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Buondì.
On the OnlineItalianClub.com website there’s a menu item you may not have noticed: “BEST OF”.
From one point of view, the page it takes you to is just a list of old articles. From another, it’s a good chunk of my life, a walk down memory lane!
The logic was, and is, that when I write something for the site, like the very words I’m typing now, it gets picked up by our mailing system and sent out to club members, some of whom will read it.
The technology, which might be familiar to older club members, is that of a ‘blog’, a contraction of ‘weB LOG’, apparently. A blog is a website, but one that was intended as a sort of ‘journal’, to be regularly updated with new content.
Blogs still exist (this is one) but for a while at least they were the in thing! Then social media came along, offering a much more immediate, interactive and personalised experience.
Why didn’t I switch to Facebook and co years back? Because it soon because obvious that writing content for social media might attract ‘followers’ and so make money, but the cash would be going into someone else’s deep pockets. Whereas the club is mine, or ours, if you like.
Moreover, much of the club website is composed of ‘pages’ (hundreds of them), which are ‘static’, so unchanging. You find them by clicking on an icon or menu item, then the content they contain is displayed for you.
It’s possible to do stuff like that on social media, but not so easy. And we wouldn’t get to control what is andì isn’t possible, not in the same way. The tech titans can change their minds about what’s allowed and what isn’t at any moment.
Actually, articles like this one are much more similar to typical social media content, in terms of format if not necessarily content. They’re not ‘pages’ but ‘posts’, call them ‘journal entries’ if you wish, each one being more recent than the previous one.
Today’s ‘post’, which you’re probably reading in an email, is easy to find on the club’s home page, which is good.
But last week’s can only be found at https://onlineitalianclub.com/blog/ (RECENT ARTICLES in the website menu), which is simply a chronological display of titles and excerpts.
Take a look there and you’ll see ten articles, with this one at the top, and the oldest recent post, from September 2024, at the bottom. Were you so inclined you could then click on the ‘Next Page’ link to see what I’d written about in August and the latter part of July.
The problem is there might be a hundred and ninety such ‘next pages’ so, should I ever write anything wise and witty in an ‘article’, it would be rapidly flushed away, disappearing from sight within days or weeks.
Hence the ‘BEST OF’ page, which is updated every couple of years with links to articles that I’m unwilling to let disappear.
I started the club in 2012, but wrote little.
In 2013 and 2014 I was learning my trade, so there were more articles, though they probably weren’t that good.
Something weird must have happened in 2015 and 2016. I suppose I must have been super-busy teaching, or something, as very few articles were written. Or perhaps there were plenty, but I didn’t deem them worthy of being remembered.
From 2017 to 2019, I was on a roll and even wrote about our holidays, in Texas, Sweden and Istanbul.
2020 was the first lockdown, so I had plenty of time.
Ditto with 2021, when working online saved our bacon.
In 2022, things went back to some sort of normal, so the ‘Best of’ page was left hanging at December 2021, not to be looked at again until… this week!
I’ve finally made the time to read the hundred and fifty or so articles from 2022, and add links to the ones that might be of interest.
Long-time club members will remember Roomie, Bug’s predecessor. Well, she arrived in the spring of 2022, and inspired various observations about very small language learners.
May’s ‘Hai la pipì? / Vuoi un gelato?‘ got good feedback, I remember.
2023 is yet to do, but I hope to get to it soon, and definitely before 2024 becomes 2025, so leaving me even further behind…
Così. If you’ve got time for a lot of (free) reading, or just like to browse, here’s the link: “BEST OF”
If not, then scroll on down to today’s commercial break. I’m promoting free ebooks and – coming next week – the November FREE TRIAL LESSON OFFER (for ‘new’ students only).
I’ll be emailing details of the’Free online lesson’ promotion early next week, so look out for that.
Alla prossima settimana!
Need some help with your Spanish, French, German, or Italian?
EasyReaders.org has long stocked ebooks for learning French, Spanish, and German, as well as their main interest, which is Italian.
There are literally hundreds of titles in total, including some which are completely free to download. Find them all on the Catalog page, first Italian, and scrolling right down past those, also French, Spanish and German.
ALL ebook titles have free sample chapters, so you can download texts at different levels, and of different types, to see which would be most useful.
Links to the free sample chapters can be found on the Catalog page (remember to scroll down to find the French, Spanish and German titles).
There are also a sprinkling of other ebook titles in Portuguese, Turkish and Swedish. There are free downloads for those languages, too! Do take a look!
So, plenty there for you to read and listen to. But what about SPEAKING?
NativeSpeakerTeachers.com, specialises in just one thing: organising one-to-one online lessons with teachers of the languages you’re learning, which can be conversational or more traditional in nature.
They don’t advertise to attract new students, but twice a year (in November and February) organise a free trial lesson promotion, when students can try the one-to-one lesson experience absolutely free.
That’ll be happening next week!
A French/German/Spanish/Italian lesson currently priced at £22 for the thirty-minutes with a native speaker teacher, will be offered – for new students only – at £0.00.
There’s no obligation to buy more and they won’t be asking for your payment card details, or anything like that. It’s a genuinely-free offer. Try one, to see if you like it, to see if it would help.
That promotion is next week. I’ll be writing then to tell you how to take advantage of it. They’re planning to give away around 150 free lessons in total, first come first served, so watch out for the emails on Monday and Tuesday!
N.b. ‘Free trial’ students, besides being gifted a thirty-minute one-to-one with a native speaker teacher, will also be offered a coupon code for a 15% discount on lessons, should they decide to actually buy some after the free trial.
Which makes the prices on the website seem even more reasonable!
Better still, NativeSpeakerTeachers.com also runs four seasonal ‘Save 20%’ promotions, at New Year, in the spring, during the first week of July, and at the end of September. So regular students need never pay the full price.
Get full details about the Free Trial Lesson promo at the start of next week. In the meantime, why not go download some free ebooks, or free sample chapters for the ones that aren’t currently free?
French | Spanish | German | Italian
P.S. Learning Italian? Even more FREE stuff!
Students learning Italian should also take ten minutes to read/listen to the latest FREE bulletin of ‘easy’ Italian news.
These regular text + audio bulletins are a fantastic, FREE way to consolidate the grammar and vocabulary you’ve studied, as well as being fun and motivating!
To get all three text + audio bulletins of ‘easy’ news emailed to you each week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, subscribe (they really are FREE) by entering your email address on this page and clicking the confirmation link that will be sent to you.
Or take a look at their website and get started on improving your Italian immediately!
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