You’re interested in learning Italian, or you wouldn’t be reading this.

But, as you’ve probably worked out by now, learning a foreign language is a time-consuming business, with a high chance of eventual failure.

Life gets in the way. Doubts, or conflicting priorities may well mean you make less progress with the language than you initially hoped.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

It IS possible to learn to speak and understand Italian to a good level.

How?

With a little help from your friends, of course! [Read more…]

Well of course it will.

And especially if you drink it in Italy, where you’ll be able to practice speaking and understanding Italian at the same time.

Here are a few of the ways that ‘il vino’ can give your Italian a boost:

1. While you’re in Bologna studying Italian, attend a wine-tasting. It’s great listening practice, for a start. Plus you might make new friends who you can speak Italian with!
2. There’s lot to learn about wine. Visit wine cellars and restaurants, read books and websites: you’ll also be improving your Italian at the same time…
3. When eating out, or ordering an aperitivo, you’ll have a ready topic of conversation. Quiz the wine-waiter or barman about the selection of wines available. In Italian, of course!
4. In vino veritas! After a glass or two, you’ll be less inhibited, and so will speak and understand Italian better. It’s a famous effect!

Just don’t overdo it!

P.S. There are just SIX MORE DAYS to save 20% on your 2014 Italian course (and so have more cash left to spend on wine…)

Click here for more information.

FREE Resources For Learning Italian!

Yes.

No.

It depends.

Hard for who?

Sitting at the reception desk of our Italian language school, I’ll quite often have conversations with Spanish university students, who’ve just arrived in Bologna and need to learn Italian.

Student (speaking Spanish):      Hi, I’d like some information about Italian courses.

Me (speaking Italian):                  Have you studied Italian before?

Student (speaking Spanish):      No, never. Don’t know a word.

Me (speaking Italian):                 Funny.  I don’t know any Spanish, but here we are having a conversation!

Next time you meet someone who tells you they speak French, Spanish, Italian, and hey, a little Portuguese, don’t be too impressed. It may not be that they are some incredible polyglot with superhuman abilities.

The similarities between Latin-based languages are strong. Knowing French or Spanish gives you a huge advantage in learning Italian, and vice versa. It’s not so much a question of starting from scratch, as of converting what you already know.

Conclusion? If you did French or Spanish at school, Italian should be a walk in the park for you.

Hard compared to what?

I once spent a fascinating year teaching English to Japanese high school students. One thing that struck me was that, get this, the teenagers I was teaching were STILL LEARNING TO READ THEIR OWN LANGUAGE. At high school!

Spoken Japanese is not so hard. Different, yes. But pretty regular, with a reasonable pronunciation system.

Written Japanese, well that would be another matter. I imagine you’d have to dedicate a good part of your life just to get to the point where you could understand the newspaper.

So, compared to Japanese with its ideograms, or even Russian and Arabic which simply have different alphabets, Italian looks like a piece of cake, doesn’t it?

Climbing Mount Italia

Let’s assume you’re an English speaker who doesn’t already have a good command of another Latin language.

Will you find Italian hard to learn?

At the beginning, yes.

Later no.

If learning Italian is like climbing a mountain, you’ve got the sheer, icy bit with the lethal showers of falling boulders right there at the bottom where you have to being your ascent.

The fearsome cliff of “grammar”. Not a place for the timid or unprepared alpinist.

To say anything in Latin languages like Italian, you need to be able to conjugate your verbs.

I do, you do, he does, she does, it does, we do, you do, they do

Except it’s a lot more complicated in Italian:

faccio, fai, fa, facciamo, fate, fanno

Then of course there are nouns with gender (the glass is male but the bottle is female), and plurals which vary according to that gender.

A confusing variety of articles complicate things further.

Prepositions are a mess, too.

I could go on.

BUT, survive the treacherous conditions on that initial vertical pitch, and what will you see?

Grassy meadows, gently sloping away up to the distant summit.

Wildflowers, frollicking cowgirls, sunbeams, you get the idea.

Getting up the rest of the mountain will be child’s play.

So, is Italian a hard language to learn then?

If you’re an English speaker who’s never successfully learnt another foreign language, well the answer has to be ‘Yes’.

Sorry.

But if you’ve already summitted other similar peaks, this one is not going to give you much trouble.

And remember, whatever you level of mountaineering experience, once you get past the technical lower cliffs, you’ve got the cowgirls and wildflowers to look forward to!

More Articles About Learning Italian | FAQ

 

Feel like getting the hell out of Bologna?

It’s a great city, but sometimes you might want a change of air.

But not want to spend the earth.

No worries. That’s what trains are for.

Bologna Central station is an easy walk or bus ride from just about anywhere in the city.

And with a bit of local knowledge, you could be somewhere else in no time at all, for very little cash!

Trains are NOT all the same

The first thing you need to know: Italy has lots of different types of trains.

If you like trains, you’ll enjoy finding out the differences.

But for the purpose of this article, you just need to know that they fall into three broad categories:

• fast trains – the Frecciarossa, Frecciargento, Frecciabianca (redarrow, silverarrow, whitearrow…)
• normal trains – the Intercity
• slow trains – the Regionale, and the (don’t laugh) Regionale Veloce (Regional and “Fast” Regional)

Have fun experimenting with different destinations on the Trenitalia website.

Beware the rather confusing search box, which defaults to “Le Frecce” (The Arrows).

This will give you results only for the expensive fast trains, which often don’t go to the smaller, local destinations anyway.

For cheap day trips near Bologna, you’ll need to select the other tab on the search box: “Tutti i treni” (All Trains)

Where to go first?

Don’t ask me. I hate sight-seeing (but enjoy reading the newspaper on trains).

However, here are the more obvious destinations within Emilia-Romagna, the Italian region of which Bologna is the principal city, and the ticket prices.

N.b. Prices quoted are for a single, 2nd class, ticket on Regionale and Regionale Veloce trains, and were valid at the time I wrote this (Nov. 2013)

If you want to come back to Bologna after your day-out, double the quoted price (you can’t buy return tickets in Italy by the way…)

Just click on the links to find out more about each place.

Modena, about 30 mins €3.70
Ferrara, 30-50 mins €4.50
Reggio Emilia, 40-55 mins €5.70
Parma, 55-70 mins €6.90
Ravenna, 59-81 mins €6.90
Rimini, 80 mins €9.30

Leave a little time…

..to get your ticket from the machine at the station.

They’re relatively simple to operate, and take credit cards and so on.

But they let anyone travel these days, and you know what people are like. There’s always someone who doesn’t know where they want to go, holding everyone up….

Tickets, please!

Italy is a wonderful place, full of wonderful people.

But it is capable, how shall we say, of throwing up the odd unpleasant surprise…

One of which is the need to “validate” your ticket, BEFORE you get on the train. Guess it saves the ticket inspector a job.

Look out for a little machine near the entrance to each platform. Push your ticket into the hole to “convalidare” your ticket. Listen for a click, and inspect your ticket closely for a date/time stamp that wasn’t there before.

The ticket inspector will want to see that:

a. you have a ticket

and

b. you’ve validated it

Or you will be presumed to have attempted to defraud the Italian state of €3,90 or whatever, and be subject to a fine.

Being an ignorant foreigner is no excuse: la legge è uguale per tutti!

Enjoy your trip!

More Articles About Learning Italian | FAQ

 

You don’t need to have been good at foreign languages at school to learn Italian as an adult.

Though of course it helps.

But this article isn’t for people who were good at languages at school.

It’s for people like me, who weren’t.

So, first let me tell you the good news.

People all over the world learn foreign languages, easily and naturally, as a normal part of their day-to-day lives. There are communities where nearly everyone speaks multiple languages. Seemingly without effort.

Isn’t that encouraging? Anyone can learn a foreign language! Even you.

Yet, there are many people who take up studying Italian but who will probably fail to achieve their goal of speaking and understanding the language.

You probably know people like that. Maybe you’re thinking “OMG, that’s me!”

So, how to learn Italian, even if you’ve never successfully studied a foreign language before? [Read more…]

Who knew that there’s a right way and a wrong way to take an Italian course?

With the wrong approach, your Italian won’t improve as much as it could do.

But get it right, and the time and money you invest will have a greater impact.

Meaning you’ll leave Bologna speaking and understanding Italian better!

5 ways to get more from your Italian course [Read more…]