Italian 101: Week 4

This week I spent my time focusing on Babbel while continuing to use Duolingo. I had to pay for the course on Babbel and it was close to $20CA for a one month subscription. I decided to do a month because it was the cheapest option in order to test it out. I didn’t know if I would like it enough to use it longer than one month so I thought I would test it out and cancel before the month is up and my subscription renews automatically.

For something that is a paid service, it is VERY similar to Duolingo. Although there is more structure for each lesson and lessons are geared towards a specific topic. I like that the lessons build on skills similar to Mango Languages. I created a few videos to share my thoughts on Babbel and show some of my progress.

This first video shows you the homepage/dashboard and explains some of the features that I like on Babbel.

In this video I show you how a lesson works. I tried to skip through the lesson in order to make it quicker for the purpose of the video, so it’s not a full lesson length but it takes you through the whole thing.

This last video shows you how to review your vocabulary using the built in review feature.

I feel like I had a really successful week. I was able to keep a streak on Duolingo achieving 50XP for six days. The picture shows only a one day streak and that’s because I finished my practice yesterday after 11pm which is after midnight on the website.

My streak on Duolingo this past week.

I moved up in my fluency by 5% moving to 9%! Although I don’t want to judge my skills based on that. I find that I am getting better at speaking Italian and reading it. I still struggle with the writing part but I think that will start to come.

Finally moved up from 4%!

Some new things I tried this week:

• I branched out on Duolingo and tried to connect with others learning/speaking Italian. I attempted to read some comments and also tried to join in but I learned quickly that I still don’t have enough skills to fully participate. I’m hoping in another couple of weeks I will be able to make more use of the chat.

Screen Shot of my chat

Screen shot of my chat

• I tried a few podcasts but didn’t have a lot of luck with them. I thought I’d be able to find some that I could listen to while running or while in the car but after skimming through 5 or 6 of them I wasn’t able to find any. A lot of them were free and had a lot of “infomercial” type dialogue at the start that really turned me away from them.
• I have added the #italianlanguage to my hootsuite feed. I am hoping to find some other useful hashtags and people to follow. I haven’t found a whole lot to be useful on Twitter yet.

My weekly assessment/reflection:

From here I plan to focus on Mango and Babbel a little more to see if I can improve my skills a little more before attempting to have more conversations with others online. I may also try to find some youtube videos that might help me.

Overall I would say it was one of my most successful weeks. I’m feeling good about my progress so far. I’m branching out and trying to connect with others who are learning Italian which is taking me out of my comfort zone a little.