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 months.
Anyway, it’s about this time of the year that club members who bought online lesson credits back in the Spring Sale start to write in asking when the next 20% discount promotion will be.
That’s not a secret, of course. We do four such promotions each year – at New Year, in the spring, at the beginning of July, and then once more, when the new school year has started, at the end of September or the beginning of October.
The Summer Sale will be from the 5th of July 2021 to the 11th of July 2021, and for that week everything you see on our Catalog page will be a fifth cheaper (assuming you remember to apply the coupon code to your cart total, that is…)
And right after the Summer Sale, there’s our FREE 30-part summer series of articles with audio to look forward to, beginning on Monday July 12th and ending on Friday September 17th (ten weeks, three articles a week, count them!)
Last year’s FREE Summer Series, also thirty articles with audio, was on ‘La storia di Roma’, and is still available for anyone to read and listen to on the club website. Why not take a look?
This year we’ll be doing the Middle Ages, about which I know nothing, but will be learning a lot as I introduce each of the thirty articles to you from July onwards. It’s being recorded by a native Italian speaker right now, and in the next couple of weeks I’ll be putting the webpages together and uploading the audio, all ready for the Monday after the Summer Sale!
For future summers, by the way, we already have the texts for ‘Il Rinascimento’ in 2022, ‘Dal Risorgimento alla Seconda Guerra Mondiale’ in 2023, and my favourite (I studied modern history at college) ‘Dalla fine della Seconda Guerra Mondiale all’era di Berlusconi’ in 2025.
When we’re done with those, we’ll have published 150 articles in total, all with audio, all free, covering approximately 2700 years of Italian history!
Didn’t know about last year’s Summer Series? Then there are probably other parts of the club website you are also unaware of.
For example, the useful Conversation prompts, or our Literature page, which amongst other things has a super-short retelling of Umberto Eco’s ‘Il nome della rosa’ along with brief extracts with explanations from each of the 34 chapters of Dante’s Inferno, and some book clubs we ran last summer.
More conventionally, there are conjugations of hundreds of (but by no means all) Italian verbs, listening materials, dialogue transcripts with audio, and an alphabetical index of grammar exercises and topics.
Don’t know where to start? Then read my article on ‘How to learn Italian’.
Still don’t know what to do? Well… perhaps some of these ‘Other resources for learning Italian‘ would suit you better than the club?
But don’t forget to check back for The Middle Ages from 12th July onwards!
A mercoledì.
P.S.
Today is the final day of May. You probably already knew that.
It’s also the final day to donate to EasyItalianNews.com, our thrice-weekly bulletin of ‘easy’ news (free Italian audio + transcript).
Until tomorrow, of course.
But then your contribution would show up in the June total, rather than helping to fill out May’s, which is looking pretty skinny…
See who’s helped us already this month.
And if you scroll down that page, you’ll see the total donations and the estimated costs for each of the thirty-one previous months, going back as far as October 2018, when we began, along with the names of everyone who was supported us each month (except the ones who preferred to remain anyonymous, obviously.)
Lynne F says
Daniel, Easy Italian News is such a wonderful resource so well done to all the team
who provide it thrice weekly. I remember the first episodes and have listened and read it ever since. How it has helped my Italian learning improve. I was pleased to read today that the new summer series will begin in July. Last year’s series was a challenge but worth while as was the Book club. Both gave me the confidence to move out of my comfort zone and read and listen to much more difficult resources, which I have continued to do..My vocabulary and usage of grammar has improved no end without actually studying.it.