“Cancel”

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Buondì.

Short and sweet (and rushed) today, as for the last couple of days I’ve been busy with medical tests and the rather trying preparation required (diets and stuff).

Still here we are, tests completed, and it’s Wednesday again, a new day and meteorologically-speaking a new season.

It’s spring in the northern hemisphere, at last! Yesterday, on the way to the hospital, my son Tom (voice of EasyItalianNews.com ) spotted cherry blossoms.

Later I’ll get out of my chair and go for a walk to look for buds, or unfurling fresh green leaves, that sort of thing. Spring always cheers me up!

Spring is also, psychologically, a time for beginning new things – studying a language, perhaps. On my walk I’ll be sure to listen to half an hour or so of Swedish news, which I’ve neglected while occupied with laxatives and injections and so on.

It’s spring, let’s study! Make a start on working towards whatever your objective is and by Easter (coincidentally, the date of our next promotion) good progress might have been made.

Talking of promotions, last week we ran a “Free Trial Lesson Offer”, which meant lots of ‘commercial’ emails to different mailing lists, work which is necessary but boring. I prefer ‘proper’ writing, like this.

If you signed up for a free trial Italian lesson before the promotion ended on Sunday night, good for you. New season, a new adventure! I hope your FREE lesson goes well, whether you then go on to buy something or not.

For those who didn’t make the leap, there’ll be another identical promotion in November 2026 (so long? Boo!) plus a ‘Save 20% on your online lessons’ promotion in April, starting Easter Monday.

Intanto, it’s spring, let’s study, with or without a teacher. It’s just a question of where to start, right?

Two things stand out in my mind from the free trial lesson promotion.

When someone buys (in this case with no payment) a lesson or lessons, the NativeSpeakerTeachers.com teaching management team will email them to find out what their needs are, what their level in Italian is, and when they’d like to do their lesson – so as to match them with a suitable teacher, as far as possible.

Someone replied to that email telling the teaching management team that their ‘level’ was a three-hundred-day ‘streak’ on Duolingo, which is an app you’ve probably heard of. But if not, the ‘streak’ thing is the app’s way of describing your continuous daily use of it, in this case for nearly a year.

Well great. I have nothing against Duolingo, particularly, and have in the past done their Swedish, Spanish, Turkish and French courses, the first two as a beginner, the others to review and refresh existing knowledge. I found their courses useful and interesting. They’re also free, which helps.

But Duolingo didn’t get me speaking, and I wouldn’t have continued using any one of the courses I tried for nearly a year, as – in my humble opinion – they were put together more by computer engineers than by language teachers.

The other thing that stood out – or more honestly, that irritated me – was someone else, a club member, who replied to one of last week’s blatently-commercial emails with one word:

“Cancel”

Most people don’t mind getting marketing messages but those who do are strongly-encouraged to unsubscribe from whichever of our mailing lists is bothering them. At the bottom of this email, for instance, you’ll find this text:

No longer interested?

All bulk emails we send (including this one) contain an unsubscribe link, usually at the bottom. Scroll down to find it, click the link and select ‘unsubscribe’. That will permanently remove your email address from our ebooks mailing list.

Could we be more clear? Having a big list (there are more than thirty-thousand club members now) costs me money, and there’s no point in nagging people to study and/or buy something if they’re not interested. Better we go our separate ways.

But bulk email is an automated system. If you receive unwanted emails, look for the unsubscribe link and click it. Simple as that.

Replying to the sender asking them to do it for you, assuming the sender hasn’t used an unmonitored ‘no reply’ email address, just makes you look – well how can I put this? – a little out of touch.

Or worse, that you can’t be bothered, which isn’t a great look for a foreign-language learner, though that brings me to the point(s).

The first one you already know, I’m sure…

1.) Learning a foreign language is hard and takes a long time.

2.) Everyone starts from a different place, with different previous learning experiences, different levels of confidence, different needs, different expectations, and different goals.

2.) There’s therefore no one course, app, teacher, influencer, language school or whatever that can read your mind and take you from where you are now to where you one day hope to be with your foreign language.

3.) Regular engagement with the language you’re learning helps a lot (exactly as Duolingo says)…

4.) But you’ll make better choices if you PAY ATTENTION, continually evaluate your needs and options, and MAKE APPROPRIATE DECISIONS.

Let’s assume you have no idea what I’m on about.

So do something, anything to start with. Duolingo if you have no better options. After a few days or a week, you’ll have an idea of how it works, how you like it, how useful it might be.

Now start looking around for other tools/opportunities, and experiment with them AS WELL. Then you’ll know more, right.

Keep on with the stuff that ‘works’, drop the stuff that doesn’t.

How to know what works?

Use some sort of evaluation system, ideally something that’s independent of the material you’re using.

For instance, find out about the level descriptors that courses and language schools typically use. Use them to figure out what your level is.

Then ask yourself if you’ve improved since you began with whatever it is you’ve been doing. And make a provisional decision regarding what ‘level’ you’re aiming for, and why.

Will whatever study activity or materials you’re spending your study time on get you to where you want to be?

If that doesn’t look likely, make some changes, look for other opportunities. Mix it up a little. Let some time pass, then evaluate again.

This really isn’t rocket science. You do something, time passes, you evaluate the results, you make new decisions accordingly, then repeat.

I wrote about this process in much more detail here.

“There’s no course, app, teacher, influencer, language school or whatever that can read your mind and take you from here to there, there being exactly where you need to be with your foreign language.”

Which totally includes both OnlineItalianClub.com and EasyItalianNews.com, of course.

Use them if they suit you, if they help. But at some point, assuming you’ve made appropriate decisions, you’ll have moved on, so you’ll have new, different needs and objectives.

At which point, look again at what your needs/objectives are and make new decisions.

Bene. Gotta go, it’s Wednesday, so the day I do an online lesson with my Swedish conversation partner.

I’ve been doing these for years. My Swedish is still terrible, as I never study, but I can understand most of what Lars says to me, and I can mostly keep up my end of the conversation.

If I ever go to Sweden again (the last time was in 2018…) my wife’s relatives there had better be suitably amazed!

Today, besides being Wednesday, is also the fourth of the month, which is payday for NativeSpeakerTeachers.com online teachers. There are forty or fifty, mostly Italian teachers, and we have teaching admin staff who select and manage them (they also deal with students’ issues, obviously).

My job is just to do the payments. Today. And the marketing, which obviously this is.

So busy, busy, but not so much that I won’t have time to get the ear buds in and listen to the language I’m learning. Nor will I be too busy to speak Swedish with Lars for thirty minutes.

Alla prossima settimana, allora.

How to learn Italian (or any language) | NativeSpeakerTeachers.com

P.S.

Don’t forget to read/listen to Tuesday’s bulletin of news from EasyItalianNews.com, will you?

Reading/listening practice will help you consolidate the Italian you’re studying, expand your vocabulary, and build vital comprehension skills.

EasyItalianNews.com is FREE to read/listen to.

Subscribing, and so receiving all three text + audio bulletins of ‘easy’ news via email each week -on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays – is also FREE.

Just enter your email address on this page and click the confirmation link that will be sent to you.

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No longer interested?

All bulk emails we send (including this one) contain an unsubscribe link, usually at the bottom. Scroll down to find it, click the link and select ‘unsubscribe’. That will permanently remove your email address from our ebooks mailing list.