Buondì. One thing that would almost certainly help you a lot with your Italian is to spend more time measuring your progress. Many learners do this woefully badly. They measure their progress according to how many chapters they’ve completed of the book they’re studying from, for example. Or according to the name of the course they’re […]

Buondì. Who makes the decisions about how you learn Italian? By which I mean what the learning objectives are, what activites are included, in what order, in what percentage of the time available, with what mechanism to evaluate progress, and with which remedial activities, when your progress is not what was hoped for. Is it […]

Buondì. I’m pushed for time today, so I’m copying and pasting an email I received Daniel, You have a convert in the reading and listening techniques. On the other side I would love to see a letter from you on how to practice talking and writing. Example. I am trying to write (or talk to […]

Buondì. Type “learn Italian” into Google and you might find OnlineItalianClub.com on the first page of results (though it varies, Google is fickle.) I tried it with Bing, just out of curiosity, and we were somewhere near the bottom of the second page, which still isn’t bad for what is basically a hobby website. No […]

Buondì. Here’s an observation of how human brains learn foreign languages, using my own brain as an example. Amazingly, considering I’ve spent nearly thirty years teaching what for others is a foreign language, and have learnt several languages, to a reasonable level, it’s really, really rare that I actually notice myself learning. Of course, I’m […]

Buondì. This from Caroline over the weekend: Dear Daniel Something to cheer you up: I’ve finally realised that it doesn’t matter what the translation of a word or a sentence is, it just matters that you understand it! Caroline But, club members will be spluttering into their cornflakes as they read this, how could you […]

Buondì. Useful word, ‘ennesimo’ (‘ennesima’ if the noun is feminine) – literally it means nth, so to the power of a number, that is to say ‘very many’ of something. But you could translate it as ‘umpteenth’, as in, “I’ve told you umpteen times that…!” Anyway, yesterday afternoon I was teaching kids, online, as we’re […]

Buondì. 2 giugno (months aren’t capitalized in Italian) is a ‘giorno festivo’ here in Italy, that is to say a public holiday. It’s La Festa della Repubblica Italiana and the Wikipedia page I linked to there will tell you all about it (in Italian, of course!) For which reason, I have the children here, or […]

Buondì. It’s June tomorrow, and while it’s still spring here in Italy, the summer is ‘coming soon’, which is exciting! Yesterday we were in Rimini, on the Adriatic coast, enjoying a windy but sunny day, with plenty of good clean air to breathe in. Fingers crossed there’ll be more such weekends in the next few […]

Buondì. A while ago, a club member sent me a link to a blog (in English) on learning Swedish, assuming I’d be interested, given that I’m learning Swedish. Actually, I wasn’t really. I’m learning Swedish mostly by listening to the radio, doing conversation with a native speaker and, to a lesser extent, reading the news […]