Im thinking of taking italian (1 Viewer)

[micuzzo]

hi pepole... as my title says, im thinking of taking itLIn... ive never done it b4 but am of italian background... due to my circumstances i am able to do it via distance ed... but am un sure of which class to take... beginners or continuers...

can anyone plz tell me what benginners or continuers is like... like i can speak italian well but im not very confident with my writing and reading... in italian will you ever need to write essays(as we do for english) how about in tests... how leniant are examiners on mistakes.... also do you need to know how to speak in the 'lei form' (unsure what it is called)

Grazie a tutti...

 

[russianROULETTE]

first off, having an italian background does not mean you will be able to do well. one of the people in my class has an italian background, which turned out to be a hindrance because at home his family speaks dialect. another girl who decided to take italian continuers in year 11 switched classes after seeing how difficult it was in the textbook.

second, it's good that you can speak the language, but speaking is only worth 20/100 for the HSC. so for continuers you need to be good at the following: reading, comprehension, listening, responding to a written text (i.e. letter or email) and making an email/letter/diary entry for a question. i recommend you look at past exemplar (i.e. high band six) answers and HSC papers so you can see what would be needed for high marks and what type of work you'd be doing.

also, doing it by correspondence will be difficult. our teacher let us learn at our own pace/self-teach, there are a lot of things that you might need to ask a teacher for... some of the tenses can be quite tricky because there are irregular verbs. but i'm pretty sure they give you the phone number of your distance ed teacher to contact in such circumstances.

as for knowing the 'lei' (formal) form, they can ask you to write a speech to a group of teachers/letter to a potential employer, in which case you would need to know it. for most verbs you use the same word as you would for the he/she (lui/llei) form. i personally managed to avoid using it.

my recommendation would probably be to do beginners, but if you think you can handle it, continuers scales better and is more challenging. but make sure you put thought into it, don't end up regretting your subject selection like i did for one of my subjects.

 

[micuzzo]

^ grazie per la risposta... solo che ho gia` fatto una decisione... ahaha lol.... im just testing you.. anyway thanks