Italian!

I ordered "Italian the Easy Way" quite a while ago (only had to pay a penny plus $6.50 shipping and handling! haha). I've gone through 8 of 18 chapters already and it's a good introduction to the language. It helps to have good pronunciation in Spanish although the book has a decent pronunciation guide, and every time I'm not absolutely sure how to say a word (in my head or out loud!) I check that guide and I also made my own notes about the things I have the most trouble with.

The book is pretty good so far, I like it as an intro. It gradually goes through more and more vocabulary and grammar. I find turning singular nouns into plurals interesting because it's much different from Spanish. (il figlio - i figli.....la figlia - le figlie...lo zaino - gli zaini, gli also used for "l' l'esame >> gli esami) There are also more ways to say this/that/these/those and I have to be patient while learning even these "simple" things. I think even with pronunciation, unlike in Spanish, many Italian words do not have accent marks above the letters where there is an irregular stress ... I'll have to learn to pronounce those properly. In Spanish it's easy to tell where to stress because it's marked if it's irregular. The book helps by marking a little dot under the letter.

I'm still learning present forms of verbs, I'll need lots of practice to get used to this. Sometimes Spanish verb forms will pop up in my head and I have to ignore them!

I'm learning who/what/where/when/why questions and how to make basic sentences. There are often sections in the chapters that will ask you to create your own little story paragraph thing that includes certain things that they list...basic ideas or sentences in Italian. I try to make it a bit long and look up words I don't know! Here's one!:

Nora e Giovanni sempre vanno insieme al cinema ma oggi decidano andare al Bar Roma. Giovanni sempre (I wrote siempre but I'm correcting it here!) prende un cappuccino la e Nora sempre prende un espresso ma loro non sanno cosa vogliono oggi, cosi tutti e due vanno a casa di Dina, l'amica di Giovanni. Giovanni sempre prende qualcosa da mangiare e da bere ma Nora non conosce Dina e non sa che cosa prendere.

-Nora and John always go together to the movies but today they decide to go to the Bar Roma... John always orders a cappuccino there and Nora always orders espresso but they don't know what they want today, so they both go to Dina's house. (She's his friend) John always has something to eat and drink but Nora doesn't know Dina and doesn't know what to ask for.

Boom shakalaka.

Lately I haven't had the motivation to study... or desire, I think I may have to focus more on French though now even though I'm taking both Italian and French in September... French will be more difficult for me I think.

French

So I am planning on taking a beginner's French course at my university this summer because there are no intermediate Spanish courses and no Portuguese courses. This means I will have to put off studying Portuguese for a while... which kind of sucks because I really do love studying it, but French is also interesting. I have gone through a good chunk of the "Easy French Reader" book which gets you reading French right away. It has a story line and there is audio for every chapter. You answer questions in French at the end of every chapter as well. I think this is a good intro to the language... it's not too difficult. But I like to be very confident with grammar even from the near-beginning of learning a language so I have also started going through "Practice Makes Perfect: Complete French Grammar" and it's awesome just like the Spanish PMP books. While reading, though, I feel less confident that I am "pronouncing" all the words in my head correctly... so for this I have bought a couple of things to help my pronunciation which will arrive at my house soon. The class will start in early May so I'm sure I will feel like I have a decent "headstart" which will make me feel much more comfortable in the classroom and lab setting.

Started Spanish in University

In January I started the second half of a beginners Spanish class and I'm surprised how much has already been covered in the class. The professor said that in the first half they had gone through what is the equivalent to the amount of Spanish a student would learn in all of high school. That's in only 3 months. I am not finding this difficult though because I have learned a lot of Spanish on my own but I can understand why it seems like quite a challenge to other students (and it doesn't help that the professor confuses people somewhat often - for example the way he explained the pretérito vs. imperfecto de indicativo: I actually lost marks on a test on a question or two where I would have used the preterit before joining the class - before listening to the professor try to explain things, but he confused me and also lead the students to believe that the pretérito and imperfecto de indicativo are actually interchangeable much of the time, ["it's up to you, you can use either" for an entire set of fill-in-the-blanks he presented to us and that there are situations where using the imperfecto de indicativo may add more "feeling" to a situation where you could also be using pretérito.]) Honestly I think I will just use the knowledge I have from the grammar books I have gone through. I still got an A+ on that test, which I didn't study for, because I didn't think I would have to.
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Also, I'm almost done the book called "The Spanish Subjunctive Up Close" which is helpful but I will probably want to go through it again. I think I'll feel more confident after going through it twice.