Among several other foreign languages I've decided to start dedicating time to EVERY DAY - Russian and Polish, for example - using a new language learning method I've developed to maximize efficiency so I can learn more languages, I've been dedicating anywhere between 5 minutes and an hour to Italian (primarily listening to podcasts) on a daily basis since October of 2016 and now I'm trying to improve my speaking skills and hopefully motivate others to dedicate a bit of time every day to learning a foreign language in 2017 :) I'm super stoked that most of the (automatic) subtitles generated by YouTube are correct, which not only means that YouTube recognized I was speaking in Italian in the first place (haha) and not Spanish or something else, but that my pronunciation is coming along nicely. Although you can get a sense of what I'm saying from the English translation of the automatically generated subtitles, some stuff came out hilarious (e.g. at no point was I talking about Harry Potter lol). ***Update: I've now uploaded proper (non-automatic) subtitles as well :) The increasing speech disfluencies as the video progresses are due to the fact that I went out of my way to refer to my notes to use words and phrases outside the range of my active vocabulary in order to challenge myself and "activate" these for future conversations in Italian (cf. this article on the subject: www.rhetorik-seminar-online.com/rhetorik-tipps/wortschatz-erweitern-simulgan-technik, which I also did an English translation of for LingQ.com quite a few years back: www.lingq.com/learn/en/preview/item/65833/) :p Finally, here's a link to the fantastic Italian podcast I spoke of in the video: www.youtube.com/user/ITALIANOAUTOMATICO Comments and critique more than welcome, un abbraccio forte! :) -David

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