How To Remember Foreign Words In Italian & Romance Languages

 

I am learning Italian on Duolingo. Italian should be easy for me. Why? 

Because I learned French at school.

 Also I learned Latin at Grammar School. 

I did a course in Spanish on Duolingo last year. AFTER visiting Spain! I started in June. This June I started Italian.

Next year I shall move on to Portuguese. Portuguese is similar to Spanish. The challenge in learning all these languages is not the root words, which are easy, since they are based on Latin. But the problem is remembering the right endings. 

Duolingo gives you sentences to translate. A dozen or so examples of sentences, teaching you the sentence structure and vocabulary which you will learn, are in the guidelines at the start of each section.

It would help to copy these sample sentences into a notebook. However, I am usually keen to start the exercises. I plan to learn by doing. I want to complete my '15 minutes to one hour' daily goal before I start my day, whilst having breakfast and drinking my coffee.

Today's first challenge was a simple sentence. I read the newspaper. 

I should have known the words, and the endings, the vowels, and the double letters. I have a tab for translate google, English to Italian, which I can reverse by tapping the arrow to get Italian to English. I looked at the words. Leggo il giornale. Only three words.

That sounds easy to remember. Giornale in Italian is like the French journal, with the same soft j sound, and the English word for diary, journal, with a stronger J. 

I repeated the sentence aloud three times, to help myself remember it. Leggo il giornale. Leggo il giornale. Leggo il giornale. I have learned the pronunciation. So far, so good.

Then I wrote it down, or rather typed it into Duolingo.  Boom, bong - wrong! 

What had I done wrong? I wrote giornalo instead of giornale.

Italian has feminine and masculine endings which we don't have in English. French and Italian have the masculine and femeine endings. At first I remembered the Italian names Maria and Mario. But it is not as simple as add o for male words, like the name Mario, and a for female names and words, like Maria. The e is the Italian feminine ending, like the English names, Anne, Annette, Belle, Carole, Clare, Diane.

I wrote my new words in my A6 notebook, which I have labelled Italian Language. I fold back the pages vertically and write the Italian sentence on the left, the English translation on the right. 

I also fold the page a second time, to make four columns for vocabulary. I write down giornale - newspaper. I underline the e in giornale. Giornale. The last letter is e.

I look at the English word newspaper.  I underline the e, newspaper.

But I have a second error. Instead of LEGGO, Italian for I read, I have typed Lego, like the Danish building block toy. (Leg being Danish for play.)

How will I remember the Italian double G? I underline the double letter. Le gg o. I think of it as Leg-go.. 

But what is the pronunciation? I check in Translate Google. The GI in giornale, is soft, like J, like the GE which appears twice in the English boy's name George.

However, the double g, GG, is hard, like the K in the English word Kick.

Now I have written a blog post about my method for learning, correcting, remembering spelling and pronunciation. This helps you, if you are learning Italian, or any other language.

By going over it while writing this blog post, I have reinforced my memory. You learn by teaching. So here is another way to remember. Work in pairs, or, as you advance, teach beginners.

Useful Websites

Duolingo