The thumbnail picture for this post on my blog home page is a beautiful view of Florence at sunset.  I’ve never been to Italy, but I did fly over it on my way home from London in 1993.  And in my childhood, from age 5 to 8, I grew up in Mount Gambier, South Australia, [...]

On Sunday afternoon I followed up one the suggestions in my books, which Ralph also gave a week or two ago, and I looked at an Italian newspaper online.  I did a Google search to find Italian newspapers and chose Corriere Della Sera.it online.
It wasn’t very interesting so I decided to have a look at the motoring [...]

It’s only last Thursday that I drove to Chadstone shopping centre – the biggest in the Southern hemisphere – to buy the Italian for Dummies Audio Set. It’s an audio course with 3 CDs and a small 96 page book that you can follow along with the CDs to see in print the words [...]

The Italian word for milk is latte. Many of you already know that from ordering you coffee from Italian restaurants and coffee shops.
I prefer my coffee black, but I do like milk with my breakfast cereal.  And  I like it in scrambled eggs, and mashed potatoes.
On doctor’s orders, to help lower my cholesterol, [...]

One of the early lessons I learned is that when an Italian word has double consonants, such as penne, one must be careful to emphasise the double consonants.  The word pene has a different meaning.  One must also be careful when pronouncing vowels not to pronounce them the same way as in English, and even [...]

Once I had my iPhone dictionaries, I then began to realise that I needed a more structured approach to learning Italian, and I brought out The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Learning Italian (1st Edition) which I bought from Amazon in 1998. This book almost got tossed out during my big purge and cleanup two [...]

Colin was spot on in his comment to my last post when he wrote that learning a language from a desk calendar was novel. What I didn’t mention in my post was that the desk calendar not only gives a new Italian word every day (with a guide to pronouncing it), but it then [...]

For many years, perhaps the last ten, near the end of each year I’ve bought “The Joy of Cooking” desk calendar for the following year.  A cooking or food  tip every day; and the back of the calendar pages, when torn off, were handy for shopping lists, reminders and various notes.  I’ve even used the [...]

This evening I changed the Word Press theme I’m using from a magazine style layout to a classic blog style where each blog is seen in full on the blog home page and follow one another in chronological order. As always, you can search for something in the Search feature in the navigation bar [...]