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Benvenuti, Bienvenue, Croeso and Welcome.
Hi, I’m Juliet. Join me on my language learning journey and discover my thoughts on different aspects of language learning with the A Language Learning Tale Podcast. Today I’m talking about…
READING OUT LOUD IN ITALIAN
You might be wondering how I prepare to read out a story in Italian, especially a long one. Well, now I’m going to tell you and how you can use these practices to help your learning.
The first thing to say is that, no, I don’t do it without mistakes. I’ve narrated some of my own books in English. It’s impossible to do without mistakes. You get your tongue in a twist, you need to compose yourself for a few seconds. It’s even worse in a foreign language, especially the tongue-twisters! So, there is editing involved, but not too much, because …
The most important thing to do is to read the piece all the way through multiple times before I do it for real. Then, I can see where the difficult bits are. Obviously, with a long piece, this can take time. Chiaro di Luna is an hour long, edited down. In practising, that’s more like an hour and twenty minutes each time (that’s roughly how long the unedited version was). I read that story all the way through, I reckon, a good 15 to 20 times.
When reading, I often come up against words I’m not sure how to pronounce. Then, I go off to Google Translate and put the word into the box. It usually comes up with a stress symbol, but not always. Even if it does, I listen to it, too. Usually, I mark the stressed symbol in red on my text, because if I hesitated in practising, I might hesitate when recording. This helps a lot. I still get stress wrong sometimes, though, because in Italian, in a lot of words, it isn’t regular.
I also deliberately speak slowly. Often, I can say the words faster, but then they don’t sound clear enough in the recording. Audio recordings should always be slower for comprehension. The listener can always speed them up.
Sometimes, especially if I’m putting on a voice, I end up making exaggerated mouth movements, too, which helps the sounds to come out correctly. Or as correctly as I can make them.
But, how can all this help you? Well, I’d highly recommend reading texts out loud, whether that’s your own, or from a book, or an article, in order to facilitate speaking. Doing this multiple times will help to make combinations of letters and words, that you don’t have in your own language, easier to say.
Putting words, or sentences into Google Translate, or some other app, can help you with this. Yes, it’s an AI voice, but these are getting better all the time. If necessary, mark things up, like I do and read it again.
Start slowly and speed up, if you can. It doesn’t have to be by a lot, just a smidge each time. You’ll get to something more natural eventually.
And, if you need to, use those exaggerated mouth movements to help you in the early stages, but maybe remember not to do that in a face to face situation. Otherwise, people might just think you’re weird.
That’s all for today’s episode. Don’t forget to join me again next time, for more language learning tips, tricks and tales and in the meantime, check out the A Language Learning Tale YouTube channel for additional, non-podcast content.
Ciao, salut, hwyl and bye for now.