Hi everyone!
I hope that all is going well.
Today I have a really exciting video for you, because I'm not only going to explain, but
I'll also demonstrate how to go from a "basic advanced" level in a language
to a very high advanced level
And what do I mean when I say "basic advanced"?
Well, for example, I think I can say that I speak Italian at a pretty advanced level.
I can talk with native speakers with no problem, I can talk about quite complex and difficult topics
and so communication isn't a problem.
But at the same time, compared with my French, for example, I don't have the same precision
when I speak Italian.
When I choose phrases and words, I'm not sure if they're the most natural choices
for example
And so, yeah I'd really like to take my Italian and take it to that level that I have
in French, where I can be much more sure of myself when I speak Italian, and also things
like knowledge of slang, for example and things like that
And so today, we're going to do it together.
And I'll also show you a little my English city, because I thought that would be nice.
Let's go!
Now I think when you're trying to achieve these really really high levels in a language,
there are various ways to do it and various methods you can use, but I think no matter
what you do, you have to think of a few things.
You have to develop a meticulous ear and eye for language.
You have to think about detail and you have to think about precision.
Now I want to be clear that, to be honest, if you can speak a language at this sort of
basic advanced level that we talked about where you're able to communicate just fine,
you're able to understand very well, and you're able to use the language effectively,
I think that's a very respectable accomplishment, and if that's what you're happy with,
then there's no need to necessarily shoot for that near-native, really high advanced
level.
But if you want to achieve that, then this is what I think it takes.
So it's no longer just about simply communicating or simply understanding, but it's also about
communicating naturally, um… you know,
understanding the finer nuances of language and what people
are saying, and it's about cultural literacy – which is something I like a lot and I'll
talk about more in future videos.
So, to better illustrate all of this, I'm gonna show you one of my personal methods
that I use, that has worked very very well for me, and it's also worked well for my
studients. and so today I'm gonna show you exactly
how I used this method and how you can use it for your languages too.
Ok so the first thing we're gonna go ahead and do, is we're gonna go and grab some
content.
Now, with this particular method, the most important thing is that the content has bilingual
subtitles or that there's a transcript for whatever you're going to be using.
This could also be audio-only, but I really enjoy using youtube content if I can find it.
So I'm gonna go to Easy Languages, because they have a huge selection of languages you
can choose from, I know that some of you guys might not be learning Italian, and so there's
a good chance that they will have the language you're studying.
So I'm gonna go here and get this nice playlist where they're all organized, and in the
case of German, for example, they have some 200 episodes, it's crazy.
So I would go through and choose only a few that sound most interesting to me.
But in this case, there are not to many, so I'm just gonna go ahead and grab all of
these, except for this "coming soon" one.
So, what I would do, is I would take the URL…
Now, I've already done this, except for this duplicate I just made.
As you can see, I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
But I like to get about 15 pieces of content if I can, it doesn't really matter but that's
just something I like to do.
So I'm gonna go ahead and close this, and next, I'm gonna go to good old Italiano
Automatico.
So, for those of you who don't know, Alberto is just an absolutely unbelievable guy, I
love all of his content, and I think he's done a real service to the language learning
industry regarding Italian, he has made a mountain of content for Italian learners.
So I really wanna support him by showing him in the video, but I also genuinely like the stuff.
Now he has a lot of episodes in this particular playlist here, there are other ones as well.
But I'm gonna go with this one here.
And what I'm gonna do, is I'm just gonna scroll through right now, and I'm just gonna
pick out let's say 5 interesting-looking episodes.
…
Let's see, is that 5?
Ok so that's 5 episodes there.
I like these "book of the day".
I'm gonna do one more because this looks really interesting as well.
So I'm gonna close this, and same thing again.
The last thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come over to another Italiano Automatico playlist,
these are street interviews, very similar to Easy German, and I'm just gonna grab
a couple of these.
Ok so as you'll see, I have now finished downloading all the files, and I imported
them into my itunes, and you'll see they're all here nice and organized.
You have Easy Italian right there, Italiano Automatico – they're all in order – and
then, lastly, the street interviews.
So what I'm gonna do is we're gonna go to memrise.
And I'm gonna go to "courses" and I'm gonna create a course.
I'll give it the same name, teaching Italian, "create course".
And now, basically, what I'm gonna do is go ahead and add levels.
We have 16 in total.
Ok so that's it.
So you see we have our nice playlist here, it's got a little image, and you have all
these nice levels that are all organized and ready to go.
So this basically gives us our structure: we have our memrise course all ready to go,
we have our playlist that we can now import into our mp3 player or iPhone or whatever
you use to listen to music, and we're pretty much ready to dive in and start massively
improving and polishing our Italian, or whatever language you're gonna be learning.
Ok so now our structure is totally set up, it's time to study.
And what I'll be doing is going through the episodes, one by one, and using the bilingual
subtitles to take detailed notes.
Now I'm not just gonna be writing down new words.
In my notes, you'll see there are very few individual words.
It's usually at least a word with a preposition, or as part of a phrase, or an entire phrase,
and a lot of times what I'm writing down is stuff that I already understood when I
heard it, but I wouldn't have known to say it that way.
So I'm looking for "what's the natural way to say this?" "what's the natural
way to say that?"
"What's a new way that I wasn't aware of that I can express this?".
I'm looking for idioms, I'm looking for slang, I'm looking for all sorts of stuff
so that I can get every ounce of detail out of that video.
So like I said, at this stage I'm not just trying to understand the content, I'm trying
to mine it for language value – everything that I can add to my personal language-learning
repertoire that will essentially make me a more accurate, more precise and a more effective
speaker of the language.
So what I'll do is I will write all these notes down, and then I'll put them into
memrise which is a pretty easy process.
Once you go in, you just add in your phrases, and then you can have them on your phone if
you have a smart phone, and you can study them whenever you want.
So basically, I will do episode 1 of easy Italian, I'll put all my notes into memrise,
and then what I'll do is I'll be studying those words whenever I get dead time.
And then I'll move onto episode 2.
But the really cool thing is, if you remember, we now have mp3 files and a really nice, organized
playlist on our mp3 player.
So whenever I'm walking around town, walking to work, washing the dishes, I can be listening
to those episodes that I've already studied.
So in the beginning, I'll just have episode 1.
I'll be listening to that over and over, but once I get to where I've studied 2 or
3 episodes and so on, you get this really cool rhythm where you have new episodes that
you're studying and that's fun because it's new content, but then you have your
memrise deck that you're studying and, sort of reinforcing all the stuff that you learned,
and then you're listening on your mp3 player to really really polish, hone and sort of
internalize everything that you've learned.
And I guarantee you, once you have these, let's say 15 pieces of content and you have
mined them for language value, you have put them into memrise, you've studied them,
and you've listened to those episodes, you know, 10 or 15 times throughout a couple of
weeks just for fun, I promise you, your language abilities are gonna have improved dramatically.
And because this is such a meticulous approach, I personally find that this stuff is already
active in my language.
So very often, when I go to speak, I remember this stuff and I'm able to use it actively.
Some of it, no, but it comes over time.
So, anyway, I really hope you guys liked this video, I hope it was helpful for you, um,
like I said this is not something that everybody will want to do.
But if you want to achieve these type of results, it's really worth the effort
And it is really fun, I personally really enjoy this.
I love listening to these episodes and when I realize, like, "wow, I understand 100%,
I understand every detail".
And then when I use the language, and I find myself employing these new expressions and
idioms and slang, you know, it's a really cool feeling and I think it makes it all worth it
So, happy language learning guys, and please feel free to comment, let me know if you like
this, let me know if you'd like to have more of these type of tutorial videos, and
just yeah please tell me what you think.
I'm happy to answer your questions.
Ok, ciao!
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