No time to read this? Why not find something to study instead? A1 – Beginner/Elementary | A2 – Pre-Intermediate | B1 – Intermediate | B2 – Upper-Intermediate | C1 – Advanced | C2 – Proficiency | What’s my level? | Italian level test
+++
Buondì.
Over the years I’ve written a lot about language learning, and learning Italian in particular.
For those who are interested, check out the club’s ‘Best of’ page, which has links to articles that might be worth a look, in chronological order from newest to oldest, all the way back to our beginning!
Because of Bug, who joined our family temporarily in September 2023 and is still with us, I haven’t had time to do 2023 or 2024 yet. Watch this space, though it’ll probably be more of the same, as I tend to repeat myself.
My earliest memories of learning Italian date back to the fall and Christmas/New Year holidays of 1997/8, that being the year I met my Italian now-wife.
I borrowed a book from the library of the school I was then working in, copied out a few verb conjugation tables, made some flash cards on scraps of paper, and tried to memorise them on the long, London bus ride home from work each day.
Visiting Italy for only the second time in my life that Christmas, to meet the future in-laws, I carried around a notebook and tried to write down useful words and expressions. Some of them I still use today, so it wasn’t such a terrible idea.
But this was way back in the dark ages of language-learning opportunities. There were no smartphones, no on-demand radio or TV, and no or very few internet resources such as OnlineItalianClub.com.
In the summer of 1998, Stefi being five months pregant, we moved to Italy. It was supposed to be ‘just to see if we liked it’, as I recall, though she remembers differently so I’ve been stuck here ever since.
At that point I’d have been learning Italian for less than a year, had done no classes and, given that I didn’t really know what I was doing, hadn’t made much progress.
Autumn/fall 1998 I was finding my feet in the local job market (teaching English), the ‘pancia’ with what would be Sofia inside was growing steadily, and my Italian was still making zero progress, as I spoke English both at work all day and at home.
Memories of 1999 begin with a stressful few hours in the delivery room of our local hospital. I couldn’t understand anything anyone said and, for some reason, my wife had lost interest in translating for me.
Linguistically, I was alone, and helpless. There was also no tea, and not even a chair to sit on, or a toilet for the dads to use. Good job I couldn’t express myself in Italian, or I’d have complained!
Five months of sleepless nights later, the summer term ended, language teaching stopped, and I finally had the time and energy to explore the local foreign language bookshop.
There wasn’t a lot on the ‘learn Italian’ shelf: the usual fat collections of verb conjugations, textbooks for foreign students at the university and at local Italian language schools, and – aha! – a very small selection of ‘easy readers’, so slim, pocket-size books at different Italian levels, some of which had a audio cassette so students could listen as well as read.
They weren’t cheap, I recall, and there were few at my (low) level, but I’d always liked reading and was, in any case, keen to have something to do during the endless, workless summmer.
So I bought one, took it home, read and listened to a chapter a day, and – satisfied with the improvement in my morale and reading/listening skills – went back and bought another, then another.
It wasn’t long before I was out of ‘easy reader’ options. Weeks later, visiting the in-laws in Rimini, I was browsing the newsstand looking for something I might be able to understand (Italian newspapers are written in code), when I noticed a rack of translated ‘gialli’, ‘giallo’ (yellow) being the Italian term for detective/crime fiction, because of the traditional color of the paperbacks’ covers.
Spotting an American author I knew and liked, and noticing the super-low ‘beach-reading’ price, I got out my lire (the euro hadn’t happened yet, it was that long ago) and bought a copy.
The first page took all day, and rather sapped my enthusiasm. Later in the summer, or it could have been the year after, Stefi took the baby to meet her Swedish relatives, while I stayed in sweltering Bologna with nothing to do. So I picked up the book again and had another shot at it.
Over the next week or two, I began to make some progress, especially once I’d figured out a rough and ready ‘method’, which I will summarise as follows:
– feel free to ignore the boring bits, especially long descriptions of scenery…
– focus instead on the dialogues and action: who says what, who shoots whom
– don’t ever look up words (it guarantees you’ll never finish, there are always so many)
– keep turning the pages even if, especially if, you haven’t got a clue what’s going on
– the more you read, the easier it gets (IF you’re already familiar with the genre. Avoid literature)
It probably took me a few months to finish that first ‘giallo’, after which I started on the John Grishams I hadn’t already read.
Buying them in English would have been too costly. And anyway, reading them in Italian was both cheap and, eventually, very satisfying.
E’ così. Years passed. In 2003 I started an MBA at our local business school. In Italian (also cheap…) I could still barely speak at all, and understood little of what the lecturers said, but I could at least READ the set texts.
When I graduated in 2005 I still couldn’t speak much, but I’d got an impressive ‘university masters’ (as Italians say, meaning one that had involved real exams and so carried legal weight for job applications etc.) certificate.
For the final MBA project I’d chosen to do a business plan for a language school, not coincidentally as in 2005 my colleages and I at Bologna’s British Council (an expensive soft-power project) were being made redundant.
So – stupid idea – we began our own language school, and made losses for years while I figured out how to put theories into practice.
On the plus side, it was only then, eight years after meeting my Italian partner, that I began to need to speak Italian, at least at times: in banks, with suppliers, when selling courses and so on.
IF I HAD KNOWN BACK THEN WHAT I KNOW NOW, I’d have got myself some regular speaking practice organised right from the start, in August 1998, or even the year before coming to Italy, and so got a lot more out of each subsequent experience: from the delivery room, through the MBA years, and starting our own Italian business (really, don’t start a business in Italy…)
AT LEAST I GOT THE READING PART RIGHT THOUGH. ‘Easy readers’ with cassette tapes, cheap paperbacks that I would have read in English if I could have got my hands on them, later newspapers and magazines.
Over the years I tried to encourage the same habits of regular reading/listening in my students (Italian adults learning English), though without much success.
And at least a decade later, I flipped it around and attempted to get the Italian-learning-or-hoping-to world (you) interested in reading/listening to simplified then authentic texts.
That’s how I learnt, I’d tell people. It really works! And it’s cheap. Though it takes a long time…
Browsing the same foreign-language bookstore one lunch time, I noticed that the ‘learn Italian’ section still had the exact same few ‘easy readers’ that I’d used myself, more than a decade earlier. Though now they came with CDs rather than cassette tapes.
But hey, I thought. We could do that! We could write our own ebooks, and sell them to club members.
So we did. I wrote a very, very short and simple story in English, and Stefi translated it.
Il ristorante was only our second attempt at an ebook, so the audio and formatting are awful.
But these days we give it away for free, as we do with Le restaurant, El restaurante, Das Restaurant, O restaurante, Restoran, and Restaurangen.
Stefi, suitably challenged, wrote the longer, higher-level Il campo di papaveri (that’s a younger me on the cover, posing as a hungry artist).
We had that one translated into various languages, too (none of them are free…)
And we were off! On our mission to get the world reading in and listening to foreign languages!
Things really got going when I started hiring writers, mostly Italian teachers actually, some of whom turned out to be capable and prolific.
Over the years our ebook catalog grew to include all levels in Italian, plus various genres.
And during the pandemic months/years I went crazy, commissioning stories and non-fiction texts left, right and center. Our writers needed to earn, and I was having fun!
Why read and listen in the language you’re learning?
If not ONLY reading and listening, then at least reading and listening AS WELL as your grammar lessons, your conjugations and what have you.
But why bother?
Because regular exposure to texts of gradually increasing difficulty provides fertile ground in which your understanding of the language can grow.
Because it’s a break from the other stuff you’re doing. Doing different activities can be more productive than hours spent doing the same old thing.
Because you can learn loads from reading/listening that you won’t learn from traditional lessons or courses (i.e. lots of pronunciation, grammar you haven’t formally studied yet, new words that you figure out from the context…)
Because you’re building vital comprehension skills. And the better your skills are, the easier it is to learn. A virtuous circle! If you don’t know what that is, Google it.
I could go on, but I’m out of time. I have to go read/listen to some Swedish before my online conversation at noon.
N.b. The ebooks store has a promotion starting in the next few days. See below for advanced access to their coupon code…
Alla prossima settimana.
Sneak Preview: 20% Coupon Code for Ebooks!
For the rest of January the ebooks store has a 20% coupon code promotion. Details will hit their mailing list tomorrow, probably (things have been busy…)
But for any club members who already know what a coupon code is, and how to use it, this one is already valid:
2025-January-Sale-20%-Off
Copy/paste it carefully into the box in your cart, press the Apply coupon button, then scroll down to see the cart TOTAL has been discounted.
Naturally, I’ll be mentioning this again, in more detail, over the coming weeks.
P.S.
And here’s the usual reminder to read/listen to Tuesday’s FREE bulletin of ‘easy’ Italian news.
The 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!
Take a look at their website to get started on improving your Italian immediately!
And/or to get all three text + audio bulletins of ‘easy’ news emailed to you each week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, subscribe (also FREE) by entering your email address on this page then clicking the confirmation link that will be sent to you.
+++
OnlineItalianClub.com | EasyItalianNews.com | Shop (ebooks) | Shop (online lessons)
Leave a Reply