Madrelingua Italian Language School
Italian courses in the historic centre of Bologna, Italy, or online from your home or office!
If you have a job, a family, well let’s say a life, you may not be able to take much time out of it to learn Italian in Bologna.
In which case, you’ll want to absorb as much Italian as you can while you’re here.
The solution? An intensive Italian course!
But just how intensive IS an intensive Italian course in Bologna? Might it be, well, too much?
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:
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…)
Yes.
No.
It depends.
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.
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?
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.
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!
Learn Italian IN Italian
Better than you’d imagine, actually.
At least, once you get used to it.
And assuming your teacher knows what she’s doing.
Lots of reasons.
But most obviously, people come to us to learn to speak and understand Italian.
Should we insist that they have an excellent working knowledge of English before we allow them to study Italian?
Of course not. [Read more…]
SI!!!!!
It’s December again!
Time for the biggest discount of the year on all Italian group courses!
Twelve months ago, way back in 2012, many of you took advantage of this very same offer to save 20% on your Italian course at our school in Bologna, Italy.
Well, now you can do it again, and so speak and understand Italian even better, for even less!
For the next two weeks, save 20% on your 2014 Italian course, and you don’t even have to decide now when you’ll be coming!
This is how it works: [Read more…]
It’s time to book a place for the Madrelingua staff Christmas lunch.
Wanted: somewhere near the school and not too pricey.
Above all though, the food has to be good.
Yesterday, Stefi and I checked out one of the options, the Osteria Bocca Buona (pictured), which offers a fixed lunch menu for €9.
Usually in Italy you’d expect your meal to be divided into “primo” (pasta, rice or whatever) and “secondo” (meat, fish…).
Bocca Buona instead offers a “piatto unico”, that strange foreign habit of combining both courses on “one plate”.
The €9 includes the “piatto unico”, plus bread, water and coffee.
Cheaper lunch menus like this one, which are aimed at office workers, will often have no additional service charge to worry about (but check!)
Note also that, in Italy, away from the extreme tourist hotspots, nobody tips.
So you needn’t, either: no one will think less of you. [Read more…]
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!
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:
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)
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
..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….
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!
Picture, I dunno, a tree.
Got an image of a tree in your mind? Brown trunk? Green bushy foliage.
OK, forget the foliage, as it’s almost winter. Bare branches then.
Your tree is Italy (makes a change from a boot, right?)
On the bottom left of the bushy part of the tree, where the leaves start (or will do, when it’s finally spring again), you have the border with France.
There’s a place called Ventimiglia (“twenty miles”) right there, on the border.
A little way along, on the underside of the tree at the angle with the trunk, there’s Genova.
And up from there, into the canopy, like a nesting bird, Turin. [Read more…]
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…]
Madrelingua is certified as conforming to the quality standard UNI 11863:2022 "Italian language and culture training services for foreigners"
