Italian language lessons

My wife and I both love Italy and have visited there several times; at the moment we are preparing for another trip to take place in a few months' time. This fascination with Italy has prompted my wife to take an Open University course to learn spoken Italian: she travels once a week to Tel Aviv and learns a bit. At the beginning she mentioned that she doesn't always manage to write down everything the teacher puts up on the white board; remembering my MBA days, I recalled that there were students who never wrote anything but photographed the white board, and so I suggested that she do this. No one else in the class (about ten people where the youngest is maybe 55 years old) had even thought of this. Below is a cleaned-up example.

This picture, and all the others like it, remind me of when I was a schoolboy learning Latin: our homework one night was to write out the conjugations of a few verbs, and that exercise stuck with me for years. The same thing happened when I learned Hebrew; whilst the present tense in Hebrew only has four forms (masculine/single, masculine/plural, feminine/singular, feminine/plural), the past tense has eight forms, two of which aren't used in spoken Hebrew. It's the same in Italian: the picture shows the various forms of the verb 'Essere' - to be. This was an unfortunate choice to start off with; although Hebrew has an infinitive for 'to be' as well as past and future forms, it doesn't have a present tense, so it was very difficult for me to explain what 'Io sono' (I am) would be in Hebrew. Fortunately we've got past that stage.

I sort of understand written Italian, but can't really understand spoken Italian as it's always spoken too fast. So I was pleased that during my YouTube searches for material on Italy, I came across a series called 'Easy Italian', in which two or more people (one of whom turns out to be British) speak in slow Italian, or as one might say, Italiano lento. These videos are both fun to watch and very educational. Whilst it is good that there are Italian subtitles, having English subtitles as well is slightly problematic. On the one hand, I don't want to see the English so that I can understand the Italian as Italian, whereas on the other hand, having the English helps me with understanding the words that I don't know. My wife can't read the English fast enough.... But will these videos help me to speak Italian? I can say a few phrases, but recently whenever I try to say something in Italian, it comes out in French.

---

Obligatory guitar effects pedal paragraph: last night we had band practice and I took along my new pedalboard. Some of the effects were ok, but I will have to dial down the number of echoes in the presets of the multi-effects pedal. The octave pedal was also interesting: I might use it more in the 'down one octave' setting in order to add depth. Today arrived the tremolo pedal that I ordered a few weeks ago; it's a shame that it didn't arrive yesterday. Apart from the slightly annoying fact that the power socket is on one of the sides and not on the top, the pedal came with two pieces of sticky tape/velcro that will enable me to attach the pedal to the pedalboard easily. Yesterday the two mini-pedals fell off the pedalboard, as the velcro that was attached to the pedal came loose. The sticky side took with it something from the bottom of the pedal casing, leaving the pedals unattached. I put new sticky tape/velcro patches on the pedals that seem to have improved the situation.

---

This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
238	14/03/2010	Toyota	Organisation behaviour
558	14/03/2013	Minimising the overhead	Programming, ERP
687	14/03/2014	Research questionnaire / 2	DBA