The course for Juventini
This is an introductory course to Italian. It assumes that you understand English. And it's for Juvenini. If you're not interested in Juventus (or at the very least, calcio) then you will not know what the heck it's all about and you'll be really bored. Tough break, but c'est la vie as we say in Italian.
How this works
There is no shortage of theories and opinions about how to learn a language. This course is based around the idea that if you can see (and hear) the language and if you can understand what it means, then you are learning. This means that it's important for me, as a course creator, to do anything I can to make understanding easier and also to make sure that the language you see is language you want to understand.
That is why this is a course that is based on stories. Every story is a short episode that involves well known characters in a situation that you will understand. Both the characters and the plot of the story will make it easier for you to understand the language, and that is the whole point. Hopefully you will find the stories fun as well.
Every sentence in a story has two translations, here's an example:
The stories are the driving force of the course. All explanations are based on examples from the stories, so the better you understand the stories the better you will understand all the rest.
Useful tools
Since you are facing a new language with thousands of new words you will need an easy way to figure out what they are. For this I recommend the WordReference.com Italian-to-English and English-to-Italian dictionaries.
In the course all the stories are translated, so you will rarely need a dictionary. But for anything else you want to read in Italian this will be important.
For geeks
This is an Assimil style course (although shorter and denser) with a dialog/story, parallel translation, audio, explanation and theory. The language is very informal and heavily idiomatic in order to make the stories both linguistically relevant and fun to read.
Credits
This course is created by Martin Matusiak. Guest voice actors: Kate and Mystery Man.
Copyright
This courses is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license.
This is an introductory course to Italian. It assumes that you understand English. And it's for Juvenini. If you're not interested in Juventus (or at the very least, calcio) then you will not know what the heck it's all about and you'll be really bored. Tough break, but c'est la vie as we say in Italian.
How this works
There is no shortage of theories and opinions about how to learn a language. This course is based around the idea that if you can see (and hear) the language and if you can understand what it means, then you are learning. This means that it's important for me, as a course creator, to do anything I can to make understanding easier and also to make sure that the language you see is language you want to understand.
That is why this is a course that is based on stories. Every story is a short episode that involves well known characters in a situation that you will understand. Both the characters and the plot of the story will make it easier for you to understand the language, and that is the whole point. Hopefully you will find the stories fun as well.
Every sentence in a story has two translations, here's an example:
- Del Piero: Ho sbagliato il rigore.
- Del Piero: I missed the penalty.
- [(I) have made-a-mistake the penalty.]
The stories are the driving force of the course. All explanations are based on examples from the stories, so the better you understand the stories the better you will understand all the rest.
Useful tools
Since you are facing a new language with thousands of new words you will need an easy way to figure out what they are. For this I recommend the WordReference.com Italian-to-English and English-to-Italian dictionaries.
In the course all the stories are translated, so you will rarely need a dictionary. But for anything else you want to read in Italian this will be important.
For geeks
This is an Assimil style course (although shorter and denser) with a dialog/story, parallel translation, audio, explanation and theory. The language is very informal and heavily idiomatic in order to make the stories both linguistically relevant and fun to read.
Credits
This course is created by Martin Matusiak. Guest voice actors: Kate and Mystery Man.
Copyright
This courses is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license.
