Learning Italian in America is hard. Why? Simply the lack of resources. I mean real resource- interesting content (books, magazines, tv shows), day-to-day contact with the normal language, etc. A key part to learning a language is hearing it and using it. When was last time you heard casual, day to day italian being spoken?
It’s a widely held position that the only way to truely learn a language is to be immersed in it. Some language systems try to leverage this to sell their product, claiming they offer an “immersion experience”. Obviously, this is not true. It’s simply not possible to fit “immersion” into 8 hours. There’s a two fold reason why immersion is as important as it is: 1) You encounter the widest range of situations and language and 2) You are forced to use the language. Is there any hope for the italian learner stuck in the USA to come close to these 2 situations? I believe that with a bit of creative thinking and some resourcefulness, the answer more than ever is YES.
Let’s break it down in two parts: the nice, clean, (legal) part, and the other half from which this post earns its title. On the one hand, I’m going to say something that I’ve read in sooo many places (and seems silly to hear), but is still true: The internet is an amazing thing. I don’t think I’ve read a single article by a language teacher that didn’t say something along the lines of “The internet just puts so many resources at your fingertips” blah blah blah. It’s true, of course it does. Unfortunately, most people (myself included, initially) don’t really know how to leverage this. They usually stop just past the online dictionaries and grammer references.
The real way to take advantage of the internet is to realize that there’s a whole world of people using it somewhere else. Seem like an overly obvious statement? It is- but still, most of the time we americans tend to forget this. And specifically what I mean is this: There’s a whole world of normal, day-to-day content that you can make your own, and “immerse” yourself in. Start with newspapers- stay away from politics and head over to the culture and art section. Repubblica.it and Corriere.it are 2 good ones to start with. Don’t worry about understanding everything, both the style and vocabulary tend to be a bit different in the news realm. But notice the everyday situations that apply to you: most of the time the news you’re reading about is the same stuff you’ve been hearing about at home- leverage this to increase your ability in these areas. It’s these situations that will get you a bit closer to immersion point 1.
Now, better than just the newspaper, track down some blog websites. I used to hate the normal, day-to-day blogs where teenage girls complain about their boyfriends, and men talk about their weekends… until I found them in italian. Now I think their a great resource: most of time their written in such a stream of conscious style that you can really get a sense of how the person was thinking, and are very colloquial- a terrific thing for someone trying to improve their conversation skills. Read them out loud, several times at least, until you can emulate the emotion and get into it. This will help those phrases get a bit more embedded in your mind. It might not make total sense, and there might be a lot of slang that the beginning learner probably shouldn’t use, but put it in your mind anyhow- someday it might come back to help you. As for websites, Virgilio Blog is a good one that comes to mind.
Finally, one more site I like is wikipedia. They have a decent sized italian section- they next time you need to look something up, look it up in english- then in italian. You’ll already know more or less what it is, so following the article and absorbing the new vocabulary won’t be as difficult. The great part is that it won’t simply be a translation- due to the nature of wiki, it will actually be someone else’s native interpretation of the subject.
In the next post I’ll get down to the other half, the real benefit of the internet 
Alla prossima! Ciao!
