The Italian Language Today
Aims
My intention is to deal with topics of a more advanced nature, concentrating on modern Italian usage with examples from newspapers, magazines, books, popular songs, films and television, concentrating on the issues and problems for people whose first language is English.
Many people I speak to about Italian seem to think that Italian is an 'easy' language to learn. It may be relatively easy to acquire a basic competency, but to be able to speak and write correctly in Italian is a difficult task, requiring many years of study.
I am a passionate advocate of spending a good deal of effort on achieving a strong grammatical knowledge of both English and Italian. The study of grammar is a fascinating one and brings enormous rewards in terms of understanding and satisfaction. Knowledge of its grammar shows Italian not to be just a collection of words and phrases which must be learned, but a wonderful structure, full of patterns and links.