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Buondì.

The article from two weeks ago (Who are you and what do you want?) keeps on generating comments, which you can read through if you have the time and voglia, as I have just done.

Some are from competent, satisfied language-learners, but many of you seem less than entirely happy.

– Speaking is so frustrating!
– I can hardly put a sentence together.
– Conversation is my weakest area.
– I find reading Italian a lot easier than speaking it.
– I can read and understand far better than I can speak.
– Speaking Italian is still difficult.

Well, yes, speaking is certainly difficult, that’s true. For a start, it’s ‘real time’, unlike say writing, where you can plan ahead how to express yourself.

Moreover, in conversation you’re also busy doing other things besides speaking. Listening, obviously, but also observing all the niceties of interacting verbally with another human.

Your expectations play an important part, too. A lot of members who left comments are retired, so may have been speaking their native tongues for six or seven decades. Hardly surprising then if they find themselves more tongue-tied in a foreign language they’ve only been learning for a few years…

But people imagine that there’s a simple cause and so a simple solution:

– I have no opportunity to speak Italian.
– I’m not sure I can become fluent without actually using Italian every day.
– I hope to spend a longer period of time in Italy so I can become more fluent.
– One day I will make the leap to an online tutor or move to Italy for a year.
– If I could just get to A2, I would try online lessons.
– I need to spend some time somewhere in Italy where no one speaks English.
– I’d like to live in a small town where no-one speaks English.

I’ve heard all that thousands of times in my thirty-five years plus spent in language education, but I still remember what a professor of French told me at a college ‘meet the faculty’ party.

I was nineteen at the time and just back from a week-long holiday romance with a girl called Pascale – who spoke no English – in a camping somewhere in the west of France (she and her friends had set out without a tent so needed to use their wits…)

I was telling the professor how ‘fluent’ I now felt, unlike at any point in the many years of French at school, and he replied that my French probably wasn’t much better than it had been before. It was just that I now felt more confident using it.

That sounded like a bit of a snub (he’d have had every right, snotty little sod that I was at that age) but the guy was correct. A week of chat with Pascale on the beach, in bars, and in a tent had done little more than reveal the limitations of my language education (how to ask about contraception…) But I felt great all the same!

More or less the same thing happened with Turkish when I spent three years in the Turkish capital Ankara, then several more years married to the girl I’d met there, who also didn’t speak English.

But by that time I was an English language teacher so had learnt to be much more realistic about what is and isn’t possible.

In those five or six years of daily practice I became CONFIDENT in my ability to communicate in Turkish, though I knew that my language skills were limited, perhaps intermediate at best.

Another commenter had it right:

– I will never be fluent but if I can communicate when I need to, I’m happy.

‘Fluent’, yuk, I never use that word. And neither should you.

It’s so imprecise! What does it even mean?

Not making mistakes? Speaking without hesitating? Always having the vocabulary to express yourself? Speaking in the appropriate register (formal/informal etc.)?

All of those things? Some of those things? Different things at different times?

If you’re thinking, but, but… I want to be FLUENT, do yourself the huge favour of questioning what you mean, what you really want, and more importantly, why.

Some people, for instance, find making mistakes so humiliating that they waste their lives trying to perfect their grammar. For what? You’ll die at some point, then who will care?

Other language learners don’t care a fig about grammar mistakes but want – above all – to hold up their end of the banter in the bar.

Whoever you are, whatever you want, that’s fine.

But don’t hide behind ‘fluent’, which only serves to confuse things.

So anyway, how to improve your spoken Italian?

Going to Italy for a while might help you feel more confident, as long as it gives you the opportunity to practice interacting in the language with others.

But equally likely it won’t make much difference.

Bet there are plenty of migrants to the country you live in who haven’t mastered the official language, right? They live here but just get by with the language, never reached proficiency and probably never will.

The place in Italy where no one speaks English doesn’t exist, by the way.

But even if it did, spending a year there would be no guarantee you’d speak lots of Italian. Maybe no one would want to talk to you? Maybe you wouldn’t want to talk to them? Maybe you’d hate the whole experience?

An Italian language school in Italy (such as ours in Bologna) can give you some practice and help you feel more confident. Two or three weeks is a good start, and affordable for most people.

But easier and cheaper would be to do some online lessons, which can be just conversation if that’s what you want.

You’ll have heard that I’m learning (never studying) Swedish? My wife is half-Swedish (her mother’s side) but neither she nor her mom will ever practice with me, and they cut me down immediately if I try to start a conversation in their language.

Stefi and I have spent around two weeks in Sweden in the twenty-eight years we’ve been together, so that didn’t help.

I get my Swedish speaking practice online, with a club member who volunteered and gets Italian lessons from https://nativespeakerteachers.com/ in return. I have a conversation scheduled with him right after I’m done writing this, in fact.

How good is my spoken Swedish?

Good enough to get by if I need it, I’d say. Not accurate, not effortless, but enough to talk about the weather, mowing the lawn, and the latest stupidities from across the pond.

The fact that I do lots of listening practice helps, meaning I can manage any interaction.

Conclusion: it really is possible to learn a language without living in the country where that language is spoken, or even spending significant time there.

But it’s also totally OK – as for many happy club members – if your Italian reading/listening skills are much better than your speaking.

There’s no reason you have to be good at speaking. Listening more effectively is a much more useful (and cheaper) goal!

‘Good enough to get by’ is a reasonable objective, along with ‘understand a lot of what I hear’.

‘Flawless grammar’, ‘extensive vocabulary’?

Both are much less important for most people, most of the time.

Alla prossima settimana!

Two Half-Price Italian ‘Easy Reader’ Ebooks: Just £4.99 Each

This week over at our ebooks store there are two (!) half-price Italian ‘easy reader’ ebooks, ‘L’imperatore e i giochi‘ and ‘Diventare regina. La storia di Caterina de’ Medici‘, both of which are at intermediate/upper-intermediate level.

These original stories (text plus online audio) will keep you turning the pages – and so improving your Italian reading/listening comprehension skills, grammar, and vocabulary – but at HALF the normal price!

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‘The philosopher’, Marco Aurelio (121 – 180 CE), was the last of the ‘Five Good Emperors’ who ruled during the Pax Romana, an age of relative peace and stability.

Join him and his son as they head off to the Colosseum for an afternoon of ‘entertainment’ – watching gladiators fight to the death.

The boy can’t wait! But his father is less than enthusiastic…

• .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 any level
• Download your Free Sample Chapter (.pdf)

Remember, this week ‘L’imperatore e i giochi‘ is 50% discounted, so just £4.99 rather than the usual ‘easy reader’ ebook price of £9.99!

Buy ‘L’imperatore e i giochi‘ just £4.99! | Free Sample Chapter (.pdf) | History/historical Italian ebooks | Catalog

Find more ebooks, organised by level, then type: A1 | A1/A2 | A2 | A2/B1 | B1 | B1/B2 | B2 | B2/C1 | C1 | C1/C2 | C2

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Orphaned while still a baby, Caterina de’ Medici doesn’t have much going for her. Though there is one thing…

7 Agosto 1530. Corte Papale, Roma

“Avanti, avanti Caterina, camminate più veloce. E ricordate di inchinarvi davanti al Santo Padre! Il nostro Papa Clemente VII è un uomo meraviglioso, e ora avete un’udienza da sola con lui. Non siete emozionata? Siete fortunata ad avere… un santo in Paradiso! Proprio così, è un modo di dire molto appropriato.”

La vecchia suora, che ridacchia isterica, trascina Caterina per una mano e riprende: “Lo dico perché è un Medici come voi. E di certo è un uomo santo. Forza, forza, camminate. Non vogliamo fare aspettare Sua Santità” bisbiglia nervosa.

Caterina’s still only twelve years old, but her uncle, the Pope, is already busy reviewing possible husbands for her, with a view to strengthening ties between the Papacy and one or the other of Europe’s powerful royal families. Perhaps the time has come for her to learn French?

• .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 intermediate level or above
• Download your Free Sample Chapter (.pdf)

Remember, this week ‘Diventare regina. La storia di Caterina de’ Medici‘ is 50% discounted, so just £4.99 rather than the usual ‘easy reader’ ebook price of £9.99!

Buy ‘Diventare regina. La storia di Caterina de’ Medici‘ just £4.99! | Free Sample Chapter (.pdf) | History/historical Italian ebooks | Catalog

Find more ebooks, organised by level, then type: A1 | A1/A2 | A2 | A2/B1 | B1 | B1/B2 | B2 | B2/C1 | C1 | C1/C2 | C2

How do I access my ebook?

When your order is ‘completed’ (normally immediately after your payment), a download link will be automatically emailed to you. It’s valid for 7 days and 3 download attempts so please save a copy of the .pdf ebook in a safe place. Other versions of the ebook, where available, cannot be downloaded but will be emailed to people who request them. There’s a space to do that on the order form – where it says Additional information, Order notes (optional). If you forget, or if you have problems downloading the .pdf, don’t worry! Email us at the address on the website and we’ll help. Also, why not check out our FAQ?

P.S.

And here again is a reminder to read/listen to Tuesday’s bulletin of news from EasyItalianNews.com.

Reading/listening practice will help you consolidate the Italian you’re studying, expand your vocabulary, and build vital comprehension skills.

EasyItalianNews.com is FREE to read/listen to, though this week they’re running their bi-monthly appeal for donations. Don’t be surprised if this one and the next three (Thursday, Saturday and Tuesday) include not-so-subtle requests for your cash.

Subscribing, and so receiving all three text + audio bulletins of ‘easy’ news via email each week -on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays – is also FREE.

Just enter your email address on this page and click the confirmation link that will be sent to you.

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OnlineItalianClub.com | EasyItalianNews.com | Shop (ebooks) | Shop (online lessons)

No time to read this? Why not find something to study instead? A1 – Beginner/Elementary | A2 – Pre-Intermediate | B1 – Intermediate | B2 – Upper-Intermediate | C1 – Advanced | C2 – Proficiency | What’s my level? | Italian level test

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Buondì.

Before I get on to that, many thanks to the approximately fifty people who responded to last week’s article Who are you and what do you want?

If you’re curious about other club members – who they are and what they want – reading though the comments is fun (click here to see them).

It’s not too late to add your own comment, or to respond to what another club member has written. I gave instructions on how to do that in the article: Who are you and what do you want?

I read all the comments but this time responded to almost none (though I was tempted) because Stefi, Bug and I have been at the beach, keeping Italian nonno company while Swedish nonna is off visiting relatives.

Bug has learnt that sea water tastes salty and that sand isn’t good to eat. But he can’t yet keep his mouth closed when splashing in the shadows, or sandy fingers out of his mouth.

In moments not spent ‘relaxing’ I’ve been catching up on this week’s Economist, which our wonderful provincial library service allows me to download for free instead of having to pay $10 or whatever it now is.

There I read that major Internet sites are reporting significant drops in traffic, as people are now asking chat-bots for answers instead of using search engines and visiting websites. Wikipedia and Tripadvisor were mentioned as examples.

Suppose you want to know what the best restaurant is in the town you’re visiting or who the Italian street you’re staying in is named after, just ask your friendly A.I. assistant. You won’t be directed to Tripadvisor  or Wikipedia.

But I’m a fossil, and a Luddite fossil at that (find out who the Luddites were, in Italian, here), so resistant to new technologies which threaten to put me out of business.

Hence I have A.I. chatbots TURNED OFF whenever that’s possible, though Google Workspace (bastards) have started charging me more each month, whether I like it or not, because of the ‘extra value’ they are now offering.

How so, extra value?

As the Economist article pointed out, use a Google chatbot (probably included with your Gmail) and Google will ‘do the Googling for you’, that’s to say that you’ll be presented with an A.I. generated answer to your search query and so WON’T HAVE TO VISIT THE WEBSITE AND DECIDE FOR YOURSELF.

I tried A.I. a year or so ago with the query ‘How to learn Italian?‘ and remember getting reasonable and coherent, if not very original, advice. As I can’t now put my hands on what I may have written about that then, I’ve just repeated the experiment.

Try it for yourself, why don’t you? I’m using Google Chrome, so pasted How to learn Italian? into the search bar.

Instead of the first result being the wonderful Wikipedia, or the opinionated OnlineItalianClub.com, Chrome shows me what it calls an “AI Overview”, WITH NO LINKS TO THE SOURCE MATERIAL.

Effectively Chrome’s  A.I. bot has scraped the free material from the internet and summarised it for me.

I don’t suppose Google will mind if I reproduce the result here. All publicity is good publicity, as they say. The formatting was a mess in the original. I’ve unmessed it a little:

AI Overview

To learn Italian effectively, focus on a mix of structured learning and immersive experiences. Start with a solid foundation in grammar and vocabulary through a textbook or online course, then immerse yourself in the language by listening to Italian music, watching movies, and ideally, interacting with native speakers.

Here’s a more detailed breakdown:

1. Build a Strong Foundation:
Choose a learning method:
Consider using a textbook, online courses (like Duolingo or Babbel), or even a structured program like ItalianPod101.
Focus on grammar and vocabulary:
Learn basic grammar rules and essential vocabulary to build a solid base.
Read aloud and listen actively:
Imitate the Italian pronunciation and intonation while reading and listening to audio materials.
Take notes:
While some advise against excessive note-taking, summarizing content and creating flashcards can be helpful for retention.

2. Immerse Yourself:
Passive Immersion:
Expose yourself to the language through music, podcasts, and movies without actively trying to understand everything. This helps familiarize you with the rhythm and sounds of Italian.
Active Immersion:
Intentionally listen to content, analyze it, and try to understand the meaning. You can use transcripts, translate, and repeat what you hear.
Watch Italian movies and TV shows:
Start with subtitles and gradually reduce reliance on them as your comprehension improves.
Listen to Italian music and podcasts:
Find music and podcasts on topics that interest you to make the learning process more enjoyable.

3. Practice Speaking:
Find a language partner: Interact with native Italian speakers online or in person to practice speaking and improve your fluency.
Use language learning apps with speaking features: Many apps allow you to record yourself speaking and compare your pronunciation with native speakers.
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes: Embrace errors as a natural part of the learning process.

4. Make it Fun:
Find creative ways to learn: Journaling in Italian, inventing stories, taking cooking classes, or even singing along to Italian songs can make learning more engaging.
Set realistic goals and track your progress: Celebrate your achievements to stay motivated.
Make learning a daily habit: Even short, regular practice sessions can be more effective than infrequent, long ones.

5. Consider Studying in Italy:
Immerse yourself in the culture:
Living in Italy, even for a short period, can significantly accelerate your language acquisition.
Take language classes and stay with a local family:
This provides a structured learning environment and an opportunity to practice your Italian in real-life situations.
By combining structured learning with immersive experiences and a positive attitude, you can successfully learn Italian and enjoy the process.

AI responses may include mistakes.

Well, lots to digest there… My own article on the topic (not included in Chrome’s search results) is here:

How to learn Italian (or any language)

You may prefer the ‘AI Overview‘. That’s up to you. But I don’t.

I put thirty years’ worth of teaching and learning experience into mine. The A.I. bot just summarised some of the web’s most popular sites and is careful to point out that AI responses may include mistakes.

I also checked to see what Google Chrome’s A.I. bot would have to say in response to the query “What’s the best Italian school?” Our school in Bologna was included, which was nice, though that’s because Google famously modifies search results based on the user’s location.

I’m in Rimini right now, so the A.I. overview included a school in Rimini and two in nearby Bologna, ours and a competitor’s. No links to any of the websites, though (you’ll find our school’s site here.)

Try to eliminate the A.I. bot’s geographical bias by typing the rather stupid question “What’s the best Italian school in the world?” and you might notice that ‘school’ is interpreted in two different ways, as ‘language school’ (like ours in Bologna), but also as ‘college/university’.

Basically the bot wasn’t sure what I was asking, so hedged its bets.

Scuola Leonardo da Vinci (nice people, I know the owners) may have the biggest marketing budget out of all Italian language schools in Italy, so get the best rankings in search engines, but not even they claim to be the best Italian school in the world.

While the University of Bologna (“As the oldest university in the Western world, it consistently ranks among the top universities in Italy and the world“), besides not being an Italian language school at all, is by no means one of the best universities in the world.

Insomma, a nonsense answer to a silly question. But I persisted.

Typing “best site for learning Italian” predictably turned up Duolingo, funded by millions of dollars of investors’ capital, so very visible whether good or otherwise. OnlineItalianClub.com (funded by me working for free) was fourth in the bot’s list of suggestions. Still no links, though, so no new ‘members’.

Back to the Economist: their journalist’s point is that however useful the new technology may turn out to be (not very, in my opinion, at least not yet), there’s a problem looming.

A.I. is ‘trained’ using data, lots and lots of it. Think the whole of the freely-available Internet, for instance, including sites like OnlineItalianClub.com and Wikipedia, but not ‘walled gardens’ like Facebook.

Meta’s A.I. will be trained on its own content, from Facebook and other social networks. Whoever has access to lots of data can, theoretically, train an A.I. system on it, and so make money, or at least stop others stealing their users away.

There are already open-source algorithms that you could use to create your own A.I. bot, were you so inclined. But it would only be as good as your data set.

No massive data set? Oh dear… Assuming you’re not the owner of a search engine or a social media empire, you’d have to use the free internet, just like other poveracci. Or pay millions. Either way, your end result would be unlikely to stand out, as competitors could do the same thing.

But that’s not the problem the article focused on. What concerns the Economist writer, and presumably the owners of Tripadvisor, Wikipedia and other sites that have experienced a drop in web traffic since A.I. bots came into general use, is that if sites are offering free content in return for advertising or donations but are no longer getting free traffic from search engines (people clicking links), their business model is likely to suffer, and may soon become unsustainable.

Why would ‘content creators’ bother to build new, innovative sites, or expand their existing offer, if the A.I. bot just summarises their work and DOESN’T EVEN LINK TO THEIR WEBSITE?

Why indeed.

“Is artificial intelligence killing the web?”

Frankly, it seems quite possible that it is.

Does anyone care?

Probably only website owners who rely on seach-engine traffic.

Should people care?

Everyone who values original, expert, freely-available content probably should, yes.

Alla prossima settimana!

P.S.

Here’s the usual reminder to read/listen to Tuesday’s bulletin of news from EasyItalianNews.com.

Reading/listening practice will help you consolidate the Italian you’re studying, expand your vocabulary, and build vital comprehension skills.

EasyItalianNews.com is FREE to read/listen to, though this week they’re running their bi-monthly appeal for donations. Don’t be surprised if this one and the next three (Thursday, Saturday and Tuesday) include not-so-subtle requests for your cash.

Subscribing, and so receiving all three text + audio bulletins of ‘easy’ news via email each week -on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays – is also FREE.

Just enter your email address on this page and click the confirmation link that will be sent to you.

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OnlineItalianClub.com | EasyItalianNews.com | Shop (ebooks) | Shop (online lessons)