In 2003 I scraped together my meager savings and signed up for the part-time MBA at Alma Business School, here in Bologna where I live.
At the time, freelance English teaching was keeping me busy all hours, but didn’t generate much of an income.
And as our third child had just been born, I was pretty desperate to get some kind of ‘proper’ career going.
For an MBA, it was amazingly cheap, probably because it was taught in Italian and by professors from Bologna university.
Who wants to do an MBA in Italian?
But still, I thought, “Two birds with one stone!”
It would force me to improve my language skills, and at the same time I’d be working towards a qualification which would hopefully get me my dream job.
The course began and the workload was intense.
There were books to read, lectures to attend, and regular exams to study for, some of which involved writing essays…
While I could scrape by with the reading, and keep a low profile during lectures and group work, it was clear that the written work was going to be an issue.
Up to that time, I had done exactly zero writing in Italian!
Fortunately, I was saved by lurking on the course’s online discussion boards.
There, I was able to read what my fellow students thought about the course topics, pick up some of the key vocabulary, and generally orientate myself.
It was also a fantastic place to get Italian writing tips.
I quickly figured out that, while my grammar was surely a lost cause (I’d never done an Italian course) and my vocabulary was desperately limited, the one thing that I could quickly and easily fix was my non-use of ‘linking words’.
The other students sprinkled their writing with words like ‘quindi’, ‘invece’, ‘inoltre’, ‘tuttavia’ and many synonyms thereof, terms which helped connect their ideas in a coherent sequence (and make them sound more ‘figo’.)
So I started to make a list, grouping the more common words into categories, like this:
CONTRAST: invece, mentre, pero, tuttavia
CAUSATION: poiche, siccome
RESULT: quindi, perciò
CONDITION: anche se, almeno che
A quick bit of dictionary work later, and I had a list of typical terms to memorize.
Come exam day, I would be able to supercharge my ‘unusual’ written Italian with expressions I’d copied from my classmates.
And lo, using this approach I managed to write something at least minimally coherent, and passed my first exam.
Time passed, and in 2005 I graduated.
After which I set about becoming rich and successful, by opening my own language school…
All this because of learning to write better!
P.S.
The Italian writing course consists of five different writing tasks.
There are no fixed deadlines, so you can take as long as you want to get them done.
Your work will be corrected by a professional Italian teacher.
The course normally costs €50 (that’s just €10 per ‘lesson’), but until 20th June you can get it for the special launch price: just €37,50!
A number of OnlineItalianClub.com readers have already signed up.
They’ve been allocated their tutors, and are hopefully getting started right now on improving their Italian writing.
Why not join them?
John Thomson says
Le congiunzioni !!!!!!!
Excellent article, as ever Daniel
I would love to see your essay when you passed your exam, which conjunctions you used, where, when and why – akin to adding chopped parsley to a dish how much is “some” is it the same as “Q.B.” “quanto basta”
I have looked at a list of 25 conjunctions and selected one English word “although”
Depending on the dictionary one uses (my preferred is Word Reference)
This can be translated as
Benche / malgrado / sebbene / quantunque / anche / nonostante / pure / seppure
I am sure there will be more and the same is true, though to a lesser extent, when translating from Italian to English
So how do you choose, is there a regional variation?
The English language tends to use a comma to separate blocks of related text or at best uses “and” or “or” with the odd “while” thrown in
All part of the beauty of la bella lingua !
Cheers
John
P.S. my beautiful wife is buying me your writing course for Father’s day.
Daniel says
Hi John,
When you get a list of ‘synonyms’like that, say from wordreference.com, you need to appreciate the various ways they could differ:
– the meaning may not be exactly the same (for example, one version may have other unrelated meanings or uses)
– they may be used in a different position in a sentence
– there might be a different level of formality
– there may be other grammatical ‘issues’
etc.
One way to deal with that is to try to study them formally.
Another option (my preferred one..) is to try to take on board the one or two most common ones for use when you speak and write, while aiming to at least recognize the others when you see or here them
In that way, you don’t immediately have to worry about the bits you don’t know as sooner or later the context will provide that info for you..
Reading a lot helps.
Good on your wife!
Hope you enjoy the course, and she enjoys the peace and quiet while you’re busy doing the tasks.
Karen says
Well if I hadn’t signed up an hour ago, this post would have hooked me in. Those pesky little words are the bane of my life and I only have a handful for each category, so I already have a task, and I haven’t even started yet. As has been mentioned by another poster, the snag is that the range of meanings for each word, doesn’t always quite correlate with English so I have to go with the context. Roll on joined up thinking/writing
Daniel says
Practice makes perfect, Karen. Thanks for signing up for the writing course. I hope it’ll prove useful…