Archives for May 2018

Buondì. First today, I have a favour to ask of anyone doing online Italian lessons, either with the club or with a competitor. Actually, it’s Martina who’s asking the favour. I just agreed to pass it on to you. This is what she wrote: Mi chiamo Martina Burlando e sono una studentessa universitaria di lingue […]

Buondì. When is a ‘porta’ a door, and when is it a gate? (And does it matter?) Bologna, where I live, used to be surrounded by a defensive wall, much of which has now been demolished. In olden times you’d only have been able to enter the city through one of the many fortified ‘gates’ […]

No, that’s not a mistake. I’m aware it’s the end of May, not December. But I’ve just published another free Italian ‘conversation lesson’, and hey, why NOT talk about Natale e Capodanno in the summer?? After all, conversation practice is conversation practice, right? And if you want to speak better, chuck that grammar book in […]

Today’s new, free material for students of Italian is yet another set of conversation prompts. The theme is ‘Sei bravo a… ?‘ (‘Are you good at…?’) Be aware that, at least for school subjects, Italians use the preposition ‘in’ not ‘at’. So: “Sono bravo in matematica!” (I’m good at maths = I’m good IN the […]

Buondì. Today I have a new, free Italian conversation lesson for you. The topic is Viaggiare (Travel) and as usual you’ll find conversation prompts at elementary, intermediate and advanced levels. The idea is that the prompts form the basis for conversation practice, perhaps in a group with friends from your Italian class, or one-to-one with […]

The first time I visited Italy with my Italian girlfriend (now long-suffering wife), we had Christmas lunch with her extended family. The group of strangers around the table included her grandmother, who sadly died not that long after, before I’d had much chance to learn Italian and so get to know her better. What I […]

Buondì. A short article today as, while I have loads of things I could write about, time is pressing. Hence, here’s the last in our ‘verbs’ series of free Italian lessons with audio: Vedere There are some good expressions in this one, though for some reason Marika hasn’t included one of the most obvious ones, […]

Buondì. Friday’s article had a video in it (a song that Anne sent in). But if you read it in an email, it’s likely the video had been ‘disappeared’ by your email provider. You may not even have noticed, but Anne was disappointed so I said I’d mention it today. Here are some options: View […]

The phrase in the title, ‘varie ed eventuali’, can usually be found at the end of an agenda for a meeting. The English equivalent would be ‘any other business’, or perhaps ‘miscellaneous’. ‘Agenda’, by the way, would be ‘ordine del giorno’ in Italian, that is to say the document containing details of the day/time of […]

Buondì. E’ come parlare al muro! It’s like talking to a brick wall! Yesterday I was doing one-to-one English lessons with some key staff at a local company. I’ve been going there each Tuesday for over two years and some of the students I work with have done forty or fifty lessons with me. One […]