Summary of Devices for Reading Foreign Novels

If you're an intermediate student of a foreign language and you want to try to read a novel in that language, you need an e-reader that lets you press on a word and instantly get a definition without having to leave the page you're reading. It also needs to let you easily switch back and forth between two dictionaries:

• a bilingual dictionary that lets see the definition in English. (To my knowledge, there are no good free bilingual dictionaries. This will be an extra cost--usually under $10.) 
• a monolingual dictionary that gives you the definition in the same language as the book you're reading. (These typically come for free.)

The reason you need both is that the monolingual dictionary by itself is too difficult for an intermediate student to use, but the bilingual dictionary is limited in size and won't have the most difficult words in it. Over time, you'll move to using the monolingual dictionary more and more--especially if the device lets you use the bilingual to look up unknown words that appear in the monolingual's definitions. When you don't need the bilingual anymore, you won't be an intermediate anymore either.

At this point, I know of only four devices that are able to support multiple dictionaries in this way. I'll discuss their pros and cons and then mention some other devices that are known not to work.

Kindle E-Readers and Apps

I have already written at length about how to read a foreign novel on a Kindle e-reader. All three of the current models seem to be running the exact same software as far as foreign-language support is concerned. Whenever you download a foreign-language book, Amazon automatically downloads the appropriate monolingual dictionary for free.

Basic Kindle

This is the cheapest Kindle that will do the job. It doesn't have the built-in light the other Kindles have, it's heavier than the Voyage, and it has lower screen resolution, but it's half the price of a Paperwhite and only a third the price of a Voyage. Otherwise, they all have about the same features. If price matters, this is the Kindle to get. Caveat: this is a model I haven't ever used personally.

I see that Amazon is offering Kindles on sale for National Reading Month. I don't get a kickback, but I know that many people have wanted to try reading a foreign novel with a Kindle but been unable to do so. At $59 ($20 off the regular price), this is probably the cheapest anyone can get into the game.

Kindle Paperwhite

The light is nice, and the improved resolution is helpful for reading languages with lots of accent marks. (E.g. French.) It's actually very slightly heavier than the Basic Kindle for some reason. It's $119, and I've usually thought of this one as the best value (I used one for a long time and loved it), but, during the sale this month at least, the Basic Kindle seems like the better deal. Caveat: some people like the light so much that they consider it a must-have. (I wonder how they ever managed with paper books.)

Kindle Voyage

If $200 doesn't seem like a lot, and you want the best, this is the one to get. I was pleased with the weight reduction when I switched from a Paperwhite, and I appreciated the resolution improvement too--especially for reading the accent marks on French letters. Even the little page-turn strips on the side are nice, once you get used to them.

Here are Amazon's specifications for all three devices:

Kindle App on iOS

Apple's iPad and iPhone host a Kindle app that appears to have all of the foreign-dictionary support that the Amazon e-readers have. If you already have an iPhone or iPad, that would obviously be the cheapest alternative--hands down.

From How To Add a German-English Dictionary To Kindle on Your iPad or iPhone (iOS) by André Klein

The screen shot from André Klein's web site clearly shows that you can press on a word, read the definition, decide that you want to see that in a different dictionary, and select one without closing the dialog.

Older Kindles

The Paperwhite I and the Kindle Touch also support multiple dictionaries, although not as conveniently. My original post on how to read a foreign novel on a Kindle describes the extra hoops you had to jump through to make those work.

Prior to the Kindle Touch, Amazon's devices didn't have touch-sensitive screens. However, a determined reader could move the cursor next to a target word and get a definition anyway. Readers have told me that the same instructions for installing a bilingual dictionary which worked for the Touch will also work for the older Kindles.

Other Devices

At present, I know of no other devices that have multidictionary support. I would be very happy to get information from more people who use a variety of devices. In particular, I can't figure out whether it does or does not work on a Kobo e-reader. The documentation suggests that you can install and remove dictionaries, but it doesn't say how you change the default dictionary for a given book.

Here are a few that are known to not work.

Kindle Fire and Fire Phone

I have no clue why Amazon doesn't make the e-reader on the Kindle Fire work the same as the ones on the dedicated e-Readers, but, as of this writing, you can only chose one of Amazon's free monolingual dictionaries. You can download a bilingual dictionary, but only to read as a book

Kindle App on Windows 8.1 (Metro version) and on the Windows Phone

It doesn't let you change the dictionary at all. If you open a Spanish book it still tries to use an English dictionary. One wonders why it isn't easier for Amazon to just have a single code base for all their apps and devices.

Nook

You can't change the dictionary on a Nook without rooting the device, which I don't recommend. If you want to read Spanish books, you'd have to buy a Spanish Nook. Supposedly the Nook apps all work the same way.

Summary

If you want to read a novel in a foreign language, you either need to run the Kindle app on an iPad/iPhone or else buy one of the three Kindle e-readers. If anyone can send me screen shots showing that some other device or app also works, I'll be very happy to include that info.

Italian Verb Patterns

It's a chore memorizing how to conjugate all 45 forms of  Italian verbs--even the regular ones, and when you factor in the irregular ones, it looks hopeless. However, there are patterns, and following those patterns makes the whole thing easier to deal with.

The most important tip is don't try to learn everything at once!

In the tables below, I will offer rules capable of generating all the forms of all Italian verbs, but you really don't want to try to memorize all of this. Not at once, anyway. Instead, look over it and pick the bits that matter to you at the moment. When you find a new verb, look at how it fits into the pattern. Use that to help you memorize it.

Just as you don't try to learn 5,000 new words all at once, try to absorb these rules a little bit at a time. Otherwise it really will be too overwhelming.

Regular Verbs

Non-Finite Verbs

There are three Italian verb forms that don't have a tense: the infinitive, the past participle, and the gerund. A traditional way to represent this would be to use example verbs, one for each of the three conjugation families:

	Speak	Fear	Sleep
Infinitive	parlare	temere	dormire
Past Participle	parlato	temuto	dormito
Gerund	parlando	temendo	dormendo

But this obscures much of what is common between them. In the table, I have made the "theme vowels" bold to illustrate that the endings (the part to the right of the theme vowel) are the same for all three conjugations, even though the stems (the part to the left of the theme vowel) are different.

A much better (and far more compact) way to represent the same information is to omit the stems, collect the theme vowels together, and thus make the endings stand out.

IT Verb Endings	Non-Finite
Infinitive	[aei]re
Past Part.	[aui]to
Gerund	[aee]ndo

The three letters in brackets show the theme vowel needed by each of the three conjugations. Make sure you see how this little table represents the information in the larger one above it before we move on to apply the same idea to finite verbs. (Verbs that do have a tense.)

Finite Verbs

Italian has seven "simple" (as opposed to compound) verb tenses: the present indicative, the present subjunctive, the imperfect indicative, the imperfect subjunctive, the future, the conditional, and the passato remoto. Verb tables in books go on for many pages. Using the notation we used for the non-finite verbs, we can make the most compact table of Italian verb conjugations you will ever see:

I T		Present		Imperfect		Fut/Cond		P. Remoto
		Ind	Subj	Ind	Subj	Fut	Cond	Reg	Irr
Sg	1	-o	[iaa]	[aei]vo	[aei]ssi	[eei-]rò	[eei-]rei	[aei]i	-i
	2	-i	[iaa]	[aei]vi	[aei]ssi	[eei-]rai	[eei-]resti	[aei]sti
	3	[aee]	[iaa]	[aei]va	[aei]sse	[eei-]rà	[eei-]rebbe	[òéì]	-e
Pl	1	-iamo	-iamo	[aei]vamo	[aei]ssimo	[eei-]remo	[eei-]remmo	[aei]mmo
	2	[aei]te	-iate	[aei]vate	[aei]ste	[eei-]rete	[eei-]reste	[aei]ste
	3	[aoo]no	[iaa]no	[aei]vano	[aei]ssero	[eei-]ranno	[eei-]rebbero	[aei]rono	-ero

A dash in place of square brackets means that there is no theme vowel. A dash in the fourth position reflects the fact that irregular verbs in the future and conditional tenses omit the vowel entirely. More about that below when we discuss irregular verbs.

The three odd forms marked "Irr" under the Passato Remoto are an artifact of the fact that Vulgar Latin had four conjugation families, not just three, but two of them were folded together into today's -ere verbs. As a result, a large number of -ere verbs have different endings in the first person-singular, the third-person singular, and the third-person plural of the passato remoto. Again, we'll discuss this more when we talk about irregular verbs.

Play with this table for a bit and make sure you know how to generate verb forms with it. Compare it with the verb conjugators in WordReference or Cactus 2000 if you need to. In this very compact form, all sorts of patterns are now clearly visible. Patterns make memorization easier, of course. I'll point out a few, but you should study it yourself and find the ones that help you learn.

• All first-person plural forms end with -mo
• All second-person plural forms end with -te
• All third-person plural forms end with -no or -ro
• Theme vowels are the same for all imperfect forms
• Theme vowels are the same across all future and conditional forms
• Despite the  name, the Imperfect tenses are the most perfect ones.

Omitted Forms

You might think that's enough verb forms already, but the astute observer will note that I've omitted a few categories:

• The so-called "present participle" Verbs that are turned into adjectives e.g. parlante. You form it by changing the gerund ending from -do to -te. Trouble is, it doesn't function as a verb, not all verbs have them, and the meanings are often wildly different. (E.g. dirigente means "manager"). These are probably best learned as separate vocabulary items as you come to them.
• The imperative forms. The command forms in Italian are just existing present-tense or infinitive forms used for a slightly different purpose. 
• All of the compound forms. E.g. Lui ha parlato. I have already written about the Italian Perfect Tenses. They're important to get right, of course, but as with the imperatives, the issue isn't with learning how to construct the forms--it's with learning what to do with them after that.

Summary

You can think of these tables as little machines that take a verb stem and create all the forms of that verb. These same tables with work for all but the most irregular verbs, as I'll explain in the next section.

Irregular Verbs

Verbs with multiple stems

With the regular verbs, we spoke of the verb stem. The tables above let you generate endings for verb stems. With irregular verbs, we're going to speak of multiple stems. For a regular verb, you only have to learn one stem, but for an irregular verb, you need to know more than that. The more stems you need to learn, the more irregular the verb is. For irregular verbs, then, we need a table to generate stems. Since these still use the same endings as regular verbs, between the two sets of tables we can conjugate everything except the super-irregular verbs.

To see how this works, take a verb like rimanere (to remain). I have made the irregular stems bold.

	Remain
Infinitive	rimanere
Past Part.	rimasto
Pres. Part.	rimanendo

		Present		Imperfect		Fut/Cond		P. Remoto
		Ind	Subj	Ind	Subj	Fut	Cond	Reg	Irr
Sg	1	rimango	rimanga	R E G U L A R		rimarrò	rimarrei		rimasi
	2	rimani	rimanga			rimarrai	rimarresti	rimanesti
	3	rimane	rimanga			rimarrà	rimarrebbe		rimase
Pl	1	rimaniamo	rimaniamo			rimarremo	rimarremmo	rimanemmo
	2	rimaniate	rimaniate			rimarrete	rimarreste	rimaneste
	3	rimangono	rimangano			rimarranno	rimarrebbero		rimasero

Notice how the present tenses all share the same irregular stem? And the future and conditional tenses share a single (albeit different) irregular stem? And the passato remoto seems to be derived from the past participle?

To conjugate rimanere, then, you need to know the infinitive, the past participle, the first-person present indicative, and the future/conditional tense. That's just four forms to generate 45--not a bad deal.

In the worst case, you'll need to know eight stems (again, not counting super-irregular verbs), but in many cases two or three will do.

Distribution of stems

These charts show how irregular stems tend to be distributed:

IT Verb Stems	Non-Finite
Infinitive	INF
Past Part.	PP
Pres. Part.	IMP

Italian Verb Stems		Present		Imperfect		Fut/Cond		P. Remoto
		Ind	Subj	Ind	Subj	Fut	Cond	Reg	Irr
Singular	1		1SG	IMP		FUT			REM
	2	3SG						IMP
	3								REM
Plural	1		1PL					IMP
	2	IMP
	3	1SG							REM

Here's what the abbreviations mean:

INF

Infinitive stem

PP

Past Participle stem

1SG

First-person singular stem

3SG

Third-person singular stem

1PL

First-person plural stem

IMP

Imperfect stem

FUT

Future/Conditional stem

REM

Passato Remoto stem

Now look back at rimanere. See how the 1SG stem rimang- gets used six times in the present tense and the FUT stem rimar- gets used twelve times in the future/conditional? This is a pattern you'll see over and over.

These eight stems are all heavily used forms. Half of the stems come from the present indicative. A single stem covers both imperfect tenses. A single stem covers the future and the conditional.

Even the passato remoto forms are heavily used by narrators in novels. A third-person narrator uses the two third-person forms, while a first-person narrator uses those as well as the first-person singular. (I suppose a first-person narrator could also use the first-person plural, but that's actually rather rare in most books.)

And you don't usually need to learn all eight anyway.

Relations between stems

For a perfectly regular verb, the other seven stems are the same as the infinitive stem, of course. Even for an irregular verb there are often connections between the stems that let you avoid learning all eight of them in most cases.

The imperfect stem is extremely important because when it differs from the infinitive stem, it drags several others along with it. All of the present-tense stems usually follow the imperfect over the infinitive.

The three irregular forms of the passato remoto tend to follow the past participle, although it would be more accurate to say they're "inspired" by it. A common transformation is for the letter 't' to become 's'. For example, the past participle of leggere (to read)  is letto and the passato remoto for "I read" is lessi.

Here's a summary of how the different stems influence each other:

INF: IMP, FUT, PP
IMP: 1SG, 3SG, 1PL
PP: REM

Irregular infinitives

It seems very strange to think that an infinitive could ever be irregular, but that's the best way to think of verbs like trarre, which seems to be missing an e from the stem, and bere, which has a different stem from all of it's inflected forms.

For the verbs with missing vowels, we'll select the stems as if the vowels were there all along. So we'll treat trarre as if it were trarere. It has an infinitive stem of trar- and an imperfect stem of tra-. It generates the future tenses with a null theme vowel and all the rest with a theme of e.

In the case of bere, the infinitive stem isn't used for anything but the infinitive itself. The imperfect stem, bev-, is used everywhere else except the future/conditional (berr-) and the passato remoto (bevv-).

What is not a stem

Sometimes a stem changes spelling in order to preserve the sound. So mangiare drops the i whenever it doesn't need it to get a soft 'g' sound. e.g. "I will eat" is io mangerò not *io mangiero. This sort of orthographic change I don't count as creating a different stem, since the pronunciation is regular.

Super-Irregular Verbs

There are only ten super-irregular verbs: andare, avere, dare, dovere, essere, fare, potere, sapere, stare, and volere. What makes them super-irregular is that they break the rule that the 1SG form gets used for the third-person plural. E.g. andare has io vado but loro vanno (not *loro vadano). These same verbs often break the rule that the second and third-person singular have the same stem. So lui va but tu vai (not *tu vi).

They follow some patterns of their own, and they're probably best learned all at once. Most of them are not irregular outside the present tense and the past participle. But there are exceptions.

Present Tense, Subjunctive

Four verbs generate the entire present subjunctive from the first-person plural, largely because they have super-short first-person singular forms. These are avere, dare, sapere, and stare. 

Imperfect

For almost all verbs, the imperfect indicative and the imperfect subjunctive share the same stem. The only exceptions are dare, essere, and stare.  Essere even uses a different set of endings in the imperfect indicative. Except for essere, the regular half of the passato remoto follows the imperfect subjunctive while the present tenses follow the imperfect indicative.

Gerund

This always uses the imperfect indicative stem, with the sole exception of essere, which is essendo. Essere is the ultimate super-irregular verb.

Families of Verbs

According to A Reference Grammar of Modern Italian, Second Edition (Maiden and Robustelli, 2007, pp. 240-242 Table 14A), if you learn how to conjugate every verb in a particular list of forty, that's enough to conjugate every verb in Italian. The reason for that is that sets of verbs that end the same way are conjugated the same way. For example, if you can conjugate correre then you can conjugate occorrere, concorrere, and soccorrere.

I've asked the publisher for permission to reproduce that table--if only to show how finite the problem really is. Even so, rather than try to memorize such a table, it's probably better just to try to get a feel for it over time. Verbs that "sound the same" get conjugated the same way too. After all, despite all the rules you might learn, you eventually need to get to the point where you do this by instinct.

So, yes, there is a lot to learn, but if you do it gradually, there are all sort of patterns that will help you out. Like much of the rest of the language, over time it will become second nature.

How to Memorize German Cases

German presents a bewildering combination of attributes: masculine, feminine, neuter, plural, nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, which combine in complicated ways across nouns, pronouns, determiners, and adjectives. Remembering how they all go together seems almost impossible. To make this easier, I've taken a shot at identifying the underlying patterns to make it easier to memorize all of this.

To speak well, you must reach the point where you generate the correct forms without thinking about it, but it helps a lot to have some rules to follow in the meantime. A useful tip is don't try to learn all the rules at once. Instead, as you find things that confuse you, refer back to the tables and memorize a bit more of them. For example, if you already know about masculine, feminine, and neuter, and you have just discovered that there is an accusative case in addition to the nominative one, then look at the tables below but ignore the dative and genitive rows for now.

What Do All These Things Even Mean?

Obviously if you don't even know what "nominative" or "accusative" mean in the first place, these explanations will do you very little good. I'll give a quick explanation in terms of English. I'm only going to explain the main uses of case, so don't be surprised when you learn there are others.

I'm going to assume that you already know the difference between singular and plural, and that you have already figured out that German has three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter.

In English, only personal pronouns (I, me, you, he, him, etc.) have case. Case is what makes "he" different from "him" and "she" different from "her." You would never say "*Him called she," and that's because the subject of the sentence has to be in the nominative case and the direct object has to be in the accusative case.  The subject is whatever performed the action of the verb. If the verb is "called" then "he" did the calling, so he is in the nominative case. The direct object is the thing directly affected by the verb. "She" is nominative case, so we need the accusative form, her. "He called her" is the grammar English requires, so if you speak English, you already know a little bit about case--you just didn't realize it.

Indirect objects in English also get the accusative case. You say "He gave her the letter" not "*He gave she the letter." The letter is the thing that got given, so it's the direct object. The woman is only indirectly affected, so "her" is the indirect object.

The other place you can get case is from a preposition. If you're talking about a horse, you could say "the saddle is on him" but not "*the saddle is on he". English prepositions always take the accusative case--just like direct and indirect objects do.

From this, it's kind of obvious that English only has two cases: Nominative and accusative. It's also obvious that they only apply to pronouns. In German, not only do the personal pronouns have case, so do the adjectives and (to a limited extent) the nouns as well. Also, in addition to the nominative and accusative cases, German also has a dative case for indirect objects and a genitive case to indicate possession. Finally, different prepositions require different cases.

That's all stuff you learn as part of learning German. There's a nice, lengthy description of what German case is all about on the About.com site, if you want more details.

Beyond this point, I'm going to assume you know all about what this stuff is for and that your main goal is how to memorize all of it.

The Basic Pattern

The Der Words

People talk a lot about the "der words," which are the words like der, dieser, jeder, welcher etc. They are what linguists call determiners, which you can think of as a special kind of adjective that comes at the start of a noun phrase. (The determiner comes first, then all the adjectives, and the noun comes last--just like in English.) You usually hit them right off the bat because "the" is such an important word.

They all follow this pattern:

Der Words	Singular			Plural
	Masculine	Neuter	Feminine
Nominative	-er	-es	-e	-e
Accusative	-en
Dative	-em		-er	-en
Genitive	-es			-er

Almost everything else in the world of German case will follow some variation on this pattern. In a very real sense, this table is 90% of what you need to memorize, so learn it and learn it well. My strategy was to try to write this chart from memory every morning before starting my German lessons. It only takes a few seconds, and it's well worth it.

Ironically, der itself  is slightly irregular. Neuter Nominative/Accusative is das not des, and Feminine/Plural is die not de. Since these are some of the most common words in the language, memorizing them isn't a big deal. Most of the other der words follow the table above perfectly, but you'll need to learn exceptions as you come to them.

Here are some simple observations on the table above that may make it easier to memorize:

• There are no genders in the plural--only in the singular.
• The accusative only exists as a separate case for the masculine singular.
• There are effectively only two cases for the feminine.
• In the dative and genitive, there are effectively only two genders.

The nominative and accusative of the feminine are the same as for the plural, but I don't suggest making a big deal out of that because it fails when we get to weak forms of adjectives.

The Ein words

These are also determiners. Ein, kein, mein, dein, etc. are all ein words. They follow almost exactly the same pattern as the der words except that two of the masculine and neuter forms lose their endings entirely.

Ein Words	Singular			Plural
	Masculine	Neuter	Feminine
Nominative	-	-	-e	-e
Accusative	-en
Dative	-em		-er	-en
Genitive	-es			-er

Pay attention to those two empty slots: we're going to say that those are places where the determiner is "weak." That is, we'll say that einen, einem, eines, eine, and einer are "strong" but ein is "weak." This will matter when we talk about adjectives later.

Personal Pronouns

These are the words like he, she, it, me, etc. I'm going to do two very unorthodox things here: first, I'm going to treat the third-person personal pronouns separately from the rest. Second, I'm going to replace the genitive with the possessive. I'm a linguist, and I know that's wrong in linguistic terms, but for the purpose of memorization, I think it helps a lot. You'll see why.

Third-person personal pronouns

I think one place a lot of textbooks go wrong is that they try to treat all the personal pronouns at once. This is a big mistake because it crams the different kinds of third-person pronouns into two cells and completely obscures the fact that they follow almost the same pattern as the der words.

Personal Pronouns	3rd Person Singular			3rd Plural
	Masculine	Neuter	Feminine
Nominative	er	es	sie	sie
Accusative	ihn
Dative	ihm		ihr	ihnen
Possessive	sein			ihr

I have replaced the genitive case with the possessive here because the real genitive personal pronouns are almost obsolete.  This is another chart worth producing from memory every morning for a while.

The words on the possessives row mean "his," "her," and "their." Unlike the other words in the table, they get further modified based on the gender, number, and case of the thing being possessed, and they follow the pattern of the ein words above. So "his cat" (in the nominative) is seine Katze; the possessor (masculine) determines which pronoun and the object (feminine) determines the ending.

If you really do need the genitive pronouns for some reason, just add -er to the words on the bottom row. That gives you seiner and ihrer.

First and Second-Person Personal Pronouns

The first and second-person pronouns follow a completely different pattern. They have to. 

Personal Pronouns	Singular		Plural
	1st Person	2nd Person	1st Person	2nd Person
Nominative	ich	du	wir	ihr
Accusative	mich	dich	uns	euch
Dative	mir	dir
Possessive	mein	dein	unser	euer

They don't fit the pattern, of course, because they have no gender. You learn them quite early when you study German, and the fact that they follow such a different pattern from everything else doubtless causes lots of confusion. It helps to know they're their own thing.

As with the third-person pronouns, each of the words on the possessive row generates a whole set of ein words. This is another chart worth trying to write from memory every morning.

Again, if you really need the genitive personal pronouns for some reason, add -er to the words that don't already end in -er. That gives you meiner, deiner, unser, and euer. 

Adjectives

Strong  forms of adjectives

An adjective is "strong" when it has a weak ein word in front of it or when it doesn't have any determiner at all. For example, "I like red apples." (Remember that a weak ein word is one that doesn't have any ending on it.)

Strong Form Adjectives	Singular			Plural
	Masculine	Neuter	Feminine
Nominative	-er	-es	-e	-e
Accusative	-en
Dative	-em		-er	-en
Genitive	-en			-er

Notice that these are exactly like the der words except for the Masculine/Neuter Genitive (in bold). I'm told that even native Germans sometimes make the mistake of using -es instead of -en for these.

The way to think of this is that the information in the der-word table has to be conveyed somehow, and if the determiner is weak or absent, then the adjective has to do it. (As long as the leader is strong, everyone else can be weak.)

Weak forms of adjectives

When an adjective has a der word or a strong ein word in front of it, it takes a much simpler set of endings.

Weak Form Adjectives	Singular			Plural
	Masculine	Neuter	Feminine
Nominative	-e	-e		-en
Accusative	-en
Dative	-en
Genitive

If it weren't for the masculine accusative, this would be really simple. This is the last chart worth trying to write from memory every morning.

Some books talk about a "mixed" form, and they have a separate table to show what happens to adjectives when they follow one of the ein words. That saves remembering that some ein words are weak (but you have to learn that anyway) at the expense of having to memorize yet another table. (I took this idea from Hammer's German Grammar and Usage, Chapter 6.2 "The Use of the Strong and Weak Declensions.") There are other weak determiners, with their own patterns. (For example etwas takes no endings at all.) Hammer's rule of "use the strong adjective ending when the determiner has no ending and use the weak ending when the determiner has a der-word ending" works very well for those too.

So what happens if you have two or more adjectives in a row? They all take their form from the determiner, not from each other.

Summary

Everything keys off the der words. Learn those well. They aren't a perfect guide, but they're awfully good. Learn the exceptions as you come to them.

Good luck!

Seta (Silk): A Short, Easy Italian Novel

Seta (2008, 108 pages) is a quick, easy read: ideal for someone's first attempt to read an Italian novel.

Hervé Joncour, a young man in 19th century France, tries to save his town's silk industry by smuggling silkworm eggs out of Japan. Although he's happily married to Hélèn, he becomes obsessed with a girl he meets in Japan. But Japan, newly opened to the world, is sliding into civil war.

The Worm Turns

The silkworm spins a cocoon from a single, kilometer-long thread. From such threads hangs the prosperity of the little town of Lavilledieu, which specializes in silk making. When a silkworm blight starts killing European silk worms, the citizens have to send someone to find replacements. Every year, Hervé Joncour has to travel across the world to buy millions of eggs and get them back to France before they hatch. Each trip takes months, while the world around him keeps changing.

And even when he's back in France, he can't stop thinking about a mysterious girl he met in Japan. One who makes him eager for each return visit, even as they grow more and more dangerous.

You can too!

This is an excellent first novel for someone ready to make the leap to reading Italian. Other than a limited amount of silkworm terminology, Seta doesn't demand a lot from the reader in terms of vocabulary. Like any Italian novel, the narration makes heavy use of the passato remoto, but the only forms you have to learn are the 3rd-person singular and plural. The 108 pages are divided into about 65 little chapters, many of which fit on a single Kindle screen. This gives you an incredible sense of accomplishment when you're reading it because you can knock the chapters off in rapid succession.

One chapter is very sexually explicit. Very. That may be a problem for some readers. Others, having read this warning, may be disappointed that that chapter is quite out of character with the rest of the novel and very near the end as well.

The ending may present a different problem; I noticed that some reviewers complained that it left loose ends. Seta is literature, not action-adventure (although there's a fair amount of action and adventure in it), so it's really about Hervé Joncour's own issues and contradictions, and it's over when those are resolved. In that sense, there are no loose ends. It really is one long thread.

Feel free to review my list of foreign novels I recommend reading as well as reference books I use for learning how to read foreign languages.

La forma dell'acqua: Why I Abandoned it

I decided to abandon the popular Italian novel La forma dell'acqua (first novel in the Inspector Montalbano series by Andrea Camilleri) because it is too far from standard Italian to read comfortably, and because there is no value to a non-native speaker in learning the non-standard words.

How I Chose it

About a month ago, following my usual process for choosing a foreign novel to read, I made a list of Italian novels to consider. About a week ago, I asked my Italian teacher for some suggestions for novels suitable for a strong intermediate reader. He sent links to a few web sites that listed books that are popular in Italy at the moment. Camilleri was the only name to turn up on both lists.

I really like crime stories, and the Inspector Montalbano series sounded interesting. If any of the reviews complained about the unusual language in the books, I missed that entirely.

What happened when I tried to read it

From the very first page, I found myself looking up way too many words that didn't exist in the dictionary. This slowed me down a lot because I'd try switching dictionaries, then checking Wikipedia, and finally highlighting the word for later. Sometimes there would be two or three unknown words in a single sentence. Given the setting, I had expected to encounter a few Sicilian terms in the dialogue, but not in the narration. Regardless, I forged on to the end of the first chapter.

Even with all that trouble, I did get the gist of the story. A couple of garbage men doing their morning rounds and complaining about their bosses find the dead body of someone they know. They report it to the local police, commanded by Salvo Montalbano. In retrospect, I'm amazed I got that much out of it.

It's not just that it took a couple of hours to do this--it was painful. Still, figuring that perhaps there were only a few words I'd need to know for the rest of the book, I went back to the start and looked up the mystery words online. Or at least I tried to.

The first unknown term, cummigliava probably meant "accumulated," but Wordreference didn't have it, Linguee didn't have it. I consulted an online Sicilian-Italian dictionary, and that didn't have it either. Finally I did a Google search for it, and I found this article:

‘I am Montalbano/Montalbano sono’: Fluency and Cultural Difference in Translating Andrea Camilleri’s Fiction, by Saverio Tomaiuolo

There I learned that I'm not the only one who has trouble reading this author's work.

Why I abandoned it

The author has loaded it with words that he himself invented by merging words from the Sicilian dialect with standard Italian words. Apparently Italians find this entertaining--my Italian teacher told me that he's hugely popular over in Italy, and that you can figure out most of the words by doing Google searches on them because there are all sorts of web sites where people argue over what they're supposed to mean.

I actually considered that. After all, even time spent reading someone's Italian web page is time spent reading Italian, but what put me off the idea is the fact that I don't want to be memorizing a bunch of non-words. Not when there are so many real words I need to add to my Italian vocabulary.

So even though Italians love Camilleri's work, I think students of Italian need to stay away from it.

Candide

Despite being 250 years old, Voltaire's book Candide ou l'optimisme was a delight to read, even at my level of French. It's a wild and crazy tale of a very young man's misadventures across half the world--adventures that retain their power to shock, horrify, and make you laugh. Sometimes all at the same time.

The Best of All Possible Worlds

Candide's teacher, Pangloss, teaches that logic proves that this is the best of all possible worlds and that all things work out for the best. Starting with chapter one, things don't seem to go that way for Candide though. He's kicked out of the castle, drafted into the army, almost flogged to death for trying to desert, almost killed in a battle, almost drowned at sea, almost killed in an earthquake, almost burned by the inquisition--and this is all in just the first six chapters (out of thirty). 

Much of the message of the novel is that the "this is the best of all possible worlds" philosophy is ridiculous, but to some degree the text contradicts this. Bad things have a way of happening to Candide, but worse things happen to the people who tangle with him. If he's driven out of a castle, you can expect a few chapters later to learn that he just escaped the castle's destruction. If he misses a boat with all his belongings on it, expect to learn later that the boat sank. It may not be the best possible world for Candide, but things work out a lot better for him than they seem to have any right to. This makes his misfortunes a lot easier to bear. He's a comic figure, not a tragic one.

Of course the message isn't the fun part of the book, and it's quite easy to just ignore it and enjoy the trip. And what a trip it is! The story takes you to Europe, Africa, South America, and just over the border into Asia.  Sometimes he's fleeing, sometimes he's pursuing, and sometimes he just goes with the flow.

Part of what makes it funny is that no matter what happens, no matter how strange, he always takes it in stride and cooks up some sort of explanation. And some really strange things happen.

When I was in high school, students in second-year French read Candide. Now I understand both how teenage students would be able to read such a book and why it would entertain them.

Issues Reading Candide on a Kindle

This was the second novel I ever read in French. Most of the notes I wrote about how I read Cinq semaines en ballon apply to Candide as well. In hindsight, Candide would have been the easier one for me to start with despite it being over 100 years older.

Because the book was so old, I went ahead and bought an English translation as well--if "bought" is the right word for free books. (Candide is free on Amazon.com in both French and English editions.) What I discovered, though, was that I really didn't need the English version at all. I consulted it at the end of each chapter, but I rarely found any translation mistakes worthy of note.

As with any novel in French, the reader has to be prepared to cope with the passé simple verb tenses in the narration. Unlike modern novels, you also have to deal with it in dialogue, which means you'll occasionally see forms beyond the third person ones. This turns out not to be a big problem because the Kindle's free monolingual French dictionary knows all the passé simple forms and always gets you to the infinitive. If you see a mysterious expression like  nous parlâmes, it's enough to know that the verb is parler and you can figure out that this means "we spoke".

One other thing that took some getting used to is that Voltaire often says point instead of pas to make negative statements. The free monolingual French dictionary does explain this, but, of course, it explains it in French. I think that's the only grammatical point that took me by surprise though.

The hardest vocabulary for me were the words involving Pangloss's philosophy. As it turns out, nothing Pangloss says is of the least importance, and even translated his comments are generally arrant nonsense. (I'd probably get those jokes better if I'd ever had to study philosophy in Latin.)

Supposedly Voltaire wrote the whole thing in just three or four days. I find that hard to believe, but almost as incredible is that I read the whole thing in three days. Of all the foreign-language books I've read so far, I think this one was the most fun. Highly recommended.

How to Make a Gold Duolingo Tree

Finishing Duolingo isn't enough; you want all the skills to be "gold," and you want them to stay gold. In this post, I'll talk about how to "regild" a completed tree, what to do about weak skills if you're half-way through a tree, and how to keep a tree gold from the very start. I'll also discuss how to do this in a way that actually teaches you something--it shouldn't be an exercise in aesthetics!

Those who are impatient can just skip straight to the end and read what I recommend as the best practice. For everyone else, I'll explain what it is we're talking about and how I reached the conclusions I did.

The Decaying Tree

When you first finish a skill, Duolingo turns its icon gold, and five "strength bars" (like on your phone) appear beside it. If you don't do regular "strengthening" exercises, though, the strength bars will gradually weaken from five to one, and at anything less than five, the skill appears in its original color--not gold. This is what we mean by "strong skills" and "weak skills." "Regilding the tree" means doing enough exercises to turn the whole tree gold again.

People who do new lessons but never do review lessons get used to the way a wave of color chases them down their tree. Those who took the placement test and skipped over a large part of the tree are often stunned when a huge slab abruptly turns color all at once. In both cases, Duolingo is sending a message that those are skills that ought to be reviewed. This post is for those who want to do something about weak skills and who want to enhance their language learning at the same time.

Why Bother?

As Duolingo warns, if you don't review what you learned, you'll start to forget it. Lots of people eventually abandon Duolingo because they get about a third of the way down the tree and then they have terrible trouble finishing new lessons, due to the fact that they've forgotten too much of the earlier material. Doing regular review lessons spares you from this.

Duolingo has a decent algorithm that tries to target the things you most need to review. Done right, the review lessons really shouldn't end up being a waste of time--they should help you solidify your understanding of the language. And they often contain material you didn't see when you did the skill for the first time.

Two Kind of Strengthening Exercises

To reverse this decay process, you can either do a skill-specific strengthening exercise or a general strengthening exercise. To do a skill-specific one, you pick a weakened skill and click on its icon. On the right, you'll see a colored box showing the strength of the skill, and inside that box is a button to strengthen the skill. Press that button and Duolingo gives you a review lesson targeting the skill as a whole. That is, it doesn't just repeat one of the lessons--it asks you questions drawn from all of them.

Because it only takes 17 correct answers to complete a lesson, and because Duolingo usually has far more than 17 possible questions per lesson, when you do a review lesson you will frequently see sentences you never saw when you did the skill in the first place. Usually not entirely new words, but you'll definitely see new ways to use the old words.

Depending on how weak the skill is and how big it is (i.e. how many words it covers), a single strengthening exercise may not be enough to make it gold again. Repetition may be necessary. On the other hand, occasionally you'll strengthen some entirely different skill that just happens to share a few words with the one you were trying to strengthen.

To do a general strengthening exercise, you go back to the main menu and click the blue "Strengthen Skills" button on the far right of the screen." This brings up a review lesson that has a random mix of things you have already studied but that Duolingo thinks are weakest.

Because the benefits of the general exercise are spread across the entire tree, it usually strengthens anywhere from zero to three skills--some people have reported as many as 13.

In short, your tree weakens over time, and you have to do strengthening exercises if you want it to stay (or become) gold. The question is how often to do them and what kind to do. To answer that, we'll start with a look at Duolingo's algorithm--what's known of it, anyway.

How it Works

Duolingo does not publish much about the algorithms they use for weakening and strengthening, but they did make at least one posting with hints about it. Further, a Duolingo user with the handle pinkodoug has made an extensive study of the Duolingo JavaScript and he has some plausible ideas about their algorithms for strengthening and weakening.

Drawing from those sources plus my own experiments, here's my best guess as to what they do. (N.B. these are my conclusions, so if they're wrong blame me--not the sources above.)

To Duolingo, strength is about words, not skills. Strong words have a score of 100%, and they decay over time until they reach zero. All words are decaying all the time, but some words decay faster than others.

You can actually see this if you click on the "Words" tab at the top of the home screen.

This shows all the words that Duolingo thinks you've studied so far. It tells you how long ago you practiced each one, and it gives each word's current strength using a bar system that goes from 1-4 (not 1-5 the way skills do). If you sort by "Last Practiced," you'll see that the older words tend to be weak while the latest words are almost all 4-bars strong. This is because all words weaken over time, but, as I said before, some words decay faster than others. We'll get back to this last point in a minute.

Every skill is associated with a set of words--probably the same words that you see in the individual lesson descriptions. Whenever those words have an average strength of 2.5 bars or more, the skill is gold. Otherwise, it shows the original color, and the skill-strength declines based on some function of the average word strength.

Whenever you do a review lesson, it targets some number of your weakest words for review. A skill-specific review only picks words from that one skill. A general review picks words from every lesson you've completed so far. Otherwise they're the same--with one important exception: in the tips that Duolingo offered, they said that skill-specific strengthening turns your tree gold faster than general strengthening does.

As long as you complete the review lesson, the targeted words all get set back to four bars whether you get them right or not. The catch is that getting them right makes them decay slower in the future. Getting them wrong or using the hints makes them decay faster. This is why some people report making tremendous efforts to strengthen every single skill only to watch them start decaying again a few days later.

The fact that some people seem to keep their trees gold without much effort suggests that there actually is an optimal way to do this. To determine what that might be, I did a few experiments--with help from a friend.

Experiments

Greg's French Tree

For the past twelve months, I have been slowly going through Duolingo's French tree, following a rule of doing two review lessons per day followed by one new lesson. In that time, I have completed most of the tree, and it has never weakened. That is, although an individual skill has weakened two or three times, I simply strengthened it specifically and thus ended the day with a solid-gold tree. During that time, I had three different week-long vacations during which I couldn't do lessons. Even so, when I got back, the tree was still gold. Others have reported similar experiences.

This suggested to me that it is possible to have a durable gold tree without a whole lot of work. That is, it seemed that as few at two general strengthening exercises per day might be enough, if done daily for a long enough time.

Naomi's Italian Trees

My friend Naomi in New Zealand was interested in exploring this, and she agreed to help do a few experiments. She had finished her English-to-Italian tree (aka the "forward tree") in just a few months and wanted to gild it. She had also just completed the Italian-to-English tree (aka the "reverse tree") in a single day and wanted to keep it gold.

The experiment was very simple: On her forward tree, she did two general strengthens per day. On the reverse tree, she did three general strengthens per day. Back when Duolingo allowed you to fail, she would persist until she completed that number, although, as it happens, she rarely failed an exercise.

Here's what happened.

With three general strengthens per day, the reverse tree got worse for about 40 days, leveled off for about a month, and then started improving in an irregular sort of way.

The forward tree decayed steadily, reaching 57 weak skills on day 91. At that point, we changed our strategy.

Starting on day 92, Naomi began doing three skill-specific exercises instead of two or three general ones. She selected the skills to strengthen by picking the weak skills highest in her tree. She applied the same algorithm to both trees.

We only have 13 days of data with the new method, but the results speak for themselves.

This graph shows how many weak skills were left each day after Naomi did her strengthening exercises. This shows that the reverse tree was 100% regilded on day 99 and that it has remained so for six days now. On the present trend, the forward tree will be regilded in two more weeks.

Obviously this strongly suggests doing the per-skill exercises rather than the general ones--just as Duolingo had advised people. In fact, the per-skill exercises appear to be more than three-times as effective at regilding. It also suggests that two exercises per day was not enough.

We adopted one additional rule: substitute general exercises for specific ones if there are no weak skills left, but never do more than two general exercises on the same day. That is, if the tree has any weak skills, then Naomi still does three strengthening exercises--padding them out with general ones as needed, but if the tree was solid gold to begin with, then she only does two generals, not three. The idea is that, like with my French tree, a durable gold tree should eventually need only two per day to maintain it.

Note: Throughout the process, Naomi reported that the algorithm seemed to have a knack for finding exactly the things she was weakest on. She felt the exercise improved her Italian enormously, even if she did spend 91 days making no visible progress on regilding her trees.

Greg's Spanish and Italian Trees

During this time, I let my own Spanish and Italian trees decay. (Both had been gold on day zero of Naomi's experiment.) Over the next month or two I'll try to reproduce the results from Naomi's trees, but I wanted to share one key result that I got on the first day:

For the best learning experience, you should strengthen from bottom-up instead of top-down.

The reason to prefer bottom up is that it drills you in the skills you most-recently learned--the skills you are most likely to need help in. You'll discover that Duolingo has a lot more material for those skills that you never saw when you did them the first time. Most people have a weak grip on the last skills in a tree, so it makes a great deal of sense to prioritize strengthening them first. In contrast, the stuff at the top of the tree is far easier to do, but it's also far less valuable to review.

The exception would be for someone trying to resurrect a long-unused tree or for someone who has become overwhelmed and is considering quitting. Those folks should strengthen from the top down because it's equivalent to starting over, in a way, without losing everything you learned the first time. (In my view, no one should ever delete their Duolingo tree and start over.)

Other Issues

I always advise people to avoid timed practices and not to use the mouse-over hints unless absolutely necessary. I'll explain my reasoning for both suggestions.

Timed Practices

You buy the ability to do timed practices at the lingot store. It's a one-time purchase, but it's still a bad deal. The way it works is that when do a review Duolingo offers you the option to do timed practice instead of the normal kind. In fact, it becomes the default.

In timed practice, you only have a few seconds before the clock runs out and you lose the round. Every correct answer puts more time on the clock, so you need to go like lightening to keep ahead. In theory, this helps you develop the skills to handle conversation in real time.

Many of the people I've talked to who reported doing lots and lots of review lessons with little progress on regilding their trees told me they were doing timed practices. I think this strengthens the tree slowly because time pressure encourages people to skip long sentences. The earlier post from Duolingo said that every word counts, so it would make sense that skipping the long sentences would really hurt you.

Given that Duolingo's new UI is much more forgiving of mistakes, it probably makes more sense to try to get the same effect by simply going through the exercises as fast as you can, accepting the fact that you'll make more errors. As a bonus, when you do make an error, you can stop and study what you did wrong. Anyway, if you want to regild your tree, you should probably stay away from timed practice.

Hints

The other thing that seems to be strongly associated with lack of success is using hints. Using a hint means doing a lesson and mousing over a word to get Duolingo to show you the definition.

Unfortunately Duolingo takes this as a hint that you don't know that word at all, and it makes that word decay faster. Do use the hints if you really don't know the word. (We want to help Duolingo figure out what you really need to study, after all.) But don't use them just because you want to be 100% sure of a word before you press return.

Summary

Plan to do three exercises per day. If you can't invest that much effort, you probably can't do this in a reasonable time. With that, here is the system I recommend for making durable gold trees with Duolingo:

• Always do a skill-specific strengthening exercise if there are any weak skills in your tree at all. Only do a general strengthening exercise if there are no more weak skills to do.
• If there are multiple weak skills to choose from, always pick the one that is furthest down the tree. (That is, prefer skills you learned later over ones you learned earlier.) But, if you are effectively starting over (e.g. after a long absence or because you're overwhelmed) then pick the highest (that is easiest) weak skills first.
• For an incomplete tree, do two strengthening exercises and then do one new exercise every day. If you're not ready for a new exercise, do a third strengthening exercise instead.
• For a complete tree that isn't all gold, do three strengthening exercises every day, using general strengthening exercises if you run out of skill-specific ones.
• For a complete, solid-gold tree, only do two strengthening exercises per day--both of which have to be general ones, of course.

Never do a timed practice. Never use hints.

Finally, take your time. Don't try to regild your tree in a day or two of inhumanly focused effort--followed by a month of neglect. A steady effort over a long period of time is the best way to do this. You'll learn the most that way, and it won't burn you out.

If you follow this plan, assuming that you are doing your best on the exercises, your tree will eventually be "durable gold," meaning it will stay gold with minimal effort on your part, even if you go on vacation for a week or so. How long it will take to get there depends on a lot of things, but a month or two seems typical. (It depends on how well you do the exercises and on how deeply decayed your tree was in the first place.) Have at it, and best of luck!

I would love to hear from anyone who gives this a try. Leave a comment and let me know how it went.