Buondì. Every February and November we run a ‘FREE Trial Italian lesson’ offer, which means giving away an online lesson with one of our experienced Italian native-speaker teachers, normal price £20, to up to a hundred and fifty lucky people around the world, no strings attached. Many of our several hundred regular online students started […]
Archives for October 2020
The complexities of life will defeat you, if you let them
Buondì. My aged Italian in-laws recently changed their laptop computer. My wonderful father-in-law likes to have new stuff – smartphones, wide-screen TVs, and so on – and conserves a part of his pension each month so as to be able to afford the occasional larger purchase. The old computer was looking rather battered, I admit. […]
Ebook Basics (and a new half-price ‘eBook of the Week’)
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 […]
“I know you’ll have an opinion about flashcards”
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; […]
So much nonsense written about language-learning
Buondì. Thanks to club-member Zsuzsanna, who sent me a link to this reasonably interesting article about language-learning. The article is a comment piece about a ‘scientific’ paper, published in the journal ‘Cognition’, the abstract for which you can find here. I haven’t read the full journal article, because to do so would require payment and […]
Was this ‘the most ‘beautiful’ film ever shown at a festival’?
Buondì. Thanks to club member Paul, who sent a link to an online Italian film festival beginning later this week. It’s free, apparently. You can find details of their program here, and full details of how to participate on their homepage, the gist of it being that they’ll post access details for each film (Italian […]
Setting goals that AREN’T about studying Italian grammar…
Buondì. Thanks to the various club members who emailed me with their reactions to Wednesday’s article Different expectations when ‘coding’ and ‘decoding’ Italian, and in particular to Andrew who left a ‘comment’ (meaning that other people can read his ideas/questions). I’ll reproduce a section of what Andrew wrote here, for those of you who get […]
Different expectations when ‘coding’ and ‘decoding’ Italian
Buondì. This from an explanation given to my class of Italian adults learning English, yesterday evening, after they had spent years, probably decades, failing to understand English tense forms. 1.) OK, so you guys don’t know English perfectly, right? (They agree.) Which means that a lot of the time you’re uncertain about how to express […]
How do children learn a (foreign) language?
Buondì. The Autumn Sale has concluded. If you’re still trying with the coupon code, hoping to get a 20% discount on online lessons or ebooks, then you’re too late, sorry. I closed down the promotion a few hours ago. So, on to the next thing. This afternoon I’ll be catapulted back in time thirty years […]
Just a few hours left of the 2020 Autumn Sale
There are just a few hours left of the 2020 Autumn Sale. Until the January Sale (which begins at the end of December) there will be no further chances to save 20% on the full range of ebooks and online lessons in the club’s online shop. Though we will have some new ebooks to look […]
