Purpose

Welcome!

The purpose of this site is to serve as a repository of links and reviews of sites that you can use to improve your Italian, with a heavy focus on listening and speaking resources.

If you're looking to improve your grammar, learn new words, then check out my list of links related to those areas. This site isn't going to teach you Italian, but it will point you in the right direction for resources - both on- and offline to help you with your Italian.

A recent article on About.com by the Italian expert, Michael San Filippo, talked about how students spend too much time on grammar, vocabulary and workbook exercises and not enough time using their Italian in the real world. Maybe this blog can help you change that by showing you what resources are out there.

Learning Italian should engage all of your senses. Reading helps you to build your vocabulary. Writing allows you to express yourself in a new language and helps you to put the grammar that you've studied into practice. Listening will help you appreciate all the hours you've spent studying grammar, sentence structure and all those vocabulary words as well as train your ear to understand the language "on the go" and help you to become a better speaker. And speaking will allow you to communicate in Italian, forcing you to use all of your abilities to make yourself understood. At the end of the day, if you can't speak the language, how will it ever serve you?

It's important to practice all of these areas but placing a slightly greater emphasis on your weakest strengths. If speaking is easy for you, but you can't write well, don't stop speaking. Keep practicing both and try to identify areas where your writing is weak and practice - write letters to friends and family, join an Italian forum or chat room -- whatever you need to do to improve your writing. If reading and writing are easy, but you have trouble speaking, then find ways to talk more in the language. Often times, we avoid things that we do not like because we are afraid to fail, afraid of embarrassment or just plain old shyness. Whatever the reason, learning a language can help you overcome that. Learning a language is about taking risks, and the risks that you take with learning a new language and by putting yourself out there will have its rewards.

Get out from beyond your books, workbooks and staid dialogues/conversations and appreciate Italian as it was meant to by watching Italian movies, listening to Italian music, watching Italian TV and news, listening to podcasts, logging onto Skype and finding a new Italian friend to talk with or joining an Italian conversational group in your area.

All the while as you do these things, remember that you can't translate every word or phrase from English to Italian. As you listen, read, write and speak, try to think as an Italian would. Don't think in English and then try to translate. You won't have time in a social situation to do that, and it's a bad habit to get into. Keep your Italian simple and become more complex as you become more proficient, and understand that when you first begin studying Italian, you can't speak Italian as you speak English.

Be realistic. Know your limitations. Identify your strengths and weaknesses and work around them. Don't give up. Don't get discouraged. Practice, practice, practice!