If you go on duolingo.com and sign up to learn Italian there are 66 individual sections to learn before they consider you done with the course. Since some of the last sections have to do with politics and business I'm making the educated guess that finishing the course will result in reaching an intermediate level in Italian.
The short term goal here is to finish every one of those 66 sections before my college classes start up again in August. Since I don't know how long they'll take me I'm going to set the pace at a section a day until I'm done. I believe that would have me done on the 18th of July. The reason I'm pushing the sections so close together has to do with needing a base of knowledge to be able to start conversing with others. Without enough words to choose from all you're left able to say is hello and goodbye with a couple how are you doings thrown into the mix. As such I'll work on getting the vocabulary base quickly and then spending the last month working on writing short essays and speaking.
Now I've been dabbling with learning to speak new languages for a couple years but I've never really had the self discipline to keep it up for long. I'd learn a few phrases and then move on to something newer and shinier. I never set solid goals with deadlines so I'm betting that'll make a big difference in how much I stick with it.
As a result of that dabbling I'm actually a couple days ahead of schedule to start with because I have 3 sections already done. Hopefully that'll give me some breathing room for days that take longer to finish as well as days where I don't have anytime.
On top of doing a section a day from duolingo.com I'm also planning on going to an Italian conversation group that meets once a week on Thursday evenings and a different group that meets every other Sunday morning. Unfortunately all these conversation groups are in California where I'm staying for the first part of the summer. Sometime around the 4th of July I'll be heading back to my apartment in Iowa where I attend college and they don't have any Italian conversation groups close by.
But don't lose faith quite yet! Once I get it figured out, I also plan on using italki.com to converse with italian natives and practice my writing skills. Hopefully that'll make up for the lack of local conversation partners.
On top of the crazy amount of vocabulary that I'm going to be learning this summer I might also take a programming class online since I have next to no idea how to implement any of the ideas I have for how to organize and run this blog.
Wish me luck!
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