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Buondì.

If you cook, you’ll know when your favourite kitchen knives are blunt by the fact that slicing a tomato, or worse an aubergine/egg plant, has become much more laborious, impecise and potentially dangerous to your fingers.

Yesterday it was aubergines, for a ‘sugo’, for my wife, who’s partial to them.

I have two ‘proper’ kitchen knives, that’s to say the ones I use all the time in preference to the junk. One is cast, so all-metal, including the handle; the other has a black, wooden handle and a longer, slimmer blade.

This second knife was a present many years back, and is my go-to for most types of cutting and slicing. It and its fellow live in a block on the counter, along with others that are rarely touched, apart from when I need to prise open a stubborn can or hack though a whole chicken, bones and all.

So anyway, yesterday’s aubergine required the long-bladed, black-handled favourite, but the tough skin defeated it, so I had to fish its fatter-bladed, metal-cast friend from the kitchen sink, give it a quick rinse off, and use that instead.

Sauce simmering, I got to thinking that I totally shouldn’t put off dealing with the blunt knife any longer, so located the long steel thing that came with a long-forgotten knife set and began ‘sharpening’ my slim-bladed, black-handled friend.

Frustratingly, to no avail. Minutes of scraping the grooved steel across the shining blade had no effect, and in fact appeared to even make things worse.

I examined the steel, which was worn and slightly rusted. Perhaps that was the issue?

I figured I must need a new sharpening tool, so sat down at the computer with a view to ordering one. But given that I’m in Italy, I needed to search using Italian words, which didn’t immediately come to mind,

So I decided to begin with a little basic research, in English, and Googled ‘how to sharpen a blunt kitchen knife’.

While I typically ignore the Youtube videos that appear at the top of Google search results, preferring to actually READ, I had time while the sugo was simmering so I clicked on this one – How To Sharpen Dull Knives – and immediately realised I’d been doing it all wrong!

The lady chef first showed my own sharpening tool, known as a ‘honing steel’ apparently, demonstrated how it should be used, and emphasised that this particular implement would absolutely NOT sharpen a blunt knife. It was only to be used (and then, very briefly) to ‘hone’ a knife before beginning to cut.

To sharpen a blunt knife, invece, what’s needed is either a pull-through sharpener or a whetstone, both of which were demonstrated, neither of which I possess.

Looking on the bright side, Mr Black-Handle, lovingly gifted to me decades ago by my wife (who you could meet at our Italian school were you so inclined) must be an amazingly good bit of kit to have stayed sharp despite years of me hacking at it incompetently with a honing steel.

‘Whetstone’ in italiano, by the way, is ‘cote’ or ‘pietra per affilare’, affilare being the verb ‘to sharpen’.

Amazon has plenty of options, but I refuse to order from them, so are stuck with my fatter-bladed second-choice knife, at least until I have the leisure time to drag my BMW moto from the garage and go look for a knife shop to buy a ‘cote’.

After which purchase I’ll definitely return to Youtube with a view to learning how to use it properly. Finally, at the age of fifty-eight, the shame of it.

Which puts me in mind of language-learning, and how it’s not entirely unknown for adult learners, especially older adults such as myself, possessing of life experience and an abundance of self-confidence, to insist on ‘doing it all wrong’.

The inverted commas because what counts as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ totally depends on a person’s aim, that is to say if what you really want is to destroy the edge on your blade, then hacking at it with a honing steel would be a perfectly logical and so ‘right’ thing to do.

Some learners are obsessed with studying Italian tenses, for instance, despite the fact that Italians rarely, if ever, use most of them in speech.

Agreed, you’ll see them when reading, but said grammar-obsessed students tend not to have the time or inclination to read the language they’re learning. At least not yet, not until they’ve mastered the grammar, all of the grammar…

There are plenty of ways to waste your language-learning time to little effect but I try to be charitable and assume that wasting time is precisely your objective.

You might term what you do as ‘keeping my mind active to stave off dementia’, or insist that you really enjoy conjugating irregular verbs in tenses that you’ll never use. People are passionate about their Duolingo ‘streaks’, which is a case in point.

Va bene, va bene, you know best! The customer is always right, even when ‘wrong’. Though if ‘wrong’, invariably loathe to admit it.

HOWEVER, when things are not as you might wish them to be – when your favourite knife won’t slice through a tomato without squashing it hopelessly, or bounces right off an aubergine/egg plant – and even while you’re unwilling to consider the wisdom of your ways, there sometimes occur ‘eureka moments’ when something is so undeniably ‘better’ that it cannot be ignored.

Chatting with a native speaker teacher online, for example. Virtually every learner who’s tried it is amazed at how much more confident they feel within just a few weeks (assuming neither the teacher nor the student is a complete idiot.)

The only drawback being the potential cost, though that’s trivial for many. The problem for most people is simply their unwillingness to change their ways, to admit that their approach wasn’t having the desired effect, to try something different.

Ditto with reading and listening, which are basically free or almost so, and so much more effective than the edge-destroying nonsense that inexperienced learners waste their time on.

I’d planned to write an ebook, provisionally entitled ‘The Man Who Learnt A Language Listening To The Radio’ (I once met such a man, and tried it myself) but became dispirited that the bulk of learners refuse to listen or read at all, even about things that interest them.

That said, if you’ve got this far, you might be the rare exception! In which case I should mention that our ebooks store is running a promotion this month. The details are below.

Alla prossima settimana!

25% Off Graded Italian/Spanish/French/German Study Materials

Don’t know what ‘graded’ study materials are or how they could boost your progress with the language you’re learning? Scroll down to ++++ to find out.

But first, don’t forget the 2025 ‘Back to School’ Sale is running this week and next, which means a 25% saving on graded material for learning Italian, Spanish, French, and German.

Everything in our online store, EasyReaders.org, is a quarter cheaper until midnight on Wednesday 24th September 2025.

But only if you remember to use this coupon code:

2025-Back-to-School-25%-Off

Make your selection from our range of ebooks, which have been especially written to keep you interested and making progress.

Apply coupon code 2025-Back-to-School-25%-Off in your shopping cart to reduce the cart total by 25%!

Stock up on online easy readers, parallel texts and grammar workbooks – at an unbeatable price!

Italian | Spanish | French | German

Here’s that coupon code again:

2025-Back-to-School-25%-Off

Don’t forget to use it when you order to save 25% on the price of everything in your cart!

Italian | Spanish | French | German

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Everyone learning a foreign language is familiar with the concept of ‘level’.

Some materials are just too hard for where you’re currently at, others might seem just right, whereas the texts you worked on months ago will now, hopefully, feel easy.

We all know that it can be difficult (impossible!) to understand films and so on in the languages we’re learning, or to read an authentic article, say from a newspaper, which is written for educated native-speaker readers.

And yet, clearly, listening to the language as it is really used, and reading articles written in it, are important long-term goals, even if they seem unachievable for the moment.

Plus, it seems likely that the more we read and listen, the more meaningful our studies will be, the more new words we’ll pick up, and the more we’ll feel familiar with the grammar and structures of the languages we’re learning.

Reading and listening to the language you’re studying are unarguably good ways to speed your progress, and in any case, training yourself to listen and to read effectively in the new language is obviously going to be necessary at some point.

But authentic materials are HARD! Often too hard.

The solution to this quandry?

‘Graded’ texts, that is to say materials written by language teachers for learners like you, and designated as suitable for those who have reached or are above a particular level.

The CEFR level system uses six level bands, which are (from easiest to hardest): A1, A2, B1, B2, C1 and C2.

Assume that students at the C levels should be reading and listening to authentic (real-life) texts and audio without too much difficulty. The graded materials at those levels, then, will approximate texts written for native-speakers.

People at the intermediate stage (the B levels) are not yet ready for ‘real’ or ‘nearly real’ listening and reading, but still need to build their skills in anticipation. So the graded materials will be an in-between step, aimed at challenging students to develop their skills further.

The easiest materials (at A1 and A2 levels) are designed to be unintimidating, which means short chapters and simple or simpler grammar and vocabulary. Their purpose is to encourage learners to get into the HABIT of reading and listening to the language they’re learning as early on in the process as possible.

The more reading & listening you do early on, the easier everything that follows will be. You’ll already be used to, for example, guessing meaning from context in a text, or getting the gist of the spoken language even when you can’t pick out every word.

Graded materials are useful at every language-learning level, but their real power can be seen when they are incorporated as an integral part of our studies right from Day 1 with a new language.

The difference between a learner who regularly reads and listens to graded materials, and one who never or rarely spends time on anything other than grammar and vocabulary exercises, is plain to see, if for no other reason than that a student who has no fear of reading and listening (because she is using materials that have been specifically written for her level, remember) comes across as being more confident and more autonomous.

How to find graded materials for your level? Our Catalog page lists materials by type and in level order, which should help.

But importantly, there’s always a free sample chapter, which you should absolutely look at before deciding to buy a particular title.

Have a look at the first few lines, the first paragraph, the first page, even the whole of the first chapter. Can you manage to figure out what’s going on in the story without too much effort, without constantly reaching for the dictionary?

If not, step down a level, try another free sample chapter, keep looking until you find something that you’re comfortable with. Don’t forget to check out the free online audio, if there is one. Usually the link is at the top of the first chapter…

Then, if the story grabs you, go ahead and buy a copy! Read a chapter a day, perhaps. There are usually eight short chapters, so in not much more than a week, you’ll be done.

At which point, you could check out other titles at the same level, or look at free sample chapters for the next level (or half-level) up, to see if you’re ready for something a little more challenging.

Aim to establish a reading/listening HABIT. Move up to the next level only when you’re comfortable, no need to rush,

Gradually, month by month, your reading/listening skills will improve, as will your knowledge of the grammar and vocabulary of the language you’re learning.

With graded materials, such as ‘easy readers’ and ‘parallel texts’, you’ll master the language you’re studying step-by-step, almost without realising it!

P.S.

Do find some time to stock up on the easy readers, parallel texts and grammar workbooks you’ll need to improve the language you’re learning –  at an unbeatable price – as the next sale won’t be until January 2026, so a long way off!

Browse our Catalog now: Italian | Spanish | French | German

There are free sample chapters to download for all of the many hundreds of ebooks there. Enjoy finding materials for your current level, and for the level or levels you aim to reach in the future.

When you’ve made your selection, don’t forget to apply Coupon code 2025-Back-to-School-25%-Off in your shopping cart, to reduce the total price by 25%.

P.P.S.

And here’s the usual reminder to read/listen to Tuesday’s bulletin of news from EasyItalianNews.com.

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 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

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Buondì.

Here’s a quick follow up to last week’s article ‘How people handle multiple languages at the same time‘ inspired by Anne, who emailed to ask what language a bilingual person thinks in when he or she is alone.

By the way, if you have a question about, or an allergic reaction to, this or any other article, much better NOT to email me (I’m busy caring for Bug so might ignore you) but to ‘post a comment’ on the relevant article.

How to do that? Locate the article you want to write about on our website by clicking on the Recent Articles link. Once you’ve found the right one, click on the title, then scroll right down to the comments box.

Fill it in, press the button, and be patient, as your words will need to be moderated (an anti-spam measure) before becoming visible. All genuine comments will be published, however daft. Your email address is required but won’t be visible. Fake one if you’re privacy-minded/paranoid.

Anyway, I replied to Anne that it was a fascinating question, but a false one. She didn’t agree, but then she’s been writing to me for a decade and never has yet.

My reasoning, based on forty years of language-learning experience and thirty-plus years of teaching, goes like this…

Human toddlers (say children aged between one and two years) don’t yet speak, but are certainly ‘thinking’. The respond, they decide to ignore warnings, and you can totally see in their cute little faces, and obvious body language, whenever they’re pondering doing something naughty.

‘Thinking’ about engaging in something forbidden is certainly happening, yet no human language has yet been acquired to ‘think’ in.

N.b. for the childless amongst you, when toddlers are about to do something really, really bad, they wait until you’re not looking, ideally when you’re busy in another room, then go very quite. It’s a tell. For toddlers, silence equals plotting, language or no.

Insomma, it’s obvious that even if two-year-olds don’t have the language to express their thoughts, they still have thoughts. Rage, boredom, affection, wanting something, and so on.

That’s not so different from dogs, actually, which are also inclined to urinate in inappropriate places and similarly don’t express their needs and feelings in words. If you’re a dog, why bother learning to speak? Doting humans will figure out – with a little trial and error – what you want.

Which reminds me, there was a famous medieval emperor, Federico II, known as “stupore del mondo” (1194-1250) who was as fascinated by language as we are. But Federico, being an emperor, could experiment on newborns – denying them any spoken input or contact with their moms – with a view to waiting until they could speak in order to discover which was the true ‘language of God’, the sort of question that was top of the agenda in medieval times.

What happend? Find out (free text + online audio) on our History page, here: Il Medioevo, Episodio 20, Federico II, “stupore del mondo” (1194-1250).

The History page, by the way, has one hundred and fifty-one other ‘history’ articles, which are all FREE to read and listen to. They cover the two and a half millennia beginning with the origins of the Roman Empire and ending with more recent happenings, such as Berlusconi, and the euro. Read/listen to that little lot, then come back and tell me your Italian hasn’t improved some.

Back to my reasoning regarding Anne’s question about which language or languages bilingual people ‘think’ in, and still with the dogs. Have you one? And are you a native English speaker?

Then I propose that your pet will, to a greater or lesser degree, respond to your commands/imprecations in English, but perhaps not in another language (try them with Italian and let me know!)

And yet your pooch acknowledging ‘Sit!’, “Good girl!’ and so on is no evidence that she’s ‘thinking in English’. Just that she’s thinking, as with the toddlers.

There you go then, Anne: language learners don’t think in any human language, not their mother tongue (tongues for bilingual people) or their foreign language or languages, no more than toddlers and animals do. They just think. English, Italian and so on doesn’t come into it.

Looking for more on this, I came across an article on Wikipedia, which describes a theory about how we really think (not in words): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_thought_hypothesis. It’s well worth a look. You’re excused. Go learn something. Come back here when you’re done.

Ready? Bene. Anne’s question, while not logical or scientific, is at least firmly-rooted in language-learning folklore, which you probably knew, as teachers and learners say all sort of silly things.

For instance, prominent in Google’s results for ‘thinking in a foreign language’ is this Reddit discussion: Thinking in another language, which begins with this question:

“I was told that I would not be able to learn my second language because I don’t think in it. I’m still learning it, I can’t think in it for the most part. But is he right?”

Predictably there are a lot of people saying how important it is to think in the language you’re learning, many others lamenting that they try but can’t, and very few contributions involving common sense.

One exception, from way back in 2016, comes from TrittipoM1, whose profile description is: “Retired lawyer, learner, translator, & teacher. Fluent English, French, & Czech. Usable Italian; survival Mandarin”:

“”…in general, most effective language acquisition proceeds in a kind of spiral of automatization of ever-increasing scope.

At the beginning, you make a few social niceties — greetings, names, basic state of being — automatic. You don’t need to translate from L2 to L1, formulate an L1 response, then translate the L1 back to L2, you just practice enough that you recognize the L2 input, and an appropriate L2 response becomes automatic. At the next level, you add in some other domains with typically predictable variations, and _those_ become automatic — no need for translation, you recognize what you hear, and you respond. And so on.

Ideally, you never need to translate anything. You simply expand in a spiral the range within which you don’t need to translate…

…”Thinking in” an L2 doesn’t mean anything more than making some recognition and responses possible within the L2 itself…”

Thanks TrittipoM1, that’s very helpful!

For non-language-teachers, by the way, L1 is your mother tongue while L2 is the language you’re learning or have learnt, that’s to say your ‘second’ language as opposed to your first. It’s jargon, obviously.

Nonsense aside then, there are language-based activities that might approximate ‘thinking in a language’, most obviously writing.

Learning to write your own language is painful enough (remember?), and slow, because what we’re basically trying to do is encode, at a tender age, our ‘language of thought’ in writing, with the idea that the results will more or less approximate speech.

Making a phone call is a lot easier, but when I was a lad, calling grandparents and aunties to thank them for birthday/Christmas gifts was too costly, so I was required to learn to write, like it or not. “Dear Auntie, Thank you for the present” (what was it, Mum?) “I hope you are well.”

In some languages (English, for example) the ‘output’ of writing is often similar to speech, even if the process is completely different (speaking is automatic where writing is laborious). That’s not true for all languages, though.

I can understand and speak some Turkish, but find both reading and writing it very hard, as the normal patterns of speech are much simpler than written text, which is all complicated and back-to-front.

And of course, pity Japanese teenagers, who while being as sullen and smelly as kids in Italy or your country ARE STILL LEARNING TO READ AND WRITE at the age when their western peers are having fun experimenting with drugs and trying to lose their virginity.

Other areas in which you might, sort-of, be thinking in language?

What about acting, at least when you have lines to say? Or reading poetry aloud? Or sermonising, or giving a speech?

Though if you think about it, they’re all ‘performative’ in some way, so very different from ‘normal’ language use, as well as from day-to-day ‘thinking’.

Conclusion: when it comes to language-learning, it’s a dumb idea to try to ‘think in Italian’ when Italians certainly don’t (I asked some before writing this).

It’s unhelpful to worry that you can’t ‘think in Italian’, or despair that perhaps you never will. At best that’s demotivating. At worst it’s very misleading.

Language-learning just isn’t like that. It’s not a question of ‘thinking’ in anything, but of getting plenty of ‘input’ and engaging with it.

Read, listen, speak if you have the opportunity, write if your mother says you must. Then wait for the magic to happen.

Alla prossima settimana!

2025 Back to School Sale: Ebooks for Language Learners -25%

(Published yesterday at our ebooks store site)

The EasyReaders.org 2025 ‘Back to School’ Sale has begun!

Which means that students of Italian, Spanish, French, and German can save 25% on ebooks to supplement or guide their language learning.

Everything in our ebooks store, EasyReaders.org, is a quarter cheaper if you remember to use coupon code: 2025-Back-to-School-25%-Off

Ebooks for students of Italian, Spanish, French, and German can be found on our Catalog page, where everything is organised by language, type, and level.

Or follow these links:

Italian | Spanish | French | German

Use the following coupon code to save 25% on your orders, for as long as the promotion lasts, with no minimum or maximum spend:

2025-Back-to-School-25%-Off

First make your selection from our range of ebooks, which have been especially written to keep you interested and so making progress.

Then go to your shopping cart and apply coupon code 2025-Back-to-School-25%-Off to reduce the cart total by 25%.

Scroll down to verify that the cart total has been reduced by 25% BEFORE proceeding with your payment…

Coupon code 2025-Back-to-School-25%-Off is good until midnight on Wednesday 24th September 2025.

You can use it as often as you wish until then, with no minimum or maximum spend.

Do find some time to stock up on the easy readers, parallel texts and grammar workbooks you’ll need to improve the language you’re learning –  at an unbeatable price – as the next sale won’t be until January 2026, so a long way off!

Browse our Catalog now: Italian | Spanish | French | German

And don’t forget to apply Coupon code 2025-Back-to-School-25%-Off in your shopping cart, to reduce the total price by 25%.

P.S.

And talking of how to ‘think in Italian’, here’s a reminder to read/listen to Tuesday’s bulletin of news from EasyItalianNews.com.

Don’t translate it. Don’t study it. Just listen to it and follow along with the text.

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

EasyItalianNews.com is FREE. It’s funded by donations. Every couple of months we ask satisfied language-learners to pony up, so we can keep publishing the thrice-weekly bulletins. Enough of them do. Find out who, here: https://easyitaliannews.com/many-many-thanks-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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