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Buondì.
On Monday morning I published episodes 4, 5 and 6 of this year’s FREE Summer Series, which will cover the fifty or so years of Italian history from the end of WWII up to Berlusconi and the euro.
Previous years’ Summer Series covered ‘La storia di Roma’ (30 articles), ‘Il Medioevo’ (30 articles), ‘Il Rinascimento’ (30 articles), and last year’s ‘Dal Risorgimento alla Seconda Guerra Mondiale’ (30 articles), so a grand total of 120 articles + online audio.
That’s plenty of FREE study material for anyone who wants to make use of it – read, listen, avoid using a dictionary, and your Italian comprehension skills are bound to improve. And this year’s FINAL summer series will add another 32 texts. Find them all here.
Which reminds me, over at EasyItalianNews.com we’ve had several comments recently (and the fact that a few people commented suggests that many more are affected) from people complaining about the quality of our English translations!!
Apart from the fact that if we were to offer ‘English translations’ of material for people learning Italian, they would be GOOD, CHECKED, PROFESSIONAL translations (as in, for instance, these Italian-English parallel text ebooks), the EasyItalianNews.com website is designed for one purpose only – to get learners used to ‘long form’ Italian listening tasks, such as for example listening to the news on the radio or TV, and to help them transition from ‘easy’ to ‘authentic’ sources.
The idea is to provide the audio with text support, which isn’t otherwise readily available. Not many radio shows offer transcriptions, and Italian TV, which probably does, is unavailable to students in most countries of the world.
By listening to (and reading, as support) each EasyItalianNews.com bulletin, three times a week, over a period of months or years, students’ comprehension skills will improve, I guarantee it, hopefully to the point at which they’ll want to start with ‘real’ news, or whatever.
Dictionaries are discouraged, because they just get in the way of that longer-term skills development. Trust me, they do. Yes, I know, you don’t know a lot of the words. Yes, you think it would be lazy to just skip over them. But that’s wrong (for so many reasons…)
This is LISTENING. Not knowing some of what you hear is normal and, for learners, that might be most of what you hear, rather than just some. So you have to practice that ‘not knowing’, see? And develop strategies for dealing with it.
Stopping the text to look up a word in the dictionary is just dumb. As is going back to listen to a part you didn’t quite understand. Both are counter-productive. Instead you should be improving your ability to guess, to hypothesize, to figure stuff out, even though it’s fast and partly or mostly unknown.
And/or just chill. Listen ‘extensively’, rather than trying to get each detail. In time you’ll get better at it. This is stuff I’ve been teaching to paying customers for decades, and it totally works. Try it for a few months and you’ll see.
Anyway, there are tips on how best to use EasyItalianNews.com on their ‘Advice’ page, https://easyitaliannews.com/how-to-use-easyitaliannews-com/, with different approaches suggested for students at different levels.
BUT THERE ARE NO ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS.
How on earth would they help???
The most recent comment on this topic was:
“Your translations are obviously done by some robot who continues to refer to females as HE. This is reprehensible.”
And someone else wrote recently:
“I enjoy reading Easy`Italian news. From time to time there are grammar errors in the English version.”
The cheek of it… Grammar errors? From an English teacher and practised writer of articles? How dare you!
The rather irascible reply, to both comments, was:
“There are no English versions… EIN bulletins are in Italian, only. Any ‘English versions’ are produced by readers’ web browsers. Language learners should know better than to enable apps to translate automatically…
We do not advise translating the Italian bulletins before, during or after reading/listening to them as the purpose of the site is to prepare students to transition to real-time listening to extended texts, such as TV news bulletins. Translations are unhelpful to that goal.”
Anyway, the reason I mention this is that the advice and approaches at https://easyitaliannews.com/how-to-use-easyitaliannews-com/ apply just as well to the club’s Summer Series articles, which have a very similar objective, though this time with the focus on the written text, the audio being the bonus rather than the other way around.
Again, there are NO TRANSLATIONS. If the free texts appear to be in English, this is a problem at your end – check your browser settings, use a different browser, use a different device altogether, use your head.
Again, you should not use a dictionary.
Again you will make slow but guaranteed progress (compared to not readling/listening at all, at least.)
And again, it’s all free, for anyone who can 1.) be bothered to take advantage of it, and 2.) is smart enough to put aside their preconceptions and listen to good advice.
To find the new episodes, any time from Monday onwards each week of the summer, visit the club’s History page, scroll down to near the bottom – where it says ‘Dalla fine della Seconda Guerra Mondiale all’era di Berlusconi’ – and there, in a red font are the live articles (the grey font ones are yet to be published.)
Here are the six we’ve published so far:
Episodio 1. Gli orrori della Seconda Guerra Mondiale in Italia
Episodio 2. Lo sterminio degli Ebrei in Italia (1938-1945)
Episodio 3. Gli italiani massacrati nelle foibe (1945-1946)
Episodio 4. Il trattato di pace di Parigi e le condizioni per l’Italia (1947)
Episodio 5. L’Italia diventa una Repubblica (1946)
Episodio 6. Il cinema neorealista
N.b. Not everyone likes to read/listen online, so we also SELL ebook versions, which you’ll find here:
La storia di Roma (B2) £9.99 Download FREE sample (.pdf, .epub, .mobi/Kindle)
Il Medioevo (B2) £9.99 Download FREE sample (.pdf, .epub, .mobi/Kindle)
Il Rinascimento (B2) £9.99 Download FREE sample (.pdf, .epub, .mobi/Kindle)
Dal Risorgimento alla Seconda Guerra Mondiale (B2) £9.99 Download FREE sample (.pdf, .epub, .mobi/Kindle)
There’ll be one for this year’s summer series too, but at the end, in September.
And talking of ebook ‘easy readers’, Episodio 6. Il cinema neorealista mentions three famous neorealist movies. The article itself explains what ‘neorealismo’ is/was, but if you plan to get to it later, take a look at the English Wikipedia page.
Surprise! Years back we did ‘easy reader’ ebooks for two of those films! And very good they were, too. Find them in the Italian Cinema section of the ebooks store, or follow these links:
Ladri di biciclette (A2/B1) £9.99 Download FREE sample (.pdf, .epub, .mobi/Kindle)
Roma città aperta (B1) £9.99 Download FREE sample (.pdf, .epub, .mobi/Kindle)
E così.
Stefi, Bug, and I arrived at the coast yesterday for a break from the steamy streets of the city and a few days of ‘relax’. We’re staying at the suoceri’s place, which has air-conditioning in the living spaces and is well-supplied with small-animal-friendly toys and miscellaneous chewable items, accumulated in jars, boxes and odd corners over multiple generations.
Bug is having a wild time, crawling around the parquet at top speed. Picture a full-sized clockwork lion cub, with its spring fully-wound, and you’ll have a good idea of what’s been shooting around my feet while I’ve been typing this.
At the proof-reading stage (yes, I do check for ‘grammar errors’) things have gone quiet, though, as Stefi has taken the cub to the beach. How he’ll react when plonked on the 100 Fahrenheit (38C) sand remains to be seen.
Alla prossima settimana!
P.S.
Did you read/listen to yesterday’s FREE bulletin of ‘easy’ Italian news?
As mentioned above, EasyItalianNews.com publishes three bulletins for learners of Italian (text + audio) each week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
You should subscribe. It’s free.
To do that, enter your email address on this page, watch out for the ‘please confirm’ email, click the link it contains, then sit back and wait to receive the next bulletin.
THERE ARE NO TRANSLATIONS!
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