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 […]
How to not find what you need
Buondì. The January Sale is O.V.E.R., the coupon code is no longer valid, and I’m back to doing something other than customer service, thank goodness. Oh the tales I could tell… One thing that came up recently, during an email exchange with a club member, was how some people, it seems, don’t look at the […]
2021 January Sale: it’s not what you spend, it’s what you do
Buondì. It’s the final day of the 2021 January Sale (details here) over at our online shop, EasyReaders.org. Use the coupon code below to save 20% on the online Italian lessons and/or ebooks you’ll need to improve your Italian in the coming year: January-Sale-2021 And here are some links to click: Catalog | Italian | […]
The usual end-of-sale ‘ebook best-sellers’ article
Buondì. The January Sale is nearly done (as always, it’s been a lot of work!) so I thought you might be interested in hearing what other club members have been spending their ‘learn Italian’ budgets on. Hence the usual, end-of-sale ‘ebook best-sellers’ article. E poi, it’s the first Monday morning in January. Who has ideas […]
Archive: The dos and don’ts of taking online Italian lessons
Buondì. From our archive, and a reminder about the 2021 January Sale, which ends on Tuesday night. The dos and don’ts of taking online Italian lessons Written from personal experience, as I use this method to learn languages (I’m also an online teacher, so see things from both perspectives…) Don’t put off starting. OK, this […]