Buondì.
For those of you here to enjoy our thousands of pages of free materials, with no intention of buying anything (prego!), I’ll start with a link to something new.
You’ll recall that the club has a new section, labelled ‘Conversation‘ in the menu at the top of the site?
These are prompts for conversation lessons, or just for practice with a native speaker, or even on your own. You could sit on the toilet (nice and private) and talk to yourself in Italian. Why not?
Better though, if you have friends from an Italian evening class you’re attending, meet them in a coffee bar (or pub…) and use the conversation prompts to get a conversation in Italian started!
Don’t worry about making mistakes. The important thing is to ‘activate’ what you know and get your brain and mouth into the habit of using it to communicate, even at a simple level.
Anyway, the new one is ‘Mi piace e non mi piace‘ – we’re intentionally doing the easy topics first.
And all three topics published so far are here. There’ll be more along soon!
Other news today, I was tidying out the website’s spam folder and found a comment by Outi, who was disappointed that I had been trying to sell easy readers rather than recommending the best Italian crime novels for students at his level (read his comment, and my reply, by scrolling to the bottom of this article…)
After having apologised for the site having lost his comment in the spam, it occurred to me that some of you might like to suggest suitable authentic Italian crime novels that he could read. If so, just add your comment after ours, here, and hopefully he’ll see them.
Poi, the January Sale. I thought you might be interested to hear how it’s going.
Most people who visit the new shop seem to start by downloading something free, which is fine.
For Italian, there’s a free easy reader (which has audio) and a free parallel text (which doesn’t, but has an English translation).
The same for Spanish and French. German has just the easy reader, so far. And there’s free stuff for the more obscure languages (such as Swedish and Turkish), too!
As regards actual sales, top of the list by far is our outstanding-value pack of ten online Italian lessons (remember that the price will be 20% less when you apply the coupon code – see below).
Hot on the heels of that one are our popular grammar workbooks, and leading the pack of those is ‘The Tenses You Need To Speak Italian‘, which clearly has seventeen five-star reviews for a reason.
That said, while the five levels of the Italian Workout! series sell fewer copies at each level, they come to many more in total.
In fact, it’s not unusual for people to buy several levels at a time (occasionally all five levels), which I would, of course, encourage!
But DO ‘try before you buy’ by downloading the free sample chapter first.
There’s a free sample chapter for every ebook in our shop. That’s because we want you to be absolutely clear what the material is, that it is the right level for you, and that you can use it on your preferred device, BEFORE you spend anything (it saves me a lot of time dealing with customer service issues…)
To get the free sample for any or all of the material that interests you, click on the cover image in the shop and seek out the free sample chapter link in the book’s blurb. Click it and then look in your downloads folder for the sample.
Open the free sample from the downloads folder, rather than from your browser, to be sure your device has the software to view it the way you would want.
N.b. The workbooks come in a zipped folder (sample chapter too). Apple users may have issues opening them, though it’s simple. There’s a note in the FAQ about how to do this, and if that doesn’t fix it, write to me for help!
So, next in popularity after the workbooks come the ‘bulk-buys’, that is to say ‘bundles’ of easy readers, enough for weeks or months of study, packaged together and priced at a discount.
Of those, Eighteen Italian Easy Readers – HALF PRICE!, is pretty unmissable.
And for movie buffs, the same discount can be had with Nine Book Of The Film Easy Readers – Save 50%!
Don’t forget that the ‘bulk-buys’, while already discounted, get EVEN CHEAPER once you apply the coupon code (details below).
I should also mention that all of our easy readers and parallel texts are available individually.
The easy readers here are ordered by level, from low to high. Each has an original Italian text, with glossaries, comprehension tasks, and online audio.
The parallel texts here are also in level order. You get the Italian story and an English translation, but no audio.
All of the above have free sample chapters. Just click the cover images and look for the link.
And finally, one of the features of our new shop is that you can find things by ‘type’.
So, for example, we have all of the volumes in our ‘Day in the life of…’ series together, here. The blue/grey ones are parallel texts, the red/green ones are easy readers.
Ditto for the ‘Classic Italian Movie’ series, all eleven volumes of which are here (easy readers only, no parallel texts.)
Beh, that’s about it for today. I’m all puffed out from trying to sell you something!
You’ll find the coupon code info below.
A domani!
January Sale!
Today’s Wednesday, right?
So there’s Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday left of the January Sale (next week it’s back to work, for a rest!)
There won’t be another 20% discount until Pasqua (Easter).
So if you’re taking online lessons with us (or intend to) and want to stock up on credits at a 20% saving, why not do it today?
And all ebooks are a fifth cheaper than usual, but only until Sunday night, when the sale ends.
Paste coupon code january_sale_2018_save_20% into the box in your cart (either site), press the ‘apply coupon’ button, and the cart total will be reduced by twenty percent.
n.b. It’s not the item price that changes, it’s the cart total – you have to scroll down to see the reduction.