Buondì.

Quite a few club members buy our ebooks, though they’re probably only a small fraction of all club members, surely less than five percent of the total (I’m just guessing.)

I wonder why?

After all, we have a range of over a hundred ebook titles, at all the different levels, structured in ways that should appeal to learners with different priorities and preferences. They’re not free, that’s true, but the prices are reasonable for ‘study material’ which is designed to help you build your knowledge of Italian and your ability to use it (when listening, for example.)

Ebooks can be downloaded no matter where you happen to be, instantly after your payment clears. So no waiting days or weeks for your text to arrive, and no postage costs.

My hypothesis is this: that the less than 5% or so of club members who have tried our ebooks like them, and often continue buying them, as we constantly publish more.

But that the 95%+ of club members who haven’t tried them are hung up on one of two things:

1.) “Language learning is about GRAMMAR, isn’t it? What have reading and listening got to do with anything?”

and/or

2.) “What’s an ebook? I don’t have a Kindle so I couldn’t use it, anyway. Sell me something made of paper that’ll need to be physically brought to me, here on the other side of the globe, at great cost in terms of CO2 emissions. The waiting will surely increase my eventual reading pleasure!”

Regular readers will know that I’m always harping on about 1.), and now know why. So today, let’s talk about 2.), the ebook basics!

An ebook is a computer file

Which means you can save it on a computer, tablet, smartphone or ebook reader (more about which later…) Like any computer file, for example a bank statement, you should save it somewhere safe, so that you’ll always be able to find it when you need it. It’s a good idea to keep a back up copy, perhaps not on your usual device. That way, if you change computer or lose your phone, you’ll still have it. Books made of paper can get lost, but computer files can be copied and so are, in theory, more practical – they don’t need to be dusted, either.

The default format is .pdf, which means the ebook can be printed, or read on any device

.pdf is the file extension we use for all our ebooks. It means ‘portable document format’, which is exactly what it sounds like. Everyone uses it. Bank statements, ‘terms and conditions’ documents, contracts, receipts, and so on – they’re all .pdfs. Any sort of device should be able to read a .pdf. Some of our .pdf ebooks also contain links to online audio files, which means that as long as you’re connected to the internet, you should be able to click the link and listen, as well as read. N.b. ‘easy reader’ ebooks have audio, but ‘parallel text’ ebooks don’t – because they have a translation instead.

We have free sample chapters for virtually everything, so you can try before you buy

Want to see the difference between an ‘easy reader’ and a ‘parallel text’? To see which you might prefer, and to check how easy/difficult it is to download, to read, etc.? Our Catalog page has FREE sample chapters for just about every title. Click the link to download the .pdf to your device, find it in the Downloads folder (usually), click it again to open it. Via!

IF you buy an ebook, you’ll be emailed a download link immediately after your payment

I used to email people their ebook purchases, which worked well but was very time-consuming. Nowadays, our shop is set up to send a download link automatically, usually immediately after a payment is received, which is faster and a lot less hassle. OPEN THE BORING EMAILS FROM OUR SHOP SOFTWARE and read them. Where it says ‘Download’, that’s the link (or links) you need. The links work exactly the same way as the ones on our Catalog page – except that they are set to expire after three downloads/seven days, whichever comes sooner. You should download a copy of the ebook you bought and save it somewhere safe. But don’t worry – if you mess it up (or don’t bother to read the emails from our shop), just email me and I’ll fix it for you.

Some, not all, of our ebooks, have alternative formats (for Amazon’s Kindle, for example)

You’ve seen people, maybe on public transport, holding little oblong plastic things that don’t seem to be tablets or smartphones? Those are ebook readers, and they are for, well, reading ebooks. The Kindle is the most well known of the bunch. The advantage of the Kindle (and its sisters) is that you can read on it at night, store many texts easily on it, and so on. It will also adjust the size of the text for you, so you might be reading just a few sentences, in a very large font, per page. The text ‘flows’ according to your preferences. The disadvantage of that is that we can’t control the formatting (the Kindle displays the text according to its settings, not the way we have chosen that you should see it.) And THAT means that ereader formats (.mobi for Kindle and .epub for non-Amazon ereaders) are not suitable for ‘workbooks’ (which contain exercises etc.) or ‘parallel texts’ (each line has a corresponding translation). Those types of ebooks come only in the .pdf format. On the product information page (click the ebook title on the Catalog page to visit it) it should say clearly (at the top) which formats are available. If you’re unsure, ask. If you buy an ebook, you’ll get a download link for the default .pdf format. If you’d like the .mobi (for your Kindle) or the .epub (for other ereaders), just write and ask us AFTER your order is completed, or add a note on the order form at the time of your order. Please check the available formats for the ebook or ebooks that interest you on the ‘product information’ page BEFORE you buy, but basically it’s ‘easy readers’ = all three formats, ‘everything else’ = only .pdf.

That’s about it, really. If you’re a long way from a bookstore, if you want something in Italian to read/listen to/study right now, then you should consider an ebook. Be part of the clued up -5% of club members who already do, why not?

Ready to practice what we’ve talked about?

This week’s half-price eBook of the Week offer is the A2/B1-level (lower intermediate), ‘Il campo di papaveri’ (The Poppy Field), the story of a struggling young artist who falls in love with his landlord’s daughter…

We have two VERSIONS of this tale. The pornographic version and the non-pornographic version – just joking! There’s the ‘easy reader’ version (text, glossaries, exercises and online audio), which comes in the default .pdf (see the FREE sample chapter, here) plus .mobi (for Kindle) and .epub (other ereaders) for those who request it.

And then there’s the ‘parallel text’ version – the Italian original, plus a line-by-line translation into English, but NO glossaries, exercises or audio (the FREE sample chapter is here). Because of the special formatting required, this one is only in the default .pdf format, so no Kindle-compatible file format. Sorry!

Two versions, three possible file formats, four options in total – confusing, isn’t it? But take a look at both product pages, or both sample chapters, and you’ll see they have different cover art to help you choose – the ‘easy reader’ version is red and green and has a little audio icon, while the ‘parallel text’ version is blue/grey and has two little flags to show that there’s an English translation of the Italian original.

I almost forgot to mention: both ebooks are half price all this week, so just £3.99 instead of the usual £7.99. Don’t buy both to take advantage of the saving, though, as the text is basically the same. Try one or the other, according to how you prefer to learn (with a translation or with accompanying audio.)

And once your payment clears, read all the emails the shop sends you, the ones with words like ‘order completed’ or ‘invoice’ and so on in the subject lines, which you might normally ignore… One or more of them will contain the download link you need!!

‘Easy reader’ version | FREE sample chapter (.pdf) | ‘Parallel text’ version | FREE sample chapter (.pdf)

Or select something more suited to your current level from our Catalog page!

A mercoledì.

P.S.

Saturday’s FREE bulletin of ‘easy’ Italian news is waiting for you to read/listen to it, here.

The audio is eight minutes and thirty-six seconds long. Press play and listen, while following the text on the webpage. Don’t worry about the parts you don’t understand, don’t try to stop the audio, just keep listening. The purpose of the material is to train you for precisely that – real time listening. Not understanding everything you hear is normal, and is part of the task. But the text is there as a support.

Eight minutes and thirty-six seconds later, you’re done! Give yourself a pat on the back and open a beer. There’ll be another ‘easy’ Italian news bulletin along on Tuesday, and another on Thursday. Listen to/read each one, and you WILL notice a gradual improvement.

However, if you’re in a hurry to improve your listening comprension skills, why not invest an additional seventeen minutes and twelve seconds this very day? Listen to the audio a second time, still with the text support. It should make more sense this time… And yet again, this final time without the text, which will be much harder, but at least you should be able to recognise the general topics.

Subscribing to EasyItalianNews.com is totally free. Do so and you’ll be emailed each new bulletin as soon as it is published, each Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Read/listen to them for a couple of  months and your Italian will be better as a consequence.

OnlineItalianClub.com | EasyItalianNews.com | Shop

Buondì.

Club-member Andrew emailed this:

One other language learning tool which I’m kind of undecided on is flash cards. I’ve not seen you mention them on your site, but I know you’ll have an opinion. Maybe a topic for a future newsletter?  My thoughts are:

• Helps get over a hump when you struggle with similar looking words; spesso, spasso, spessa, etc
• Single words on their own don’t work, it needs to be a phrase with context.
• Focus on tricky words, not every word you don’t know.
• Beware of youtube videos that have you believe it’s the silver bullet.

Well, of course I have an opinion on flashcards, Andrew’s right. Though not a strong one either for or against.

I agree, Andrew, that flashcards (little pieces of paper or cardboard with the word you want to learn written on one side and maybe a translation on the other side – or a more technologically up-to-date version of this age old study technique) are no silver bullet.

The interesting part, though, is why not.

Learning vocabulary is, of course, an essential part of learning a foreign language, and there are different approaches to doing it.

When I was a beginner in Turkish, for example, I remember using flashcards to teach myself the numbers, the days of the week, food items, and other such useful beginner topics. The Turkish words were not similar to anything I’d seen before, so effort was required to recognise and memorise them, and there was the promise that they would be immediately useful.

Duolingo didn’t exist in those days (this was more than 30 years back), but if it had done I could have used their app, which presents words and grammar together not separately, and probably got just as far or further than with my elastic band-wrapped stack of snipped up pieces of card.

Ditto with taking a course, or doing ‘match the word and the picture’ exercises, or whatever. There are many ways to learn new words and, in part it, comes down to what you are comfortable with and what the options are. If I had no other way of learning words, so no app, no course, no textbook, then flashcards and the like would be fine.

Flashcards, I suppose, would also be good when it came to dealing with a MASS OF ESSENTIAL ITEMS that really must be dealt with before moving on to, say, reading or listening to actual texts. If you want to learn Japanese, you’re going to have to deal with the Japanese writing system, and so build that visual memory for kanji (the Chinese characters that represent words). Flashcards, why not?

BUT – and this is the important point – in any language there’s a lot of vocabulary. And so, once past the essentials that you’ll find in any beginners’ course, the issue is WHICH WORDS are worth spending your time on, rather than how you might learn them.

By definition, when using flashcards, you will have pre-selected words you want to focus on, or someone else will have done so for you. But once past the lowest levels, it’s far from obvious what your focus should be. Do you really need to memorise sets of ‘body’ or ‘food’ vocabulary, for example? Or would you, like me, find it more useful to be learning terms like ‘marketing’, ‘discount’, ‘turnover’, ‘profit’, and so on?

With my most recent and lowest-level language, which is Spanish, I’ve really not ‘studied’ at all (apart from a few months with Duolingo), but I have been reading it, listening to it, and taking weekly conversation lessons. You might wonder whether that’s not a case of putting the cart before the horse, but with a language that’s reasonably accessible in terms of its vocabulary and grammar (I know Italian and some French) it’s perfectly possible to get used to understanding it and communicating in it WITHOUT memorising sets of words beforehand.

By reading regular emails from El Pais about the American presidential election, for example, I’ve learnt a lot of words, got much more used to the grammar structures, and built my confidence dealing with Spanish texts. More to the point, the things I am reading and listening to contain the words and structures that are relevant to my interests. Sure, I might have trouble decoding a Spanish menu, because I haven’t bothered with the flashcard set of food words, but I can follow the conversation about how relevant the Hispanic/Latino vote in Florida is, and how both sides are attempting to win it.

Were I to have spent the same time as I spent reading election report emails in Spanish memorising word lists, I might, or might not, have learnt more items. But they almost certainly wouldn’t have been the things that are most-immediately relevant to me.

Insomma, learning by reading/listening/speaking has the huge advantage that it is targeted to your needs, compared to learning pre-selected lists of words. Suppose I was into, I don’t know, say cooking, then arguably, reading and following recipes would be a way to fast track the relevant words and structures into the part of my brain from which I expect to subsequently retrive them when I need them.

OK, you might argue, what about making flashcards of all the words you need to look up when creating Spanish food for your family, learning just those, and so having exactly the vocabulary you’ll want handy for next time?

Logical, but wrong.

Reading recipes, or election news, has the advantage of providing information about frequency. If I read or hear a word many times, sooner or later my brain will figure it out. It’s a slow process, and not terribly effective, but it’s natural and everyone can do it WITHOUT STUDYING.

Whereas if I only see/hear a word or structure once or twice, I might not understand it and I’m pretty sure not to remember it. Or at least, I won’t remember it to the extent that I could use it in conversation when I needed it.

But that’s fine.

Because according to the texts that I am exposed to, that I have chosen to read/listen to, that particular word, that specific structure, is not frequent. And items which are not frequent are unlikely to offer a very good return on the time invested to learn them, or to stay ‘learnt’ very long, given that they won’t be reinforced with regular exposure.

Learn by reading/listening/speaking and you will inevitably, without a shadow of doubt, eventually assimilate and be able to use whichever elements of the language that are most relevant to you, while ignoring the rest.

And it’s the ‘ignoring the rest’ part that allows someone like me to reach a degree of conversational fluency fairly quickly.

What I’m not doing is spending time on memorising words or studying grammar that I might only use at a future point, or never. What I’m instead doing is having fun decoding, then perhaps as some distant future point using in speech, the elements of the language which I actually need, in order to understand what I read and hear, and to express my thoughts.

A final point – by not studying Spanish, I find that I’ve developed a huge hole where the past tense should be. Were I to be bothered to fill that hole, I’d find a website or textbook that showed the past tense conjugations and perhaps make a few flashcards. Perhaps just ten or twenty of the most common verbs.

With a little effort I’d have significantly improved my Spanish using this old-fashioned and free technique.

Why not do that, then, you might be asking yourself?

Because I’m lazy, perhaps. Or maybe because I don’t learn languages that way any longer. It didn’t work out so well in the past, so I stopped.

These days, I’d rather be catching up on the pandemic situation in Madrid and Barcelona by listening to the lunchtime news on Spanish radio, or reading about last night’s presidential debate in a Spanish newspaper’s daily election email. And yes, it’s difficult at first. But it quickly gets easier.

Articles and news broadcasts are not perfect, but they motivate and interest me, and importantly, they contain FREQUENCY INFORMATION. Whatever I hear/read often, I learn effortlessly. Whatever is uncommon gets ignored.

Were someone to come up with a master-list of ‘all the words that Daniel needs to learn in order to read, listen to and say the things that Daniel is interested in‘, then surely it would be worth me devoting study time to. I’d make a MOUNTAIN OF FLASHCARDS, and work through them, and boy, would it be time well spent!

But given that such a list would be personal to each one of us, and so each would be different, no one has done so, not even, especially not, my teacher, who sadly lacks the ability to peer into my brain and poke around to see what’s missing.

My list would be heavy on language-learning, marketing and politics. Yours would be different. And both would no doubt mutate in time, as our interests and priorities changed.

Never mind that there are no master lists, though, because you know what? Our brains has an app for making one.

Just feed your app appropriate data (text and audio which is more or less intelligible, feedback from conversation partners on things you don’t know how to say, or say badly) and it will run happily in the background, not taking up too much of the mental energy you need to conserve in order to get through your day. You’ll forget it’s there, but all the while it’ll be working away to build for you, word by word, structure by structure, your very own master list for the language you’re learning!

Read, listen and converse for long enough, for enough hours/days/months/years, and you will end up with, I promise, a personalised database of the elements of the language that are most essential for your needs.

No Youtube ‘learn an Italian word a day’ video can do that for you.

A lunedì.

P.S.

Here’s a final reminder about this week’s new ‘book of the classic movie’ ‘easy reader’ ebook, which is on offer until Sunday night at just £5.99!

• .pdf e-book (+ audio available free online)
• .mobi (Kindle-compatible) and .epub (other ebook readers) available on request at no extra charge – just add a note to the order form or email us
• 8 chapters to read and listen to
• Comprehension questions to check your understanding
• Italian/English glossary of ‘difficult’ terms for the level
• Suitable for students at B1/B2 level and above
• Download your Free Sample Chapter (.pdf)

Buy L’avventura, just £5.99 this week! | Free Sample Chapter (.pdf) | Classic Italian movies ‘easy readers’ | Catalog

P.P.S.

Don’t forget to listen to Thursday’s FREE bulletin of ‘easy’ Italian news!

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