(That is, learning Italian.)
Once we embarked on this Italian adventure, it occurred to several of us that we needed to bestir ourselves to learn at least some rudimentary Italian. Luckily my Italophile friend Valerie recommended DuoLingo to me, and soon the whole family was using it. It is a free on-line language learning system that plays like a game, and I love it!
You can use it to learn other languages, including not only English, Spanish, French, and German, but Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Hebrew, Vietnamese, Welsh, Swahili, and Romanian--and that is far from a complete list of DuoLingo's offerings. In addition, they're currently developing courses in Czech, Hindi, Japanese, Yiddish, and five other languages, including High Valyrian (which I've never heard of before).
Not only is the program free and fun to use, but it seems rather noble in its aspirations.
At the same time, I took in-person Italian lessons from Nando Gonzaga, whom I heartily recommend. Much as I love DuoLingo, I also really enjoyed sitting across from an actual flesh-and-blood Italian speaker who was able to push me further along the learning curve with all kinds of games, charts, and other aids. His blog has a number of entertaining entries for those interested in "la bella lingua," including the song that gave this blog its name.
Of course I won't really know how well any of this is working until we get to Italy and try to actually speak and understand Italian in situ. But I am hopeful. At least I know how to say such handy DuoLingo phrases as "Lei ha troppi fidanzati" (She has too many boyfriends) and "Quasi tutte le mucche sono morte" (Almost all the cows are dead).
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2 comments:
Let's hope you'll never need to use those two handy phrases in situ. (Unless there's some kind of cause/effect scenario where "She who has too many boyfriends causes almost all the cows to die.) Keep posting, Tessa, I'm loving this!
Thanks...but I wonder who you are.
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