Hitting level 6 in my journey learning Italian
Here is another update in my journey using primarily CI for learning Italian. As I have mentioned in my other posts, I am a heritage speaker of Spanish so I have halved the hours needed for the levels based on the Dreaming Spanish roadmap.
By 320 hours, Easy Italian was accessible. I still struggled with the more difficult speakers but by the end of 500 hours I’d say I can understand nearly any speaker on their street interview videos. I found I could even understand them when they were wearing masks, which previously was not doable at all.
By 325 hours, I could now understand Nicolo Balini without too much effort. At 500 hours, all his videos are accessible and I usually only have trouble when there are multiple people talking at the same time.
At 350, I went out of my comfort zone and was able to understand this video (https://youtu.be/c-1h5Cdaqx4?si=mCH5ZDsseUej3z0q) and that gave me confidence to branch out. I wish I had kept track of which videos were accessible at certain hours but it was a busy summer!
At 400 hours I began to do more speaking. I was not avoiding speaking but I did want to focus on CI. I found that with the AI on Duolingo, I felt much more fluid and that I could get my point across albeit with very simple concepts. As I progressed, I had even more fun with speaking and could even sometimes find different ways to say things if I didn’t know the word. I attached some photos with transcripts from my conversations. Sometimes I did insert Spanish when I didn’t know the Italian word for it.
By 460 hours , I had so much more confidence speaking! It was crazy how much progress I had with speaking after 50 additional hours of input. I will try to attach photos of feedback from the Langua app at around 460 hours. At this point I think I will be able to communicate in Italy during our upcoming vacation without too much trouble, although more complicated things are certainly still out of reach.
Now at 500 hours, I have a much broader range of what I can watch! I don’t think every video is within my reach yet but the ones that are not tend to have very quick speech, people talking at the same time, and more advanced stuff, I’d say like C1 level.
I will be super excited to post my update at 750 hours when I finish the roadmap!