Yesterday afternoon I spent a few hours updating our Italian Lessons Series with the hundred or so exercises we’ve reformatted over the summer (it brought back some happy memories of places and people seen in July and August.)
There are still some gaps in our grammar coverage, but for now I’ve had more than enough of conditionals, the subjunctive and so on.
And indeed, to speak and understand a foreign language, you need more than grammar, right?
Sure do, boss.
So today we begin the process of sorting out and updating the club’s ‘vocabulary’ section.
I have a long, long list of exercises to check out.
Some we’ll do by level, some by topic area…
But today, for want of better ideas on how to start, I’ve picked four word order exercises on Italian proverbs that I remember making myself a few years back.
The four exercises cover well-know Italian sayings, the sort of thing you’ll often hear in speech or see in a text: ‘The dress makes the monk’ and that sort of thing.
Fun to study, and all round useful to know!
All you have to do is to click each word or short phrase IN THE CORRECT ORDER.
The bad news is that there’s no ‘solutions’ button to cheat with.
So if you want to learn the proverbs you’ll have to keep clicking until you figure them out.
As you do, write them down somewhere and revise them in a day or two.
Italian Proverbs – Word Order Exercise (1)
Italian Proverbs – Word Order Exercise (2)
Italian Proverbs – Word Order Exercise (3)
Italian Proverbs – Word Order Exercise (4)
If anyone gets horribly stuck, you can always email me for a clue…
New Italian Easy Reader Published Today!
Our new easy Italian reader is level B2 (upper-intermediate.)
It’s about the composer, Vivaldi, of ‘four seasons‘ fame.
It’s set, picturesquely, in Venice in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
This is the second in our ‘Day in the life of’ series.
Previously we published Un giorno con Raffaello (remember?) and there’s a really good one on Galileo in the pipeline…
But back to ‘Vivaldi e la chiesa della Salute‘ for the moment.
Start by taking a look at the FREE SAMPLE CHAPTER (.pdf).
The free sample chapter has a link to the audio recording for the entire story, which is also free.
Listen to the story online as often as you wish, with our blessing.
But if you’d like the full text, a .pdf ebook that you should be able to read on any computer, tablet or smartphone, you can get it this week only at 25% off.
This is where it gets a bit complicated, as we now have TWO online shops, the club one, and the new e-books shop.
The OnlineItalianClub.com shop prices in EUROS and allows payment only via Paypal or credit card.
Vivaldi e la chiesa della Salute costs €7.49 this week.
At EasyReaders.org we price in British pounds, and there are additional payment methods available.
We recommend Paypal or ‘Pay with Amazon’, but direct bank transfer is also an option if you have a UK bank account.
Vivaldi e la chiesa della Salute costs £5.99 this week.
If the level of ‘Vivaldi’ is too high for you, or in general for ebook shopping, I’d recommend the new site, EasyReaders.org as the design is better.
OK, I think that’s everything.
A mercoledì, allora.