Madrelingua Italian Language School
Italian courses in the historic centre of Bologna, Italy, or online from your home or office!
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…]
Who knew that there’s a right way and a wrong way to take an Italian course?
Italian courses in Bologna!!
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!
This is possibly the weirdest thing I’ve ever done, inviting total strangers to dinner.
Let me explain.
You know how teenagers are? Competing friendships, ever-changing plans, group dynamics, that sort of thing?
Well, I was supposed to be cooking for my eldest daughter’s friends this evening. But now it’s just “friend”.
The fish was already defrosting. And I got a bit carried away at the supermarket and came home with vegetables for at least eight.
We’re six.
Seems a shame really, but who accepts dinner invitations for Saturday night on Saturday afternoon?
Certainly no one we know.
So, just on the off-chance, if you happen to be in Bologna this evening (Saturday 16th November), and don’t have anything better to do… [Read more…]
The Tower of Babel, by Lucas van Valckenborch (1535 or later–1597) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Just as French became the “lingua franca” in the area known as France, and Spanish the predominant language in Spain, so Italian evolved as the national tongue in Italy.
Right?
Wrong.
While it’s true that all three languages derive originally from Latin and have evolved their modern “similar but different” forms over many centuries, it’s certainly not the case that Italian, French and Spanish would have been the main form of communication across the respective territories during the whole of that time.
Those of us from the English-speaking world are used to speaking a fairly homogenous language, that is to say one without significant variations within our country of origin, or across different countries.
Despite the differences between, say, American, British or Indian English, people in each place are still recognisably speaking the same language, one which was spread by British settlers/colonisers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Empires require a degree of standardisation to function efficiently.
Geographical isolation, on the other hand, encourages variation, especially over the long term. So in Europe, with its long history, regional variations in language were and are profound, even within relatively small areas of the continent.
In the eighteenth century, at the time of the American declaration of independence, most Frenchmen, Italians or Spaniards would not have travelled more than a few miles from home, so the language they spoke would have been defined by the place of their birth rather than by the need for a national lingua franca.
Perhaps the same was true of the myriad of Native-American languages, or the hundreds of languages still spoken in modern India (but not true in what were once imperial China and Japan, where central rule was the norm.)
In short, politics and technology influence which language comes to be used in which geographical area.
French, for instance, is said to have been given a boost as a “national language” by Napoleon, who conscripted vast armies to conquer Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Soldiers needed to be able to understand their orders, and conscripts who only spoke, say Breton, would have been have little use in a fight.
Likewise, many a Spaniard will tell you that at heart he is really a Catalan, Basque or whatever but speaks Spanish out of necessity, almost as a second language, because it is the language of his state.
If, like Sam Cooke, you “don’t know much about history”, you might be surprised to know that Italy was only unified as a nation around 150 years ago. Before that it was divided into various reigns and city states, each of which had its own dominant language/dialect.
Linguistic variations in the Italian peninsular were (and still are) particularly rich. As an example, according to Wikipedia there are six variants of the Bolognese dialect. If you lived right here in the city, you’d have spoken one form, while people living in the countryside to the north or south of town would have communicated in other, different, forms.
There was certainly no assumption that someone living in one part of what is now Italy would have been able to talk to an inhabitant of another city or region, and nor could they; Italian dialects/languages are very different from one another.
As history is said to be written by the victors, so today’s Italian is the dialect that happened to emerge from the unification process as the “official” one. The other forms continued to exist and to be used as before, but for the first time there was an “official, national” way of communicating.
With the new Italian state came military-service and education, both powerful forces for promoting the national language. Later the mass media helped too. First cinema, radio and newspapers, then TV gradually made a good working-knowledge of Italian indispensable, even in regions which still maintain separate linguistic traditions (German in Bolzano, for example.)
Once, many Italian children would have been effectively bi-lingual, speaking both their local dialect AND Italian, to a greater or lesser extent. Sadly, this has now changed, and in many areas of Italy dialect is more of a memory than a living language.
Fifteen or twenty years ago in Bologna it was still normal to hear older people chatting away to each other in dialect. Which was reassuring, as I always had a good excuse for not knowing what was going on.
Middle-aged people would understand what their parents were saying, but probably not use it much themselves. The world had moved on, after all.
Their children/grandchildren would be oblivious.
Fast-forward to today, and the last generation to use Bolognese dialect naturally and fluently has mostly disappeared, the middle-aged are now aged, the children are adults.
It’s become much rarer to hear dialect spoken on the bus or in the park. Only traces remain, though there are a number of websites for people interested in learning.
Nevertheless, there remain a few words of Bolognese which are indispensable for both Italian and foreign visitors to the city.
Learn these 3 dialect words to get by in Bologna, and to give your Italian a Bolognese flavour!
In Bologna, you’ll throw your trash into the “rusco” (in Italian that would be: pattume, spazzatura).
And you’ll gain entry to an office or appartment building, by pressing the “tiro” (which rings the bell to invite whoever’s inside to open the main door.)
When something surprises you, exclaim “soccia” or “socmel” (which means “suck it”.) While that sounds, and is, very vulgar, even old ladies use the term round here, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t too.
Try it: tiro, rusco…
Socmel, you’re talking Bolognese already!
Like Italian food?
Then you’ll certainly be familar with the classic ‘spaghetti bolognese’. Mmmm! Just like they eat it in Bologna, right?
Well no, actually.
The famous ‘ragù alla bolognese’ is used in lasagne, people eat it with polenta, but mostly, it’s served with tagliatelle. NOT with spaghetti. (If you must, you can find out more about spaghetti here)
What are tagliatelle? Yellow sheet pasta, less than 1 mm thick, cut into long strips around 7-8 mm in width.
According to the Italian cooking website giallozafferano.it, tagliatelle were invented in 1487 by Bolognese master chef Zefirano on the occasion of the wedding of Lucrezia Borgia and Alfonso I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara.
He was apparently inspired by the bride’s long blonde hair. The cook, that is, not the Duke.
Madrelingua is certified as conforming to the quality standard UNI 11863:2022 "Italian language and culture training services for foreigners"
