Archives for May 2020

Buondì. A quickie today, as I promised my wife I’d be ready for coffee with her in an hour, and I’ve spent the past 55 minutes doing my weekly Turkish conversation lesson. Yesterday I started on next week’s new Mini-Book Club choice (see our Literature page if you have no idea what I’m talking about), […]

Buondì. In reply to Monday’s article About self-teaching, this from Anne in Chicago: Well, I couldn’t work my way all the way through this email, but it seems to me that the best way to learn a foreign language is to go live somewhere they speak it. Yes, well, those of us who are, or […]

Buondì. “Don’t do it like that, do it like this!” you might have heard from a teacher. Or perhaps, “THIS is how you should be organising your notes / reading / pronouncing that word.” Assuming your teacher was/is competent (I normally don’t), and that you choose to follow their advice, then you should be, more […]

Buondì. I’m utterly fed up with arguing with club members about why they should ‘just read’ and not use a dictionary while doing so. And yes, I know there are lots of times when, actually, you SHOULD use a dictionary – for example, when you are ‘studying’ rather than ‘just reading’, or if you’re being […]

Buondì. One of the perils of being a teacher is assuming that what’s obvious to me is obvious to everyone else too. After all, I’ve taught this and written about it so many times, how could you all not already know it? And yet I’m constantly reminded that people DON’T KNOW. For example, with the […]

Buondì. Coming on Monday we have the next ‘easy’ Italian reader ebook in our ‘Literature’ series, Luigi Pirandello’s rather odd ‘Uno, nessuno e centomila‘, about a young man who gets himself into rather a lather about the way others perceive him. If you’ve finished Pinocchio (I haven’t, yet), or never started it, or started it […]

Buondì. “To translate or not to translate, that is the question.” Or rather, that is A question. But really, not one you should be asking yourself. For the answer is, or should be, obvious. Don’t translate. A caveat to that: if you’re training to be a translator, or someone is paying you to translate something, […]

Buondì. It rained overnight in Bologna, so was cloudy and cooler this morning when I woke. I hadn’t slept at all well, due to corona virus-related worrying, possibly aggravated by a rather-too-rich homemade pizza (con salame piccante e molto gorgonzola!) and a bottle of strong Spanish red (Lidl has an ‘all things Spanish’ offer on, […]

Buondì. An email came in from Shelley, who, when I suggested her issues would be of general interest, agreed that I could use her name and quote her: I was wondering if you have any [ways of measuring progress] for the spoken word instead of the written one? I came to Italy with my better […]