Italian: a funny 3-minute introduction

(video in English)
Note that this post is a copy of the one over at my fluentin3months.com blog. There may be more comments over there.

This is a short video (less than 3 minutes long) I made about how to start learning Italian while I was passing through Rome again this year. There’s only so much you can say in 3 minutes, so it’s mostly a light-hearted video that obviously can’t be so detailed and is not to be taken seriously! Most of all, it was a good excuse for me to dress and act silly around Rome! You can watch it embedded through Youtube above in English, or through Dotsub below in Italian with English subtitles. [Note that these may not be viewable in feed readers / for email subscribers, so you might have to click through to my site]. You can also watch it entirely in Esperanto, French, Spanish and Portuguese on this site by clicking the links to the right!

(video in Italian with English subtitles)

Useful links

Here are some useful links that might help you in learning Italian! Feel free to share others in the comments:

http://www.wordreference.com Great free online dictionary with an excellent, active and helpful forum for asking for translations of particular terms

http://it.answers.yahoo.com and http://answers.yahoo.com Another forum, the famous Yahoo Answers, but in Italian! If you have intermediate Italian, then ask a question (in Italian) about the language in the Società e Culture –> Lingue section. A huge amount of natives are only too eager to help. This is great for getting extremely quick answers for questions or having small text reviewed, for free. Note that the answerers are non-linguists (and sometimes mostly teenagers) so you should wait until you have several answers to be 100% sure. For beginners in Italian, use the second link for the same site in English and post your question in the Society and Culture –> Languages section. When writing in English, usually the wordreference forum is much better; non-natives would be answering in the English version of the Yahoo Answers site, and once again there are a lot of teenagers with time to kill there…

http://italian.about.com Interesting blog for beginner to intermediate learners. Includes regularly updated articles and free resources for learning the language.

http://www.transparent.com/italian/ Another blogger with a good chance of doing really well in the Top 100 Language Blogs, with excellent frequent tips about the language with lots of examples.

http://www.marinajonica.org/ A blog entirely in Italian written by an Italian (and good friend of mine) about Montegiordano in the beautiful Calabria region in the south of Italy. Italians blog too, so if you do a search for a topic that interests you (technology, music, etc.), but in Italian, then you can practise by reading modern content written by natives regularly. http://blogsearch.google.it is a good search tool for finding such blogs.

As I mentioned in the video, twitter is a good way of practising each day with an Italian status update. Feel free to follow my regularly updated Italian twitter! It is not proofread, so I can’t guarantee that there are no occasional mistakes.

The Internet is full of sites in Italian; anything you can find in English (news, sports, blogs etc.), you can almost certainly find it in Italian!! A quick search on Google will give you a list of radio stations and even some live streaming video that you can watch/listen to. If you feel like sharing a site about learning Italian, or one in Italian, do so in the comments!

I hope you liked my video!! Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments.;)