How to improve your Italian comprehension? Here is my system.
Obtain mastery in Italian; it would seem like an easy task nowadays. On the internet, you can find many apps, also free, to try with this beautiful language, but difficult is to learn properly.
The first question to ask is: I want to get to write efficiently, to understand suitably (written and oral), or to speak fluency Italian? Each of these skills requires a different approach. We choose to understand the Italian language, primarily.
Furthermore, the central question is the following: if I could choose, now, what kind of Italian would I want to speak?
I will explain better. If I could magically decide to be born in a city other than my real one, to have got that particular accent, the way of thinking and talking, which birth city would I choose? This decision is the fundamental question.
Indeed, if for work purposes, study reasons or simply because I would like to watch a movie in the original language that was made and interpreted by Romans actors rather than Sicilians, Tuscans or Venetians, it should be important to be familiar with that precise linguistic form. Instead, I can't find it in a book or a magazine article.
How to do? After choosing, for example, to want to be born in Florence (or Rome) and being able to talk fluently with Florence (or Roman) accent, here is the technique I propose.
To start, you have to find an on-line teacher, with whom talk on Skype, for example, on www.verbling.com or it.verbling.com you can find many instructors with very low prices.
You should to search on the internet about a transcribed conversation, or radio interview of a person that you know is born in a particular city (in this case Florence or Rome), save the link, send it to your Skype teacher and ask him to have a lesson on it.
You should decide to approach a text of no more than five hundred words (a couple of pages), that you could read in fifteen or twenty minutes.
With your online tutor, you have to do a simple reading exercise in which teacher reads a paragraph before you, and then you repeat it. After about twenty minutes of reading, the teacher should make you two or three questions about the meaning of the text you have read together, and you should try to give the answers, that's all.
Repeat this exercises for a couple of months by changing the transcription every day, and you will have an excellent improvement.
You will speak, you will understand, exactly the particular kind of Italian you have chosen.
If you want, you can focus on a subject that you particularly like, for example, interviews on economics, daily gossip, sports, health, the internet or anything else, to optimize your exercise and make it more enjoyable to you.
An example where you can find transcribed conversation or radio interview here
http://italianoperstranieri.mondadorieducation.it/cervelli-in-fuga/
I particularly like the interview "Cervelli in fuga" with the Italian (born in Lucca, Italy) Alberto Bandettini, here http://italianoperstranieri.mondadorieducation.it/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/c1_comprensione_orale_02.mp3
Differently from usual expensive courses where you can commonly learn to say "buongiorno e buonasera."
Carlo Marino
30 mai 2018
