7 Day Italian Challenge: Day 01

Yesterday I was excited for this, and yet today I find myself procrastinating. Why is it suddenly so hard for me to jump into this Total Italian immersion thing? Wanting it and doing it are two different things.

Well, half the day had past already (woke up way later than I had planned) without anything done, but I decided that I was not going to lose the other half of the day. Better late than never.

Here is a quick break down of what I did.

Reading:
-A few articles from Cose Turche
-Facebook: Fans Club Italiano di Tarkan e Turco per Italiani
-Forums: Italian Music, Tarkan Forum e Download Zone

Listening:
-Music (many hours/half the day)
-TV: episodes 1 & 2 of 'La Regina Di Spade'. (About 45 minutes each)

Writing:
-Nothing

Speaking:
-Nothing

The first thing I did in order to create a fake immersion environment at home is to change websites like facebook and youtube into Italian. I changed youtube from international ("A livello mondiale") to Italy ("Italia"). This way when I look at the most watched, featured, or most popular videos I get the Italian ones. I also changed my itouch, skype and any other application that I could into Italian.

I work best when I have some nice music playing in the background, so finding music was important for this challenge. Prior to today, I had only listened to a few Italian singers. I am so happy that my music collection has expanded. ^_^ Not only am I constantly listening to something in Italian now, but I have new celebrities/music to follow. Music is great for me because it gives me interviews to read, I can get vocabulary from the song lyrics and I can sing along to the songs.

While looking for new music, I came across some Turkish music and of course Tarkan's music too which renewed my love for this man. So I ended up reading various things in Italian about Tarkan, Turkey and Turkish culture.

End of day one. Not that great of a start but at least something was done.

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Japanese (30 minutes)

Like I wrote yesterday, I feel like I should keep up with my Japanese for at least 30 minutes a day while also doing this Italian challenge. This will mostly just consist of reading stuff online or working in my book "Japanese For Busy People I".

Today though, I have been watching Japanese news and reading tweets about the Earthquake. I want to share a link to the American Red Cross here for anyone who can donate something to the victims of the Earthquake and Tsunami. If anyone knows of any other links or I find more, I'll add them to this post.

The American Red Cross

My Languages

I wanted to make a list of the languages that I am studying and the ones that I pan to study. I want to reach a decent/high intermediate level at the very least in all of these languages, but there are a few that I know for sure that I want to be advanced/fluent(?) in. These are all languages that I have loved for a long amount of time and I don't see my feelings towards these languages changing anytime soon.

The List (In no particular order)
Spanish
Malay
Japanese
Mongolian
Italian
French
Korean
Mandarin Chinese
Hindi
Thai

7 Day Italian Challenge

So, tomorrow I will start a 7 day challenge to learn and to increase my Italian skills because although I had been able to reach a pretty okay level in Italian before, I'm afraid that I have lost all of that ability because I have not used the language for many months. I want to be able to read and write in Italian like I can in Spanish and/or Malay right not: not perfect but decent enough.

Why 7 days? Because it's spring break right now for me! I have a whole week of no classes so I can immerse myself in Italian for almost the whole day. I could have started yesterday but I'm using the weekend before to gather some materials.

The Plan:

-Surround myself with as much Italian as possible.
-Review flashcards daily while watching tv in Italian.
-Spanish: Allow myself to watch one episode of a Spanish telenovela a day, and to read as much of a book (not the internet) as I want.
-Malay: Allow myself to watch one episode of a drama a day.
-Japanese: 30 minutes of studying a day (I need to keep up with this), and one drama episode a day if desired.
-Mongolian: Occasionally review flashcards, but don't add any new material.

Time:

7 days from March 13 to March 19

I will be updating this blog with resources, grammar notes and anything else I find useful as I am learning.