4th Italian listening exercise (& let’s try out the forum!)

Ciao a tutti!

Here’s the latest in our elementary Italian listenings series:

4th A1 Italian listening comprehension exercise

And as usual, I’ll remind you where to go to get more practice:

Other exercises at the same level | Material for learning Italian at all levels

So, that’s you sorted with stuff to study, at least until Wednesday and the next listening exercise…

But what about the ‘club’ part of OnlineItalianClub.com?

Well, you will recall that recently I promised to get the forums going again.

We used to have forums, way, way back at the beginning of time (in 2012).

But in the end they had to go, because they attracted thousands of automated spam user registrations, which I spent half my time deleting…

Nobody much used the forums then, anyway, so it wasn’t a great loss.

Later we tried with a ‘bar’, where people could pretend to drink espresso, while ‘chatting’ with other learners of Italian from around the world.

That solution was imperfect, but popular.

Everything seemed to be working well, until the ‘bar’ page, which wasn’t really intended to be used in that way, was hit by a warning from Google about potential malware (that’s something bad…)

As we couldn’t find the problem, we deleted the page and all the interactions, just to be on the safe side.

But, it seems some of you missed the chance to interact with other members. Or at least to ‘lurk’ (read what other people were writing.)

So, I’ve been promising to try and find a solution that will let us interact properly.

With me so far?

Good.

Now say ‘ciao’ to the new ‘forum plugin’. That’s a bit of technology that adds a forum functionality to the site.

Doubtless it’ll prove imperfect and vulnerable to spam, but in the absence of better ideas, we’ll give it a try.

Think of it as an experiment: we’ll play around with it for a few days, or weeks, or months, and just see how it goes.

If the response is good, and the problems caused by the technology and the spammers are manageable, we’ll invest in making it look nice, so turning it into a permanent feature of the site.

If not, well, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

So, volunteers are wanted to populate our empty new forums.

You’ll find there’s one for ‘speaking’ in Italian, and one for conversations in English.

Your choice.

Go here to get started

If (when) you encounter technical issues, design problems, or other frustrations, let me know using the email at the bottom of each page on our site.

Your feedback will be essential!

Click here to check out the forum