Learning italian at 24 years old- month 2

Hello, hello

July has ended so I brought you another article about my journey of trying to learn Italian by myself. You can start reading about month 1 here on this link

The plan

You can read about it in my article about my first month learning but if you don't want to here it is: Duolingo, watch movies/TV shows (in italian) and listening to podcasts in Italian. So what have I done so far?

Duolingo

The gamification really helps me staying on track with my duolingo lessons, and my competitive side also comes out very easily in this type of apps. I have a good streak on Duolingo, but as the days pass my feeling of displeased grows. Yes, I'm learning vocabulary and one or two verbal forms but it's all superficial. I really don't like one of the exercises where you listen to a conversation and then answers questions about what was talked and about vocabulary. You might find it weird, that's a great exercise, right? Wrong. Because the conversations that they give me is full of words that they haven't thaught me. How am I supposed to answer correctly if they just throw new words at me?

Another thing is that, for some reason, they count names as vocabulary. It's important to learn some local names for sure but... counting it as words to learn?

And without explaining how the verbs work it's getting harder to advance in the levels. On the free plan you have 5 lives and lose one every time you make a mistake. I noticed that I have been making a lot more.

Tiktok videos

I will be honest, I don't know how I didn't think about using tiktok to have some type of contact with the italian language. I was just scrolling when this videos of this boy and girl (I think they are brother and sister? There was this tiktok that had the word sorella, and sorella means sister) playing somes games appeared. Honestly great way to learn vocabulary, I learned that taglia means cut (but I always thought that it was the word for size?). They have this water ballons that they hold above their heads and if they lose they need to puncture the ballon. So far I understood they have these games: they are thinking of a word, they give the other a theme and the goal is to not say the word the other was thinking; a filter gives them a letter and they need to say a word that starts with that letter according to the theme; and guessing the movie by a group of emojis. The account is @jacopoaquila_ if you want to check it out.

Random sitution

I went camping with my boyfriend and my family and one of our neighbours was a italian man, I didn't talk to him but I talked with his dog and learned how to say "sit" in italian to see if the dog would understand, and he did!

So far

I don't think I could hold a conversation in italian. I do think that speaking portuguese helps me with understanding the language, because they both came from latin. If that I wasn't the case I would be very much lost. I really need to start thinking in ways to study italian that are a bit more formal, but my aim is to take it slow and I'm only on month 2 of this journey. As always if you have any tips or know some tvshows or movies that I could watch in italian let me know!

If you want to read more of my work check out: The usa of colour in West Side Story and Bryan Johnson wants to be imortal.

See ya,

JP