Buondì. The 2021 Spring Sale (20% off everything – online lessons and ebooks) starts on Monday! I’ll be promoting the heck out of it all next week. Why? Because we have teachers who need work, ebook writers to invest in, but above all, a legion of regular online students who take lessons with us and […]

Buondì. A handy way of categorizing language-learning activities is to separate things into one of two broad boxes, so ‘input’ (grammar explanations, new vocabulary, help with pronunciation, learning advice) and ‘practice’ (everything else, so class or study activities that focus on one or all of listening, reading, writing and speaking, that is to say development […]

Buondì. I’m back in Italy. Actually, I never left. Due to the virus, it’s been more than eighteen months since my last trip. But, despite writing these articles about learning Italian (and stuff), I mostly live in a more multi-national, multi-lingual space. I listen to the news highlights each day on Radio Sverige, for example, […]

Buondì. Progress with this week’s Reading Challenge? For me, that was to read a chapter a day of both the French and Spanish versions of our eBook of the Week (see the P.S. below for details.) Well… I ‘crashed and burned’, as they say in the classic fighter-pilot-training-school movie, ‘Top Gun’, to describe a humiliating […]

Buondì. As I mentioned on Monday, we have a half-price ‘eBook of the Week’ offer going on, and this time it’s the same story, originally written in Italian, then localised into three other languages. And my Reading Challenge (which I invited anyone interested to join me in) was to read a chapter a day, for […]

Buondì. ‘Self-serving’ was the term that came to mind while I was pondering doing this. Or ‘totally self-serving’, though I dismissed that one. It’s not. So anyway, today we have one of our occasional ‘half-price ebook of the week’ offers. This in part because I have a new marketing assistant, whose task it is to […]

Buondì. Some instructions for language-learning (and for life). This is the short version, as I’m pushed for time. In no particular order: if you don’t start, you won’t progress it takes a long time to learn a language, and for perhaps a quarter of it, you won’t be able to express yourself, or understand what […]

Buondì. Since Monday, we’ve been busy promoting our FREE beginner-level ebooks, for learners of Italian, French, Spanish and German. In around 48 hours, we’ve had 633 downloads, mostly for Italian (we have a much bigger mailing list for Italian) but with reasonable interest in the other languages, too. Below are the titles, which are also […]

Buondì. My standard ‘father-response’ to the oft-heard complaint from children/teenagers that they just “don’t have time” to do whatever is expected of them – homework, clean their rooms, participate in some fun, family event – was the rather unsympathetic instruction to: “FIND TIME!” This being based on the understanding that “don’t have time” doesn’t actually […]

Buondì. Before beginning this article, I replied to an email from a former student of mine from ten or more years ago – an Italian girl, who needed to pass an exam so she could study at an American college. She’s no longer a girl, has been back in Italy for years, and is now […]