9 Summary of Week 2

Well done for completing Week 2 and reaching the end of this course!

This week you have worked with numbers. Numbers can be difficult to use in context: we can say them in a sequence (e.g. from 1 to 10, from 10 to 100), but when we need to tell or understand the time in a foreign language we suddenly find out that we are processing the information slower than in our language. This is because numbers are a language themselves, therefore you are dealing with two languages at the same time: the foreign language that you are learning and the language of numbers. If then you are throwing in an English translation, you end up with three languages at the same time.

Here are two tips on how to deal with it:

• when you are telling the time in Italian, picture it in your mind as you would see it on a clockface (like the ones that you have seen in the activities carried out this week) rather than thinking of it as expressed in English
• in the same way, when listening to somebody telling the time in Italian, picture it in your mind as you would see it on a clockface rather than translating it into English.

This means that you will be dealing with only two languages at a time (Italian and numbers), therefore making it easier for yourself

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course LGXI002 Beginners Italian 2: in cammino [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .