Benvenuti e a proposito

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Buondì.

Benvenuti, multiple hundreds of new club members, for whom these will by my first words.

And ciao to the other twenty thousand or so, who may or may not choose to read this.

Bene, so regular readers will know that I’m a long-time (three decades plus) teacher of English as a foreign language, that I live and work in Italy (previously in Turkey and Poland), that I’m married to an Italian (before her, to a Turk), that I have three English/Italian bilingual children who are now adults, and what else?

Oh yes, that I write about learning foreign languages. That’s mostly because of my career and current business interests, but also because I’ve had to do plenty of that myself. I suppose I could have written a cooking blog instead…

My own language learning hasn’t always been very successful. And, people being people, I’m not so sure about the teaching either…

So this is NOT your typical ‘polyglot’ online content:

“I speak 99 languages fluently, all learnt from Duolingo, as I have no girlfriend, children, or job, and nothing better to do.”

A quick summary:

I tried, but completely failed to learn (in approximate chronological order) Russian (in the ‘eighties), Hindi (early ‘nineties), Polish (mid ‘nineties), and Japanese (late ‘nineties).

Now I know where I was going wrong. Then, I mostly didn’t.

But out of necessity (the wives, working abroad) and by way of hanging around in bars, I made reasonable progress with Turkish and Italian.

I now run an Italian language school, which involves doing lots of boring stuff in Italian. The club was originally a marketing project for the school, though it’s grown into an impresa of its own.

I studied French at school, half a century back.

And before the pandemic I started learning Spanish, but my trip to Spain was cancelled, as all our trips were, so I quit.

So I’m not the typical polyglot, right?

Why then should you read anything I write? Apart from the thirty-plus years of classroom and individual teaching, obviously.

Seven or eight years ago, I was asking myself that very same question!

In what way am I qualified to write about language learning, in the ‘teach yourself’ sense, so from the point of view of a club member who might live somewhere in the USA, Australia or wherever, a long way from Italy?

It didn’t seem that it would be helpful to write about my own experiences learning Italian, given that the effort I put in was sporadic, unstructured, and spread over a quarter of a century.

Plus, most club members don’t live in Italy, or even visit regularly, either.

At a certain point, I proposed – in an article like this one – that I would ‘teach myself’ a language of club members’ choosing (some voted, most didn’t bother), which turned out to be Swedish, my mother-in-law’s native tongue! Voters were joking with me, I assume.

I admit, I had zero enthusiasm for either Sweden or its language, but was up for the challenge of learning a random language and writing about it. Without spending money, and without living in the country. Also, it would provide topics for my articles. And we had ebooks to promote.

So I began to teach myself Swedish!

And all these years later, I still do some most days, which is a good result in itself!

I can understand part of what I hear on Swedish radio.

I can chat online each week with a Swedish club member, who gets Italian lessons from NativeSpeakerTeachers.com in return.

And when, occasionally, I get to interact with my wife’s Swedish relatives, they are duly impressed.

Except her mom, obviously, who claims not to understand a word I say to her.

Insomma, despite a record of language-learning disasters, I have one moderate success to boast of.

More importantly, I ‘taught myself’, in ways that any club member could easily replicate.

More important still, I learnt a lot about the language-learning process, from the other side so to speak.

And the most important thing I learnt was this:

LEARNING A LANGUAGE REQUIRES LONG- TERM ENGAGEMENT WITH IT

Which was where I went wrong all the other times.

My first marriage (to the Turk) lasted just a few years. I got pretty fluent in that time, especially arguing and cursing, but when I met wife no.2 I was unable to keep it up and, anyway, had to begin learning Italian instead.

Do Duolingo Italian, or any Duolingo language course, or all their languages (I’ve done Turkish, French, Swedish and some Spanish), and you’ll probably learn something, perhaps a lot.

You might keep your ‘streak’ going for months, even years.

But what you totally won’t get from them is how to manage your own learning: their app makes the decisions for you.

In particular, you won’t learn how to manage your own learning over the medium to long-term, which is crucial.

If you want to learn enough Italian to understand and chat during your holiday, you’ll need at least some speaking and listening practice – and ideally quiet a lot – over months, or a few years.

To reach a level in which you could work in Italy, or run a business here as I do, takes a lot longer.

You have to have good reading skills (contracts, bank documents, etc.) and need to be able to write, too. Not perfectly, but at least quickly and in an appropriate register.

That’ll likely take years.

As will other more day-to-day things, like picking up an Italian newspaper and being able to browse it without too many limitations.

Or going to an Italian movie without being the only person in the sala who has no idea what’s going on.

OnlineItalianClub.com has been going since about 2012, and some of our original members/readers are still with us, sprinkled amongst thousands of newbies.

If they’re still learning Italian, they’re probably pretty good by now.

But likely they aren’t actively studying, doing courses, downloading apps, taking lessons and so on.

What tends to happen instead is that – just like me with my semi-successful languages (French, Turkish, Italian, Swedish) –  learners don’t keep up daily engagement with a language, but retain some abilities in it, and ideally come back to it now and again.

That’s not ideal, and leads to feeling that you’re ‘losing’ what you learnt (personally, I don’t believe that’s possible) and that, when it comes to speaking, you’re ‘blocked’ (which totally is, but it goes away quickly.)

What is ideal is if learners keep up at least some regular content with a language, and maintain that over time, perhaps for their whole lives.

That’s how we learn our mother tongue, after all, and how bilingual people (my wife and kids) become and remain bilingual.

It’s also how it’s possible to move to a country, start learning the new language, and eventually become functional in it, if far from perfect:

LONG-TERM ENGAGEMENT

The club website has lots of free materials for studying/learning Italian. If you haven’t already, explore them here.

In contrast, these emailed articles are mostly about keeping people interested over time.

Our club members from 2012, for instance, who may have quit actually studying a decade ago, might still read in Italian, listen to it, and perhaps speak it online or when travelling.

My job is to encourage that, for instance by drawing your attention to free or paid resources which would help you.

And to advise, based on my own professional (teaching) and personal (learning) experiences.

If you’re new around here, see today’s P.S. for an example.

It’s promoting a different website, one that I put together as a result of using something similar when I was first learning Swedish, and recognising how useful it was.

Così. If you want to just study Italian, use the materials on our website (or Duolingo, or whatever).

But if you need a little moral support, helpful hints, and engaging anecdotes, don’t miss the Wednesday articles.

Can’t wait until next Wednesday?

We have a ‘Best of’ page.

Alla prossima settimana!

P.S. A proposito…

A proposito, did you read/listen to Tuesday’s FREE bulletin of ‘easy’ Italian news?

No registration, passwords, etc. are required to do that.

You can read/listen directly on their website, completely anonymously, then click away if not interested.

The thrice-weekly text + audio bulletins are a fantastic, FREE way to consolidate the grammar and vocabulary you’ve studied, or might one day get around to studying, as well as being fun and motivating!

But to save yourself the trouble of going back to the website three times a week, why not get the FREE text + audio bulletins of ‘easy’ news emailed to you?

They’re sent out, for FREE, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, to subscribers.

Subscribing is FREE, too.

To get the three weekly bulletins by email, just enter your email address on this page and click the confirmation link that will be sent to you.

If you don’t see the ‘please confirm’ email, check the spam/junk folder.

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