la prima settimana - the first week

Ciao amici! It's been a busy first week as I've been working on getting through a few chapters in each of my Italian books as well as listening & reinforcement from my online resources. I've found that two of the most helpful books so far have been Italian: Made Simple by Cristina Mazzioni and Berlitz's Essential Italian. These offer a good balance of natural dialogue, pronunciation guides, storylines, and grammar rules in a nice, easy-to-read format. I've also found that while Duolingo is good for review, it doesn't always include the grammar rules and is often best used for listening and speaking practice.

On that note, I've been learning a lot of the basics and really want to try to get into some sentence formation this week. I can make basic sentences and introduce myself, but I haven't applied much else. In my German class last year, our teacher introduced a journaling assignment - basically, we would write around a specific prompt or theme each week, looking up words that we didn't know how to translate and using them in sentences. I found that this really helped improve my knowledge of the language and I felt much more confident in my sentence forming skills. With this in mind, I think my goal for the next few weeks is to keep an everyday journal, writing down new words I learn and hopefully having a few pages of solid Italian writing, however basic it might be!

I bought this cute little journal a few weeks ago and have been looking for an excuse to write in it :~)

I've kept up my listening practice and have found a few interesting Italian stations if you're into that sort of stuff -

RAI Isoradio - news and information station centered in Milan; frequent traffic and news updates
Radio Cortina - this is a more localized station, but I've noticed the hosts tend to speak slower and often they'll have special radio music shows featuring a mix of American and Italian music
Radio Italy Live - probably one of my favorites. It's based in New York, but plays Italian music around the clock which tends to go a lot slower than spoken Italian and frankly it's more fun to listen to!
News in Slow Italian - this website is good for listening comprehension, because it provides subtitles and goes slower to aid pronunciation and understanding. It has a lot of premium features, but the broadcasts themselves are free.

Another resource I've been taking advantage of lately is the Easy Languages channel, host to tons of videos in different languages. They interview native speakers on the streets to get cultural perspective and awareness around the world - they have episodes in Ukranian, Arabic, Japanese, German, and Italian uploaded on a weekly basis. It's great for gaining not only new vocabulary and listening practice, but also cultural awareness of the customs and traditions in Italy.

Easy Italian 3: Life at the Border 

And yet another exciting aspect of my learning comes through the prospect of a penpal! I'm not sure if this is a definite, but I am looking at different websites that offer Italian penpals willing to write back in forth in a mixture of English and Italian. It's practice for both recipients in a language that they are learning on their own time. I've talked to my parents about it and have done some research about how to go about setting up an exchange, and it seems the best and most affordable way to maintain a penpal is through email. Hopefully I can find someone near my age willing to participate in a language exchange online!

update - I found a girl named Sara online - she's sixteen, living in Italy, and more than willing to help me out with Italian, which I appreciate a lot! I'm writing an email to her as we speak; hopefully we can send messages back and forth and I'll let you know how this all goes in an update post :~)

Grazie mille per la lettura! See you all soon!
-Sarah

Comments this week:
Madi
Margo
Kat

giorno numero uno (day no. 1)

Che piacere vederti (Nice to see you)! I'm excited (and somewhat terrified) to begin my journey into Italian. However, I'm armed with a ton of resources - some of my favorite travel blogs, YouTube channels, and some guidebooks - to help me along the way. One of my favorite blogs is Learn Italian with Lucrezia, which I'll be using to help begin my Italian journey. I've been watching some videos from Tom Txxytu and taking notes on basic things like grammar and past tense verb conjugations. Hopefully once I begin to learn basic nouns and things like colors and the alphabet, I will be able to formulate sentences.

Duolingo has also been an important component for my language learning, because it gives me an opportunity to test what I know and incorporate new words into my vocabulary while receiving feedback. It's also an app, which is useful because it means I can practice just about anywhere. I've also ordered some books from the library on basic Italian. Things are getting off to a good start!

A few of my books I'll be using for the next few weeks - I'm excited!

At the same time, in trying to combine natural as well as more methodical approaches to learning, I really hope to fully immerse myself in the language. This can be through listening to Italian talk radio & podcasts or reading children's Italian books, which some people have found to be a helpful resource for new vocabulary. In doing so, I aim not to understand the entire exchange, but perhaps pick up a few phrases and gain insight into different dialects and articulations.

The Italian intonation is something that definitely does not come naturally to me, so I'll be practicing that this first week, because speaking as fluently as possible is one of my goals for this project. I will also be laying a good grammatical foundation for the rest of the journey by a more methodical approach, using books & videos to gain understanding. With a quick trip to Barnes & Noble and the library I managed to land myself a few more books to practice grammar and a chai berry tea.

It wouldn't let me add the video player I wanted to include, but a video that I've found particularly inspirational is Advice On Learning Italian by Tom Txyytu, which can be found here.

Hopefully this first week will be a great start to my project!
Arrivederci :~)

Comments this Week:
Hannah Gruen
Jason Smith
Laura Roth