Refold Approach to Language Learning: Italian 50 hour update and methodology
Knowing another Romance language has meant rapid gains in terms of comprehension.
Welcome to my first Italian update using Refold/immersion methods. I’ve been learning Spanish for close to 1400 hours, and feel confident enough in my abilities to tackle another language. Since it is a long term goal of mine to become a polyglot, or at least polyliterate in roughly 4-8 languages1, and I have been learning Spanish for close to four years, it was time to move on to something new, while still spending significant time maintaining and improving my Spanish.
I decided on embarking on Italian for a couple reasons. Practically, it’s a very similar language to Spanish in terms of vocabulary and syntax, so it’ll be a gentle introduction to L3 and beyond language learning, and my first experience starting a language from scratch without any classroom time. Of course that’s on the only reason. There’s a ton of Italian literature I want to read from authors like Elena Ferrante, Dino Buzzati, Umberto Eco, Ugo Bardi, and Italo Calvino. There’s quite an extensive, if aging, immigrant Italian population in Baltimore, meaning there will be opportunities to use and learn the language in person. Finally, Italian history and culinary culture are also fascinating to me.
Just a recap of the refold method for those of you who are new here. The Refold approach is a language-learning method based on the input hypothesis developed by linguist Stephen Krashen. The input hypothesis basically states that language is acquired through exposure to comprehensible input. Improvement comes from when you advance your comprehensibility frontier by exposure to content you can almost understand.Refold codifies this approach into an actual language learning method, which consists of mainly listening/watching/reading native content, and “sentence mining” Anki cards (basically finding sentences you can push your comprehensibility frontier forward on with active study). Outputting (writing/speaking) is left until you have a strong base of knowledge to work from. Explicit grammar study is explicitly optional.
I will not be reviewing the validity of the input hypothesis or Refold here. The research and the logic look good to me, and I am not a linguist. I also think my experience with Spanish speaks for itself: this stuff works. For more info, you can watch Krashen’s lecture on the topic, or visit the refold website.
General Progress
Made it through starter Anki vocab deck and Italian by the Nature Method. Read first two Harry Potter books with corresponding Audio. Tried out lingQ but wasn’t a huge fan. Found a couple good comprehensible input YouTube Channels.
Phase One
I’m taking a bit of a different approach to Italian than I did for Spanish. Most of my early Spanish immersion was watching shows or reading Harry Potter while going relatively light on the Anki. My Italian approach thus far has been characterized by very heavy Anki usage, reading Harry Potter, and a small amount of YouTube comprehensible input. I decided I’m not going to make myself watch shows. It’s like pulling teeth.
Italian has been on the backburner for a long time. I think I first mentioned that I was interesting in learning Italian in October of 2022 on my old medium blog. Although I read the first Harry Potter book in January 2023, I found the task of a new language too hard to balance with my work responsibilities and my desire to get better at Spanish. Thus, I put off formally starting Italian until February of this year. That does not mean that I did nothing during 2023 to work on my Italian. This time, which I am calling phase one consisted of me working through an Anki deck with audio of the 625 most common words from fluent forever. I also worked through Italian by the Nature Method while sentence mining some very basic vocabulary. I didn’t get very far in this book because I found the story boring and pedantic, and a lot of transfer from Spanish made the exercise unnecessary. With other languages that I’m interested in learning like Danish or German, there may be more of a point to making it through the whole book.
I’m currently in low level phase one with a couple of different languages including French, German, Danish, and Catalan. When I start learning these languages for real, I hope that this groundwork helps me hit the ground running like it has for Italian.
Reading
I like reading a lot. I also foresee most of my interaction with the Italian language being through text, as there is not a huge immigrant population in my city, although Little Italy does exist. So my immersion is going to be highly focused on reading.
As with Spanish, I’ve been making my way through the Harry Potter series before I start real Italian literature. Since I know Harry Potter so well; up to a point in some situations where I can quote passages of dialogue verbatim with some prompting, it is much easier to understand its text in another language than it would be for another book. This effectively allows me to start reading much earlier than I would be able to otherwise, because if I can read the character names and understand some basic words, I can still follow the plot. even with only a sometimes ~20% understanding of the rest of the vocabulary. I’m also doing two other things to improve my comprehension: listening along with audiobook and reading the chapter immediately before in Spanish. The first technique makes sure I’m not picking up bad pronunciation habits, while the second has primes my understanding of the plot, cognates from Spanish, and makes me appreciate how far I’ve come in my L2.
The Italians, unlike the Spanish translators, changed around some of the names of the characters. Albus Dumbledore became Albus Silenti, Slytherin became Serpeverde and Professor Snape became Professor Piton. Apparently in earlier editions, there were even more character names changes, most of which are documented in the appendix. I liked this in general: it gave the books a little bit of a different flavor than reading them in English.
I’ve had some cool moments with immersion so far, such as realizing the reason Margherita pizza might be called thus in English because it’s the Italian word for daisy, a flower the pizza looks mildly like. I’m also having much more fun than at the equivalent point in my Spanish journey. I’ve become a much better language learner, and Italian and Spanish are really quite similar.
In addition, I’ve also been using LingQ to make my way through some really easy stories. I don’t think I’m going to continue with this resource: I find it very easy to get distracted when I’m using an internet browser and not do my immersion. I’m also finding the stories a little bit below my level.
Total Immersion time: 42 hours, approximately 300k words
Future Plans: Finish the Harry Potter series
Open Questions: Italian YA recommendations for post Harry Potter?
Sentence Mining
I’m up to 250 cards, split between definitions in Spanish, English, or picture cards. I’m trying to go for picture cards as my previous experience suggests that this is the most effective for retention. However, it’s not like my retention rate is a problem: I have a 95.8% mature retention rate, which is too high, suggesting I need to make more cards and increase the intervals on existing cards.
In contrast to my Spanish, I have a ton more cards at than my equivalent numbers in Spanish. Looking at my 400 hour update for Spanish, I state I have 301 sentence mining cards, only ~50 more than my Italian numbers with 8x more immersion. I credit Anki, as well as my work in phase one for helping me advance comparatively much more quickly than in Spanish.
Open Questions: When do you begin the monolingual transition? Is this transition actually necessary
Writing
I’ve continued to write Goodreads reviews for the books that I’ve listened to and read. This is very difficult, I don’t have a very large active vocabulary, and often get words I do know confused with Spanish. I expect this to pass with time.
Listening
I’ve been watching a few comprehensible input Italian channels, as well as listening to chapters in the Harry Potter audiobooks a second time after reading along with the text. As I stated earlier, listening isn’t something that’s super important to me in this language, as I predict I primarily will engage with it through literature. However, that doesn’t mean listening isn’t important, and I want to do a better job of making space for it in my immersion.
Total Immersion time: 7
Future Plans: Watch at least one comprehensible input video a day
Open Questions: Am I shooting myself in the foot by going heavy reading?
Speaking
None. I’m trying to find an Italian class in Baltimore for social reasons, so I may end up speaking in that earlier than is optimal. Otherwise, I’ve loved my iTalki experience with Spanish, and will probably look for a tutor there.
Explicit Grammar
None, but may be helpful for me to look up things like conjugations, or how the particle gli works in particular.
Future Plans
It’s exciting to be starting a new language! I expect the Italian world of literature to really open up after I finish the Harry Potter series. The next update at 100 hours will hopefully be more interesting, but I think it’s important to document these early stages in a new language that I don’t have for Spanish.
Other Languages
I’m continuing to try and get at least an hour a day of Spanish. I’m also slowly making my way through phase one of a bunch of other languages: French, Catalan, German and Danish in particular.
Health
Sleep has been terrible, which has made it hard to get up in the morning to do the immersion that I want to do. I’ve also been struggling with various mental health things. However, I find that language learning often helps me with those struggles. Immersion is a simple thing that I can do every day and see tangible progress. When other things in life aren’t going well (injuries, experiments, and love) it’s really nice to have that.
Overall Impressions
I’m not too far into my Italian journey yet, so it’s hard to say exactly how things are going, but I’m very happy with my progress!
Full immersion link data link.
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Deus ex Vita
Beyond that I think it is probably impossible to maintain given the other parts of my life. I will also probably do a blog post on the languages I would like to learn and why at some point.
Hey Joshua,
I read your blog entry on the 1000 hours of Spanish and interested in participating in the Anki experiment but for French. How would I start?