I’ve been using Anki for 7 years and it’s great. I started with 2 years of Italian followed by 5 years of French. I live in a French speaking country and we’re moving back to Italy. My Italian is advanced beginner, my French is intermediate. I have a strong vocabulary and I have normal conversations with neighbors, but I can’t follow full-speed conversations or TV without subtitles.
What’s the best way to move forward with Italian?
Do I simply start building Italian decks in English, or is there a way of combining learning French and Italian at the same time?
In my exprience, it’s always better to study your target language in your own language; in order to assimilate vocabulary, grammar, etc, in a natural way, you want to concentrate all your attention in your target language, doing double translations will put extra and unnecesary strain on your brain. So yes, I would simply start an English > Italian deck
Having said that, I like to mix different languages in my Anki sessions:
Language deck
Spanish > English
Spanish > German
Spanish > French
…Etc.
And of course, since you’re lucky enough to move to Italy, just try to avoid using english as much as you can. That will do wonders!
Thanks for the input. That makes sense. I’ve taken a look at my old Italian database, and I’m leaning toward starting from scratch with English>Italian. I’m going to pattern it after my French decks, which I feel pretty good about.
I’ve also imported the 15,000 sentences from Ankiweb – which is great in both French and Italian.
Learn another language only from your native language or from another, in which you have at least a C2 level — i.e. virtually fluent. There are too many fine distinctions of meaning that you must learn and these are best understood expressed in your native language.
While there is a huge similarity between French and Italian, there are also differences in lexical meaning (e.g. faux amis) as well as in syntax.
