Photo: Firenze (photographer: Mike Cotrone)
THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE
I started the journey of learning the Italian language during the end of the COVID lockdown in March of 2021. Learning Italian has always been a goal of mine for many years, but my spare time always went to family or work. I absolutely love the Italian language as it sounds so beautiful listen to. My goal was to journey from a beginner to an intermediate in speaking, reading, and writing. The CEFR language level equivalent of an A1 beginner through a B2 intermediate. * Full disclosure * as I am not paid nor compensated in any way by any of the services and/or schools I mention. This blog is solely a recount of my journey and what I used along my path.
I began using duolingo as a native english speaker that had 0 experience with the Italian language. I began using duolingo anywhere from 2 hours to three hours a week in the beginning. I kept this pace for around 3 weeks as I was trying to figure out my own style of how to learn, memorize, and try to speak a little. I then began to use duolingo from around 10 to 30 hours per week building my basic vocabulary and basic -ARE verbs. This app really helped me get launched into learning Italian and I still use it from time to time. In addition to Duolingo I ventured into using Babbel and Bussuu which I found to be slightly different from one another, but equally effective for my mobile self paced learning.
Around 3 1/2 months into using the mobile apps I found that I struggled to communicate verbally much past nouns and some nouns with adjectives. I found my self looking for an online tutor and wound up starting with using Preply. I matched up with a tutor that lives in Venice and she is an absolutely a brilliant language teacher. I spent about 6 months doing 1-4 hours per week of live tutoring through Preply while still studying using my mobile apps from above. My tutor created and taught me on an accelerated A1 / A2 path which gave me underlying grammatical focus in which I sorely needed prior to the tutoring. Since then I use iTalki from time to time as I like to try to dust off my pronunciation in speaking when we are not living in Italy. It still amazes me how fast I can get out of practice when back in the United States, however the same goes in reverse thankfully when I return to Italy.
After our first vacation to Italy and approximately around 1.5 years into my studies I wanted to join an online language school that could help me formally follow the CEFR path of A1 - B2 officially. Our friend recommended the ItaLingua school in San Francisco, California as they offered many online classes from A1 to C2. I signed up as a A2 student and began the trek in a virtual classroom setting. At first I was intimidated by speaking in front of a learning group, but by the end of the A1 course I was pretty comfortable in this setting. I continued on to A2, B1, and B2 classes as my grammatical and cultural learning really was amplified. I met some very nice people, learned a ton about places, foods, and historical landmarks while learning the language. I enjoyed this type of learning at that point of my journey.
Once my family and I temporarily moved to Italy I decided to continue my language school journey in Rome. This was very intimidating since I was a little over 2 years in my studies and by this time I was learning online at the B1 level and using an Italian discord server for reading/writing with online friends. Day 1 at the Leonardo Da Vinci Language School gave me pause for a few minutes since all of my teachers up to this point, who all were from/living in Italy, however mainly taught in English with then Italian learning. So back to day 1 - I walked into class, saying "Hi / Ciao" to my teacher followed by a super long Italian response of "Ciao! Sono Claudio e aspettiamo per il resto della classe per arrivare". I stopped, slightly panicked internally, and then I remember saying to myself "yo, you speak Italian - Listen and go!". :)
If you have any questions about my language journey feel free to ask questions here.