Some Learning Aids for Our Natale!

Some Learning Aids for Our Natale!

We’ve just finished our Beginners class at the College of Commerce and we’re singing Italian Christmas songs this time of year… Grazie mille a tutti for your enthusiasm for learning Italian, for all the fun and laughs we have had.

We know that learning a language is a wonderful journey and through it we discover new world’s interpretations, new traditions and mind sets. Idiomatic expressions, sayings and words (of the new language) surprise us at times and make us smile. We had great laughs when we learned that in Italy we never say ‘buona fortuna’ (good luck) as it is supposed to carry bad luck… now we all know that we have to say ‘in bocca al lupo’ (in the wolf’s mouth)… we all know that we don’t answer ‘grazie’, but ‘CREPI’ (may the wolf die)… to know more about it just click here.

It’s great being a beginner as our learning pace is very fast and we can quickly see our improvements. Attending the Italian class gives us great help to get a good foundation and understanding of Italian grammar, which is indispensable if you wish to become fluent. Our pronunciation will be right from the very beginning and our mistakes will be a great source of improvement as the teacher will correct them for the benefit of all.

Nowadays we can also use useful apps or free websites to broaden our vocabulary, to get used to some specific expressions and to practice our Italian in an interactive way.

Sometimes, they’re more fun than books and we learn without much effort. Therefore, here is a list of those which I found so far and many thanks to those students who helped collect them.

My favorite website is www.education.vic.gov.au/LanguagesOnline/italian/italian.htm

It is completely free and you can learn lots of new vocab, sentence structures and practice your grammar in a fun way. Your children could enjoy it, too. In fact, I used this website a lot when teaching in Irish primary schools.

www.almaedizioni.it/it/almatv/ has been suggested by one of my students and it seems very good.

parliamoitaliano.altervista.org/ is a great website with a great deal of material for all Italian levels.

Duolinguo it.duolingo.com/ is also completely free and very good to build up your vocab in a fun and interactive way. Some of the vocab are not 100% accurate (for instance, they use ragazza instead of bambina for girl child), but these inaccuracies will be easily addressed when you attend your Italian class.

One of my students swears by Memrise www.memrise.com/ and she says that it helps her a lot with her vocab.

With www.italian-verbs.com/verbi-italiani.htm your problems with Italian verbs will come to an end! In fact, this website will give you all the regular and irregular verbs conjugated in a blink. Super handy, as long as you’ll learn the most common!

There are many other apps that you can download for free, but you’d need a smart phone or a tablet.

So, now… hurry up! You have lots of time over Christmas and I will be waiting for you in our Continuation class or back in the Dante and I’m looking forward to seeing your improvement!

More apps for smart phones, tablets and so on.

ps: this list is far from been complete and, please, feel free to leave a comment with your suggestions,

Carolina