Italian With Michel Thomas I
Learning Spanish with Michel Thomas was a pleasant experience for me even though I didn’t go through the audio tracks as well as I should have and ended up forgetting most of the Spanish I learned because I didn’t take keep on reading in Spanish and educating myself enough. That was of course because of the certain events that happened in my life at that time. I had become disappointed in regards to learning Romance languages after all, until my ambition for learning The Latin Language™ prompted me to start again.
I’ve decided to learn Italian by the Michel Thomas method this time because my ultimate goal is to learn Latin and I feel like Italian would be a better gateway language to Latin.
Why Latin
I plan to write extensively about why Latin is worth learning on my blog, so I will not elaborate too much here. One of the reasons I feel like Latin is worth learning is that many old philosophical and historically important scientific works have first been compiled in Latin and anyone who knows more than one language knows that no matter what you do, information is lost in translation almost like looking at a 2D projection of a 3D object and trying to completely figure it out, it’s simply not descriptive enough.
But Latin has many more linguistic features that make it superior for reading and writing in, going back to the projection analogy, we humans cannot cannot visually perceive a 4D object but using mathematics we can find out about it’s properties, Latin is mathematics in this case, meaning it makes sense to write heavy scientific/philosophical works in Latin since it can relay more information on a given subject.
Why Italian
Learning any romance language can be easy if you already know English since many English words are derived from romance languages. Italian is the language of Italy, one could imagine Italy as the modern day remains of the once existing roman empire, and hence it is grammatically the closest to Latin, of course the grammar of Latin is much more comprehensive than that of Italian. The vocabulary and the spelling of words in Italian also mimic Latin closely. Works of scientific importance in Italy are also great gateway books into Latin works because of the cultural likeness of them.
I am personally interested in the history and specially in the mathematical discoveries made in Italy. So it would be easier for me to learn Italian hence I will do so. The Cinema of Italy has always been very touching for me (e.g: Pasolini ) I still have many great Italian movies to watch and learning Italian after/alongside it will surely prove to be beneficial. Italian songs have also been in my playlists since long ago, another reason for me to be biased towards learning Italian. Expect more blog posts about the Italian language as well.
My Experience Learning Italian with Michel Thomas So Far
The Italian course using the Michel Thomas method seems to be pretty similar to the Spanish one as far as learning new vocabulary and making sentences go but it seems to move to more complicated grammatical rules faster than the Spanish one. This time I am listening to the audio tracks with better concentration and I have insight on how to get the best out of a Michel Thomas course, It looks more promising this time around for me and I hope it stays that way.