How to Sound Natural When Speaking Italian: 25 Useful Expressions

I have been learning Italian for just over two years now and after five trips to the country and living with a native Italian speaker, I am happy to have made decent progress. I sat a GCSE in Italian in May/June of this year with a colleague; we met up once a week to revise and we did a fair amount of past papers and Zooms with a tutor and other exercises which lead to us both achieving a grade 9 (the highest grade at GCSE now, higher than the old A* I have to add!).

I don’t get much time to study intensively as my job consumes so much time and I have my poetry, social life, family etc, but it is good to maintain as much exposure to the language as possible to keep it ticking over. I still remember a tip a woman gave me when I first set out on my language learning journey which was to keep it in your life in some small way every single day. Even when you can’t actively sit and study, playing music, looking at an Instagram page or Whatsapping someone in your target language.

Continue reading “How to Sound Natural When Speaking Italian: 25 Useful Expressions”
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Learning Italian: My Learning Diary (20 months in)

[Click here to read my post featuring 25 Italian expressions for natural-sounding speech]

I intended to write the second language learning diary after my 12-day trip to Italy in August 2021; I wanted to track my progress soon after spending some time in the country, surrounded by the language. However, the return to school in September and a few stalls in my learning meant I’m only just getting round to it now, 8 months after the first entry.

My first diary entry detailed the methods I had used and the point I had reached. Admittedly, I don’t adhere to a strict learning schedule as I work full-time and it’s harder when you don’t live in the country of your target language, plus it’s not urgent as my partner speaks fluent English. I have picked it up a bit more recently as I am entered in for GCSE Italian at the school where I work with a colleague, and we are helping each other. I also recently returned from a 6-day trip to Italy where I got to practice some more speaking than usual (more about that later). You can read about two of those days, spent in the Alpine region of Trentino, here.

These have been my main methods of learning Italian since my last blog entry in April 2021:

Continue reading “Learning Italian: My Learning Diary (20 months in)”