A suggestion for the reuse stage, from the other side of a dining room in Milan. Use a restaurant menu as the source text. It is the one document in a foreign language that a learner will read carefully, several times, with real motivation, because something is at stake at the end of it.
And it teaches an unusual thing. An Italian menu has almost no verbs: it runs on nouns and on past participles. Mantecato, brasato, saltato, ripieno, farcito, gratinato. Four or five of those participles open more of a menu than two hundred nouns, because the nouns change from region to region while the participles do not. A useful journal exercise: copy three lines from a menu, write in your own language what you think each participle physically does to the food, then check. You will get the cooking method wrong more often than the ingredient, and that is exactly the gap worth noticing.
The other half is that in the room almost nobody uses those words out loud. The menu is written language; ordering is spoken language, and they barely overlap. Both are worth practising, but they are two different journals.
A suggestion for the reuse stage, from the other side of a dining room in Milan. Use a restaurant menu as the source text. It is the one document in a foreign language that a learner will read carefully, several times, with real motivation, because something is at stake at the end of it.
And it teaches an unusual thing. An Italian menu has almost no verbs: it runs on nouns and on past participles. Mantecato, brasato, saltato, ripieno, farcito, gratinato. Four or five of those participles open more of a menu than two hundred nouns, because the nouns change from region to region while the participles do not. A useful journal exercise: copy three lines from a menu, write in your own language what you think each participle physically does to the food, then check. You will get the cooking method wrong more often than the ingredient, and that is exactly the gap worth noticing.
The other half is that in the room almost nobody uses those words out loud. The menu is written language; ordering is spoken language, and they barely overlap. Both are worth practising, but they are two different journals.
Very good. I will read the two articles referenced at the beginning of this text and I will come back here. Thank you.