The TV "method" or how I learned Italian

...while watching TV. The “TV method” explained. How I learned Italian from (seemingly) "incomprehensible" input. Prompted by some other blogs that mostly use DVDs and therefore seriously corrupt the methodology. Haha.

How I learned German using a similar aproach: link

This eventually resulted in a very advanced fluency in Italian. The “method” consisted in consuming massive amounts of TV programming during summer holidays. The student was a 5-year-old kid. After about three summers I remember being able to claim that I completely understood a show, after several more I could be described as very advanced. My language skills actually blossomed (and wilted) several times before I even started high school.

I saw my first cartoon in Italian when I was five. I was alone and bored and I remember playing with an old-fashioned TV-tuner, the antenna was weak and pointed in the wrong direction but I managed to catch an Italian-language cartoon about a family of bears. I believe it was a Japanese cartoon, perhaps Orso Misha, perhaps something else. It blew my mind. I had to see more. That’s the last I saw of it for a while. My dad’s apartment was facing the sea. I remember begging him later to point the antenna directly towards Italy. I spent a lot of time at my dad’s fine-tuning the channels and watching cartoons on an old black-and-white TV. The picture was not great but the sound was usually excellent. I remember he once got angry when I replaced all his local channels. I also remember him teasing me about watching something I could not understand and how I proved him wrong. This has helped me to roughly pinpoint the exact time when I was able to follow Italian programming without any great difficulty. I was around 9 years old and I remember watching "La Principessa Zaffiro" and "Kimba" in Italian. I remember the story line and plot points. I remember being able to watch it with full understanding. It therefore took about three, maybe four summers or some 12 months of intensive TV watching in order to reach this point. I did go to the beach and play with friends etc. but I still managed to spend about 8 hours per day watching Italian TV. It took me about 3,000 hours to achieve excellent passive understanding of Italian. That's about 18 million words of written text or some 180 books.

When I was 10 or thereabouts I started bustling around antennas and disassembling amplifiers. I needed my entertainment. Now maybe a scientifically oriented person can tell me why I wasn't able to watch terrestrial TV during most of the rest of the year, even on very nice days. Refraction? If that had been possible, I would have truly gone native. How do I account for some 8-9 months of not doing anything Italian-related? How fast would my progress have been? I had massive exposure but also very long periods without doing anything related to a particular language.

My mom taught Italian and French in high school. I think it’s fair to mention this but as far as Italian is concerned, this only meant that I had access to dictionaries and a few interesting magazines. She was a Francophile and she insisted on teaching me French. I used her Italian dictionaries only a few times. I do remember looking up a few things and getting a kick out of it. For some reason I still remember looking up “basil”. I remember reading a few articles about sharks, about a 19th century brigand and a girl who later became a saint (she was awfully pretty). I was 10-11 when I discovered magazines but my interest did not last. I do remember underlining a few words and looking them up. I also remember playing with an old encyclopedic Italian dictionary, looking at the pictures and reading randomly. I also remember listening to Italian radio a few times when I was especially bored during the winter months but I quickly lost interest.

The types of TV programming I consumed:

Movies: American movies, Italian movies, other foreign movies (sci-fi, horror, comedy etc.)
Series, Italian and foreign: crime, sitcoms, drama etc. Little house on the Prairie, The Dukes of Hazzard, Battlestar Galactica, Piovra…

Japanese cartoons about: fishing, giant robots, Japanese history, basketball, golf, football, baseball, judo, aliens destroying Japan, aliens falling in love with earthlings, earthlings falling in love with all sorts of things, Buddhism, imaginary competitions, student life, animals, insects, daily routine (sitcom), historical drama, romance … AND all sorts of other stuff - normal and weird.

US cartoons
Brazilian telenovelas
Documentaries about nature, history, outer space
News, local news (mafia stuff)
Teletext (later on)
TV Shows (talk, comedy)

Commercials galore, commercials, commercials, commercials. I think I learned the basics through commercials. Commercials and reruns are a sort of an evil spaced repetition. No escape, the same commercials would hound you on many channels simultaneously (especially if you were following cartoons on local networks)

My weakest point: speaking. The reason is obvious. I never had any opportunity to speak. I was never completely “fluent” in the sense of effortless native proficiency. My Italian “performance” if staged well and prepared in advance could have been described as near-native fairly early.

I was able to study Italian in high school. I usually did my homework five minutes before the class. I never prepared for any exams. This resulted in one embarrassing situation after prolonged illness but I always ended up with a final A. This was the time when I discovered satellite TV and English and German language programming. I neglected Italian but I never abandoned it. My skills were very broad but declining and if someone probed a particular area they could certainly find some shortcomings.

My high school leaving exam paper (yeah, there is such a thing) was in Italian and I defended it in Italian. I chose a famous Italian historical novel :) The smiley is for people who know what I’m talking about. I didn’t have any problems reading it.

I chose to study Italian at university. Unlike some Italian courses in the US, this was serious stuff. I never spoke with anyone – except for fake conversations in class. Most of my university exams were straight A’s. This obviously included oral exams. The few B’s were due to non-linguistic circumstances.

I never had to learn grammar in order to pass a language test. I was required to read and write a lot and this is where I benefited tremendously.

It's been seven years since I did anything remotely challenging that involved Italian.