A bit like Gregory in “Gregory’s Girl” these were my only words of Italian! Over the summer holidays I started listening to “learn Italian” podcasts which I found quite useful.
I have now listened to 5 Italian podcasts and think I’m doing quite well, in fact better than I imagined. When I was learning French and German everything was text book and grammar based, but I’m coping quite well with only hearing the Italian – after all I really want conversational Italian, really no reason for me to write it at the moment.
I can visualise some of the words, guessing them from French and also Spanish and Latin, both of which I’ve studied in the past (well I did “O” Grade Latin over 20 years ago). I can certainly see the similarities with Spanish in particular ie being able to use the verb without its subject, and some words are very similar, bit confusing at first but I’m starting to separate them out.
I have bought a dictionary and grammar book as I do find it useful to see the words written down. Anyway I better get listening again before the girls overtake me!
2 responses so far ↓
1
Joe Dale
// Aug 22, 2006 at 6:16 pm
Hi Lynne,
Great blog, very interesting. I wish you all the best with it.
Here’s a post I wrote today about the project called ‘Italian Mother Blog keeps Mull on the ball’
http://joedale.typepad.com/integrating_ict_into_the_/2006/08/italian_mother_.html
Best wishes
Joe
Integrating ICT into the MFL classroom – http://www.joedale.typepad.com
2
Graham Davies
// Aug 24, 2006 at 6:36 am
I learned basic conversational Italian many years ago from a BBC TV course, with an accompanying book, called Buongiorno Italia. It worked well for me on many holidays that I spent in Italy in the 1980s. The BBC Languages site has a good basic course in Italian, Italian Steps:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/italian/lj/
Above all, you need to practise speaking Italian, recording your own voice and playing it back to see what you sound like – and there are no Web-based materials that I know of that allow you to do this. But you can do this with a CD-ROM-based course, e.g. the Talk Now and World Talk series published by EuroTalk:
http://www.eurotalk.co.uk
I used the EuroTalk courses to learn basic Polish. They helped me get my tongue round the horrendous consonant clusters, e.g. “przepraszam!” (”sorry!”).
By the way, I was one of the consultants that helped the BBC develop the German Steps course, which is similar to the above Italian course:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/german/lj/
Leave a Comment