Blog moving - and changing

After a careful 5 minutes of consideration, I'm moving this blog (well...) to chellberg.wordpress.com and changing the topic. Completely. I didn't realize just how boring this thing would be until Max302 pointed it out a few times :)

Hopefully I'll figure out something more readerworthy to write about. I could try politics maybe.

Deciding about Pimsleur

For the amount of time it takes to do one lesson of Pimsleur, I'm starting to think that I'm not learning very much. For a 30 minute lesson you'll be lucky to learn one or two new phrases. I think it's still useful because of the speaking skill it teaches but I might start spending 15 minutes on each lesson or something... 30 minutes is too long for the amount of information presented in one lesson.

Either all that ^ is right or they're just moving slowly at first. I'll stick with it.

Meanwhile, Rosetta Stone is working pretty nicely, but it's hard to tell if/when you're finished with a lesson. *sigh*

I'll get it somehow lol.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Unfortunately I didn't get to do an Italian lesson yesterday or so far today. I went to bed early last night so I could wake up early and start Harry Potter 7. As it turned out, my copy didn't arrive till 12:10. I started right away, and without revealing anything, I LOVE JK ROWLING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Now then, I finished at 8:38 - Roughly 20 minutes of breaks subtracted = 8 hours 18 minutes to finish the book. Anyway I'm still bathing in euphoria and unimaginable happiness and I don't know if I'll get over it in time for a lesson tonight... All in all a good excuse for skipping a lesson if there ever was one.

Thanks for reading,

Corin.

Finally, I know what this blog's about!

OK so I've decided that this blog is gonna be about me learning Italian. Might be boring to you (more than likely to everyone) but I'm bored and it might help a few people on the road to learning Italian or any other language (but not Spanish. I hate Spanish) so I'm gonna do it. Hopefully

I'm using Pimsleur Italian right now, and I have acquired (ask me no questions...) Rosetta Stone Italian, and I'll be using that when I'm good at the basics and want to expand my vocabulary. I've read that this is a good way to go about it due to the fact that Pimsleur is good at teaching speaking skill and proper pronunciation but has a very limited vocabulary, and that Rosetta Stone teaches a huge lexicon but very little speaking related exercises. Hopefully it'll work. Anyway I kinda stalled for the first half of summer and now I'm actually starting.

I'm on Pimsleur Lesson 9 right now, and so far I've learned mainly how to ask limited directions (Where is St.Mark's Square, etc), inquire about where and when someone would like to eat, express when and where I would like to eat, and the like. So far it's been slow paced in terms of vocabulary but my retention has been very good, such that in the two month gap between lesson 4 and 5 (shut up) I didn't forget a thing or lose any of the amazing pronunciation I developed previously. I've been able to perfectly match the speaker's pronunciation on most of the words, with my only trouble spot being double 'r's. I'm fairly impressed with Pimsleur with the exception that they only recommend one lesson a day and that means that you learn only a few new words/phrases every day. I prefer to move faster, so I'm going to be doing one when I wake up and one when I go to sleep, and maybe one in the middle if I don't get overwhelmed or anything.

I forgot to mention, the reason I'm learning Italian is 1) I love languages 2) I hate English, and 3) I'm going to Italy with my school's orchestra next summer for 10 days. It's gonna be awesome. We're hitting Rome, Florence, Pisa, Venice, and the Vatican, and over those 10 days we only have 2 concerts to play. Jealous aren't ya :)

Anyway, that's enough for now. If anybody reads this please bug me to keep updating it because I really really wanna be able to legitimately call myself a blogger. Lol.

Thanks.

Well so much for that...

Yeah I forgot about this again... I'll try again tomorrow morning when I'm more coherent.  *sigh*