Buondì. Someone wrote to me overnight to compliment me on my podcast about learning Italian ‘fast’, which was clearly an error as I don’t do podcasts, and besides, apart from the word ‘easy’, which we use to describe material which has been intentionally created for learners (‘easy readers’, ‘easy Italian news’), I prefer to avoid […]
Archives for January 2021
Trumpistas and Trolls
Buondì. I’m assuming you’ll be aware that the company that publishes OnlineItalianClub.com (so what you’re reading now) is also the company behind EasyItalianNews.com. I mention it in almost every article. There’s also the obvious connection that both websites are for people learning Italian. We have an online shop, too, mostly full of ebooks for people, […]
New Italian ‘easy reader’ ebook: Decameron (B1/2)
Buondì. Today we publish a new ‘easy Italian reader’ ebook, part of our growing Literature Series, which you may remember us launching last spring, often together with a ‘book club’. This time it’s Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron‘, the level is intermediate/upper-intermediate, and for the first seven days our simplified, shortened ‘easy reader’ version will set you back […]
About learning
Buondì. Over dinner yesterday evening, my son (you know, the one who reads the EasyItalianNews.com broadcasts) was telling us that today he has a test at school, but expects to do badly. It’s some sort of online multiple-choice test, apparently, at which you only get a few seconds to answer each question, and (this part […]
A good day: I lost all seven games of chess
Buondì. As if I didn’t have enough to do in 2021, what with learning Spanish, improving my French, and maintaining Swedish and Turkish, recently I’ve taken up chess. I blame my eldest daughter, who’s locked down at university and, scrabbling around for ways to fill the time, downloaded the most popular chess app to her […]
The difficult made easier, but still worthwhile for all that
Buondì. Over at our sister website, EasyItalianNews.com, we regularly get people commenting that the simplified news bulletins would be even more simple if it were possible to stop the audio after each mini-news story, ‘rewind’ and listen to that segment again, and again, until each has been fully understood. Which is true, but is entirely […]
Change (Makes You Want to Hustle)
Buondì. Change can be alarming. For example, at the end of the Christmas/New Year ‘vacation’ period, when I find myself struggling to adapt from working at home to still working at home but now also having to teach online as well. Suddenly things that I’ve committed to begin to drop by the wayside (I haven’t […]
Two options
Buondì. Angela wrote in with a tip for club members. Recently, while watching an opera sung in Italian with English subtitles, I discovered that I knew some of the Italian words intuitively. This confirmed precisely what you always recommend: listen to Italian, your mind will become accustomed to it, and you will slowly grow in […]
Comments on comments
Buondì. One of my first jobs each morning is to approve comments on our various websites. That doesn’t take long, because we get so few. What we do get, though, is a mass of automated spam comments. Automated spam comments? You probably have no idea what I’m talking about, right? The basic idea is that […]
Eat your spinach! (And make better New Year resolutions.)
Buondì. I’m terribly rushed this morning, as it’s the first ‘normal’ Friday of 2021, which means I have an hour of Turkish conversation, followed by thirty minutes of actual (online) teaching, and later in the afternoon, my weekly Spanish conversation class. Plus I have to write this, cook the lunch, hit the supermarket to stock […]