Buondì. I don’t normally dream about teaching. Perhaps it’s knowing that I’ll have some courses starting soon and so will be back in the saddle. Or maybe it’s witnessing my daughter’s misery as she spends the entire week waiting for an oral exam at university (online, of course.) The poor girl is number fifty-seven on […]

Buondì. Gotta be quick today (no, really!) as it’s back to work for the first time since March ninth! Which means the familiar, but actually now quite unfamiliar, routine of packing my office bag with laptop, cable and lunch, doing the dishes from the evening before, leaving lunch instructions for the kids, choosing something to […]

Buondì. As mentioned on Friday, today we have a new, B1 (intermediate) -level ‘easy Italian reader’ ebook, the third in our series of simplified versions of classic Italian literature. Once more we find ourselves back in the nineteenth-century, this time in a Sicilian fishing village… ‘I Malavoglia’, literally ‘the Unwillings’ (an ironic nickname coined, in […]

Buondì. A quickie today, as I promised my wife I’d be ready for coffee with her in an hour, and I’ve spent the past 55 minutes doing my weekly Turkish conversation lesson. Yesterday I started on next week’s new Mini-Book Club choice (see our Literature page if you have no idea what I’m talking about), […]

Buondì. In reply to Monday’s article About self-teaching, this from Anne in Chicago: Well, I couldn’t work my way all the way through this email, but it seems to me that the best way to learn a foreign language is to go live somewhere they speak it. Yes, well, those of us who are, or […]

Buondì. “Don’t do it like that, do it like this!” you might have heard from a teacher. Or perhaps, “THIS is how you should be organising your notes / reading / pronouncing that word.” Assuming your teacher was/is competent (I normally don’t), and that you choose to follow their advice, then you should be, more […]

Buondì. I’m utterly fed up with arguing with club members about why they should ‘just read’ and not use a dictionary while doing so. And yes, I know there are lots of times when, actually, you SHOULD use a dictionary – for example, when you are ‘studying’ rather than ‘just reading’, or if you’re being […]

Buondì. One of the perils of being a teacher is assuming that what’s obvious to me is obvious to everyone else too. After all, I’ve taught this and written about it so many times, how could you all not already know it? And yet I’m constantly reminded that people DON’T KNOW. For example, with the […]

Buondì. Coming on Monday we have the next ‘easy’ Italian reader ebook in our ‘Literature’ series, Luigi Pirandello’s rather odd ‘Uno, nessuno e centomila‘, about a young man who gets himself into rather a lather about the way others perceive him. If you’ve finished Pinocchio (I haven’t, yet), or never started it, or started it […]