Buondì. Pardon the provocative title, but I’m writing this yesterday, when I woke (don’t you love that word?) at 4 a.m., to take my daughter to the airport, for her flight back to London, England. Lack of sleep makes me tetchy. Why am I writing this yesterday? Because today, when you read it, we’ll be […]
New ‘easy reader’ ebook, Madama Butterfly, £5.99 this week!
Buondì. Hope you had a nice weekend. Ours was quiet, despite my three adult kids being here, and the in-laws coming for Sunday lunch. Since you ask, I cooked tagliatelle ragù as the primo, cotolette for the secondo, and friggione as the contorno. With an antipasto of hummus on rye bread, and a vegan-alternative primo, […]
The low-hanging fruit, at least
Buondì. I’m super late today, sorry! But I have a good excuse, as we were off releasing Roomie into the wild. We opened the cage door, out she confidently bounded, and with a few powerful leaps she was gone, disappearing into the treeline. Which means my old life is over, finished, done! No more hours […]
What bothers you?
Buondì. The other day I was standing outside my house, rubbing my eyes to counter the effect of too much computer, when one of my neighbours walked by, with her three dogs. The two on leashes came up to me for coccole, the third peered balefully out of his doggy passeggino (stroller, pushchair), to which […]
Sprung, ‘Cancel culture’, and 3 Half-Price eBooks from 2021!
Buondì. Most of the trees Roomie and I passed on our weekend walks still looked like skeletons. The grass in the park was a patchwork of faded green and winter-seared brown. With cigarette butts. But the cherry trees outside my house are now a riot of light pink. Spring has finally sprung! Italian seems to have […]
Oh, and here’s an idea…
Buondì. Following on from Wednesday’s article about practising speaking Italian ( Better ideas than speaking Italian to waiting staff… ), it occurred to me that I’d forgotten to mention the obvious thing. My younger daughter, a medical student in Florence, has recently been accepted to do an Erasmus placement in Spain for some or all […]
Better ideas than speaking Italian to waiting staff…
Buondì. A club member wrote to me this week about his plan to spend a month in a small Italian town to improve his Italian – by chatting to waiting staff, and so on. He was worried that they might insist on speaking English to him, which is likely any place ‘touristic’. Or just not […]
New ‘easy reader’ ebook (Joe who?) and 4 half-price offers!
Buondì. Our latest ‘historical’ easy reader ebook is about Joe Petrosino. Joe who? He’s a really famous Italian-American, apparently, or was. Did you see the film ‘The Untouchables’, ‘Gli intoccabili’ in Italian, starring Sean Connery and Kevin Costner? Well it’s that sort of thing, but set several decades earlier, at the end of the nineteenth […]
Look back, not forward, to judge the progress you’ve made
Buondì. When I was an English teacher, struggling to unteach Italian adults all the nonsense they’d memorised in their school days about their foreign language, and how to learn it, one thing I used to hear a lot from advanced students (there weren’t that many) was that their objective now that they were adults was […]
One simple way to improve your listening comprehension
Buondì. As regular readers will know, each weekday morning I drive Roomie across town and hand her over to professional wranglers for the day, then drive back home alone, listening to the news highlights in Swedish as I go. Why am I learning Swedish? Years back I suggested to club members in an article like […]
