Buongiorno tutti,
Planning a trip to Italy? Dreaming of living here or making Italian friends? Want to speak with your Italian partner in their native language? Or, do you desire to connect with your Italian heritage and speak to your relatives? Then why not learn some Italian!
If you’re motivated to learn for an upcoming holiday you will be able to find your way around (thankgoodness for Google Maps and translate), but knowing even just some travel basics will enrich your experience, help you connect with locals, and even allow you to make new friends. It will also give you the opportunity to get off-the-beaten-tourist-path and discover Italy a little more like a local.
I know that most of us are pretty time-poor and learning a language can seem like a mammoth task that you simply don’t have time for. Not to mention that learning Italian might seem especially difficult with all the verb conjugations, tenses, and irregularities in the language.
But how hard is it to actually learn Italian? I recently invited my friend Michele Frolla of Intrepid Italian to write about this very topic on my blog. And I was thrilled to discover that it’s actually not that hard to learn relatively speaking.
Michele Frolla from Intrepid Italian
In fact, according to the Foreign Service Institute who has 70 years of experience teaching foreign languages to U.S. diplomats, they’ve worked out that there are four groups of difficulty for speakers of English to learn languages, and Italian falls into group one, the easiest group!
Of course, it takes time and commitment, and attending a weekly in-person class might just not work for your schedule. If that sounds like you, then an online, self-paced course could be perfect!
Enter Michele’s Intrepid Italian courses for travel, beginners or intermediate students. They work on the 80/20 principle that 80% of your success or results come from just 20% of your effort. That’s my kind of Italian class!
Imagine speaking some Italian with your gondolier in Venice!
You can have a look on my blog about my own journey learning Italian - scroll down to the bottom and I have a video interview with Michele about her Italian courses in case you need some more info on what’s involved.
Michele is offering a special 20% off all her Italian language courses with the code SAVE20, so I wanted to shoot you this email in case you’ve been thinking about it for a while. The offer ends next Wednesday 15 March at 11:59 pm PDT, so be sure to take it up if you’re interested.
If you decide to take Michele’s class or enroll in another Italian language class, do let me know how you find it and any rewarding stories you have after using the language. It’s been such a personal joy for me to be able to connect with my Italian partner in his language as well as with his family - it wasn’t always easy either (I most notably called myself a soppressata or sausage once at dinner with his parents!) But if you’re able to laugh at yourself a little, shrug it off, and keep at it, I promise you that the rewards of being able to speak another language are immense.
Buona serata!
x Liv