit more.
But most of the days I'm studying for exactly two hours.
So in total, I'm going to study Italian for 200 hours.
100 days, 200 hours total, and I'm starting from scratch.
From scratch just means from nothing, from zero.
So I've never studied Italian before.
This is my first real exposure to the language, and so I'm starting from scratch.
So what is my purpose for doing this challenge?
What are my goals?
What do I hope to achieve?
Well, many people ask me about how to start learning a language.
A lot of English speakers have never learned a language before and they have no idea where to even start, right.
And a lot of people think that you need a teacher from day one.
You need to go to classes and have a teacher teach you the language.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to study on my own.
I'm not going to have any teachers or any classes for these 100 days.
And I'm starting from zero.
And my goal is to reach a level where where I can comfortably start to have conversations with native Italian speakers and to start to consume native Italian content.
Of course, I don't expect to have really deep conversations and be able to say tons of different things.
I'm not saying that.
And I don't expect to understand native content very well.
I'm not saying that either.
What I'm saying is after 100 days, I want to be able to start to utilize native resources.
In other words, native speakers to talk to and native content to listen to or to read.
So I'm not going to be good at those things, but I want to be able to start using those things.
So with these hundred days, I want to get to the level where I can start to just use things, the language itself, to learn the language.
Just use content and speakers of that language, and no other resource that is specifically made for Italian learners.
Does that make sense?
So that's my goal of what I hope to achieve, and I'm gonna use this to show other people how to do the same thing.
So I want to be able to show other people how they can learn a language from scratch and get to a level where they can start to utilize native content and native speakers.
So that's my goal here.
My goal isn't to do this just for myself.
I'm trying to do it for other people.
I want to be able to provide this helpful learning resource to other people who have no idea how to start learning a language.
For all of you, if you're listening to me and you understand me right now, you've already learned a lot of English, so this won't necessarily be a resource to tell you how to start learning English, for example, But maybe it could help you start learning another language.
Maybe you have the desire to study Spanish or French or Italian like me or German or whatever.
And so this might be something useful for you if you're starting from scratch learning another language.
But I'm also making this for native English speakers who have never learned another language before.
So I hope this will be a helpful resource for people in that situation.
And just a couple more notes about this challenge.
I'm not speaking Italian with anyone during these 100 days.
So I'm not having conversations in Italian.
I'm not speaking with a teacher or a tutor in Italian.
I'm not speaking to anyone.
I'm just consuming Italian.
I might say some things to myself out loud, of course.
But I'm not having a conversation with anyone during these 100 days.
And I mention this because...
As a lot of you know, I'm someone who emphasizes input more than output in the early stages of learning, in the other stages as well.
I stress the fact that we need to consume the language and not necessarily produce it, especially when we're at a beginning stage.
I'm not saying that you can't and shouldn't speak that language in the early stage.
I'm just saying for me as a language learner.
I think that it's more effective to focus on your input, on things you're listening and reading to get the language inside your head.
And then, when you feel comfortable, when you have a basic foundation in that language, then you can start to focus on output.
And remember that input refers to listening to and reading the language, and output refers to speaking or writing the language.
So I'm focusing mostly on input here and there's a little bit of output in this first 100 days, this challenge that I'm doing, but it's not having conversations and forcing myself to speak.
But there are a few things that could be considered output, but 99 or so of what I'm doing is is input during these 100 days, and i'm also not doing any passive listening during these 100 days, so normally i would do passive listening.
I love passive listening.
You should do it, you should multitask, and if you have the opportunity to put your headphones in and listen to a podcast in your target language while you're washing the dishes or while you're doing something else, I think that's great.
However, for this challenge, I'm trying to keep it very specific.
100 days, 2 hours a day, active practice.
Just as a way to show other people what you can accomplish with 200 hours of active practice.
But of course I would encourage anyone who is following my program afterwards to also do passive listening if they can.
But I'm not going to do it just so that I can be very specific with how many hours I studied the fact that these hours were active practice and to see the results.
So I'm going to document my whole process.
I'm already doing this.
So every single resource that I use, how I use each resource, the way that I do it, how much time I spend with each activity, each resource, every day, I'm documenting everything.
And at the end of this 100-day challenge, I'm going to make a video and I'm going to show what I did.
I'm going to show all the things I did, how much time I did them for, and hopefully I'll also add part of a conversation that I plan on having with an Italian tutor, just to show that I can understand that Italian tutor and I can speak.
I'll probably include just a short little part of that conversation if I can.
I don't know if I'm definitely going to do that yet, but I like that idea, so I'll probably do that.
And I'll have this video that I can send to people who ask me I'm learning a language from scratch.
What should I do?
So this will be an easy way to show them exactly what I think and what I did to learn Italian in 100 days to get to a level where I have a good foundation in the language and I can start to use native speakers and native content to continue on from there.
So that's my reason for doing this.
I want to help other people and I also want to see for myself what I can accomplish in 100 days.
I'm very curious.
And I also want to note that This challenge that I'm doing me learning Italian This is not going to be the equivalent of an English speaker learning their first foreign language Let's say they're learning Spanish for the first time in their life and it's not going to be the equivalent of most people.
Maybe you just learning any given language.
By the way, when we say any given something, we just mean any of that thing, whichever one right.
So this challenge, me learning Italian, is not going to be equivalent.
I don't want you to think that.
Why am I saying that?
Well, I've learned other romance languages before.
The romance languages are the ones that come from Latin, so I speak Spanish, I speak Portuguese okay, I was better in the past, but I haven't spoken in a really long time so I've probably lost it and I know a lot of French, And these are all languages that are very similar to Italian.
So I'm starting out with a big advantage because I'm very familiar with Italian's sister languages.
I'm probably going to have better results after these 100 days than someone else will.
If they just learn a language and it's the first time they've learned a language, or if they're learning a language that has no relation to their language or anything, if they're just learning a language that has a different alphabet or things like that.
Italian, relatively speaking, is gonna be a very easy language for me compared to other languages, because of these advantages.
So I don't want to be unfair.
If someone sees my video and thinks that they're gonna have the same results as me, that's probably not the case.
Because I've learned these other languages that are really similar to Italian, and that's a huge advantage, but I think that the principles of What I'm doing in this challenge are the same.
I think that anyone can apply this same technique and Start to gain a good foundation in their target language and Even if they don't reach the same level, I think that with 100 days, two hours a day, using the resources that I'm using or similar ones, they can still make a lot of progress and get a really good start.
So I want to mention that as well because it would be unfair if I didn't mention that.
So I have a big advantage, but these principles still remain the same.
I think that people can still do what I'm going to do.
I've never done this before.
I've never documented my process learning a language from scratch.
All of my language learning has been completely disorganized.
I have no idea how many hours I've spent learning these different languages.
I didn't plan my language learning before I started learning these languages.
I used different methods, different things.
I started and stopped many times.
So this is the first time that I'm doing something like this.
So I'm really excited to experiment with this and document it well.
And I want to develop and refine my own plan for when I learn other languages from zero, from scratch, in the future.
The word refine means to little by little perfect something, improve it and keep on making it better.
So I want to do this so that in the future, when I learn other languages from scratch, I can follow the same process or improve this process.
That's more likely.
I don't think this is the perfect process.
I think that I'm going to learn what works better, what doesn't work, and I'll probably include that in my video at the end.
If there's something that I did that I think that other people should spend less time on, because it wasn't as good for me, then I'll be honest about that and I'll show people how they can adjust this method that I used.
So I think that'll be helpful for me and for other people.
And I might take this challenge beyond 100 days.
I might do another 100 days after it and keep on learning Italian for 200 days and 400 hours still two hours a day.
And then with that second 100 days, obviously I'll be using native content.
I'll use Italian content for Italian speakers and I will focus on consuming as much as possible.
And I'll be using Italian tutors to have conversations in Italian.
That would be the second 100 days if I choose to do it.
I'm not sure yet.
I might not.
I might just stop after the first 100 days.
But...
I'm kind of curious to see what I can achieve in 200 days if I start to use native content in the second half, during the second 100 days.
So I might do that.
I'll update you on that in the future if I decide to do that as well.
And lastly, what are my thoughts so far about this challenge and about learning Italian in general?
Well, let me be honest with you.
I've never been interested in learning Italian.
I think Italian is beautiful.
It's a great language, but it never interested me personally because I didn't really have a reason to learn it.
I didn't really have motivation to learn it.
There are other languages that I would like to focus on more.
But now that I have started with Italian, I actually like it.
I'm liking it a lot more than I thought I would.
And it's been really fun for me during these first couple weeks.
So I'm glad I chose to do it.
And I chose Italian because I want to show a lot of English speakers who want to learn Spanish.
I want to kind of show them the process that I would use to learn Spanish, because there are many people that ask me you speak Spanish?
I want to learn Spanish.
What do I do?
And I want to simulate that as much as possible about what I would do to learn Spanish.
But I already speak Spanish, so I can't do it unfortunately, and I already know a lot of Portuguese and I already know a good amount of French.
I can't do it with any of the other similar languages however, I didn't know any Italian before I started this challenge, so I thought that Italian would be a good choice, because it would be kind of similar me learning Italian and another English speaker learning Spanish.
However, I have the big advantage that I already mentioned.
So there's a difference there, but the method would be the same.
I would use this same method.
I would recommend this same method to an English speaker who's never learned a language before and wants to learn Spanish.
So that's why I chose Italian, because I wanted a similar language, but one that I don't speak at all.
So that's why I chose it.
And it's a fun language.
Italian is super fun.
The sounds are fun.
The rhythm is really musical.
It's beautiful.
I think most of you would agree.
Italian just sounds really nice compared to other languages, in my opinion.
It's one of the most beautiful languages for sure.
So I'm really happy that I'm learning it now.
I like it a lot more than I thought I would.
And lastly, just one more note about this challenge.
I'm doing things a little bit differently than I would do them if I weren't documenting this and sending it to other people to recommend to them.
If I were just doing this by myself and not for other people...
I would, of course, do passive listening with Italian, and I wouldn't do every single thing that I'm doing right now.
But I'm doing these things because I think that they will be good for other people who feel like they need help, more structure or a process that seems a little more organized, because for me, if I weren't using this to recommend to other people, I would probably be less organized and I would probably spend more time on certain things and less time on other things.
But I'm trying to create a very clean program for other people and because of that, i'm doing things a little differently from what i would normally do, because i'm trying to create a very easy example to follow.
But this is more or less what i want to do.
It's just a tiny bit different, so i want to mention that as well.
I'm trying to create this easy example to follow.
So those are my thoughts about this challenge about why I'm doing it, the purpose, what I think about Italian and all of that.
I hope this episode was interesting for you.
And when I'm done with this challenge in the future.
I'll do another episode to talk about it as well.
So stay tuned for that.
And, of course, if you feel ready to practice with my advanced episodes, in which I speak fast, then make sure to sign up to become a listening time family member.
The link is in the description below this episode.
And if you want to practice with real conversations, to practice listening to two native speakers talking to each other, then make sure to sign up for my US Conversations podcast.
The link is also in the description below this episode.
And if you like this podcast, please share it and please give it a five-star rating on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts.
All right, thank you for listening to this episode and I'll talk to you on the next episode of Listening Time.
