Italians and language learning.

I’ve heard this comment many times from my Italian students. It basically goes ‘Italians are not very good at/incapable of learning other languages’. Well, I have an appropriate response to this oft made comment: ‘bollocks’ (si equivala approssimante a ‘palle’ in italiano, credo).

Sorry about the slight vulgarity, but sometimes it is one of the best ways to get your message across.

Italians are just as capable as anyone else of learning other languages, indeed, Italy has quite a multi-lingual population.

In Italy, as opposed to the UK, I’ve met loads of people who speak a second or a third language. French and Spanish are common second languages, as are English and German, and that is without mentioning all the various dialects which exist here, some of which are considered to be genuine languages separate from Italian, I should point out.

So come on all you Italian language students, basta negatività, as the Nike ad goes ‘just do it’. All you need is some motivation and application and it can be done. Yes, I know some are more ‘portati’ (gifted/naturally able) than others, but ‘where there’s a will, there’s a way’, to coin an old English saying.

To see what Italian’s are capable of take a look at Rob’s blog Wind Rose Hotel and you will see just how well an Italian can write in English. And Rob is by no means alone, I can assure you.  There is a young lady I know called Caterina who speaks English fantastically well.  There are many others too.

So, saying Italians cannot learn other languages is absolute, total, and utter bollocks.

Climbs down from soap box.

Moodling

Moodle, if you do not know, is a course management system or CMS (Joomla is a CMS too, but in Joomla’s case CMS stands for Content Management System). Moodle basically allows people to develop and run just about any course for just about any subject on-line.   It’s open source and its free.  The Open University in the UK is working on a Moodle based e-learning set-up for its students.  If it is good enough for the Open University, then it is more than good enough for me.  I intend to use Moodle to develop and manage learning materials.

At present, I link to various on-line exercises from my website, but, although these on-line exercises are OK, being a picky type of soul, I like the idea of being able to develop excercises myself and aim them at the specific needs of my students.  I’ve yet to decide just how I shall exploit Moodle, in fact, I’ve yet to install Moodle on my webserver due to the MySQL version not being the one I need.  I have spoken to my very efficient hosting service, HostingPlan who are willing to move my site over to a server which has an acceptable version of MySQL.  Thanks HostingPlan!

Once I have the right dbase stuff, I can proceed to install Moodle, which is not difficult if you have some familiarity with the web server administration system CPanel, which I do, luckily.  While I’m waiting for things to be transferred, I can install Moodle locally on my laptop and have a play to get myself familiar with what it can do and what you need to do to make it do what you want.  Once I know a little more, I can have a think about how to set things up and start creating courses and adding content.

My only gripe with on-line solutions for language learning is that it is not yet easy to practice that most essential of skills, speaking.  However, this is coming and with PHP5, CSS3 and Moodle 2.0,  something called “VoiceXML” will start to be implemented and developed and voice based interaction will become possible.  Yes, I know that this is not real conversation, but with a little imagination prompted conversations can be developed and should help non-native speakers of a language to deal with real-life situations more confidently.  The potential of this technology is without bounds in my opinion.  I find it fascinating.

I shall report on my progress.

Want to translate an Italian word?

Then try here: Frasi.net

The graphics may not be all that flashy, but the results are comprehensive. Try it, you might like it.

Walter Tobagi – in memoriam.

Ever heard of Walter Tobagi? Nope.  Not a surprise, neither had I until today.  It is the anniversary of his death today, poor chap.

Way back in 1980 on this very day Tobagi, who was a senior journalist working for the Corriere della Sera newspaper, was gunned down here in Milan by the then active Red Brigades.  His perceived crime?  He dared to criticise the wave of terrorism which was sweeping through Italy at that time.

In some ways, you can understand why journalists do not now always write as much and as in depth as they would like here.  Being forthright can cost you your life.

Be free with your speech, but do not take liberties.

Well, it was ‘ot.

It’s not hot today.  Lashing down with rain it is.  Cue summer colds.  A mere 13 degrees centigrade.  Bit of a change from the 34 degrees of last week.  Still, at least I can almost sleep at night – if were not for my writhing, squirming and kicking little son, that is.

Bouncy wi-fi connection? Try this.

UPDATE: 1st June 2007

I’m still having bouncy wi-fi problems, despite running the WinsockXPFi app once more.

I seem to have cured my bouncy wi-fi problem. Often, when there were other wi-fi connections active, both secure and non-secure in my area, my wi-fi connection to the www would come on and go off all the time. This was annoying to say the least. I tried updating the wi-fi drivers, reseting the access point and even installing a wi-fi trouble shooting application. All to no avail. Until now.

After hunting around the Internet I discovered this little application: WinsockXPFix. You don’t have to install it, just click on it, back up your registry, either using this program or something else and ask it to repair. Re-start your PC as instructed and you should experience wi-fi stability. I have for two days so far. So, if you have bouncy wi-fi and have Windows XP, Home or Pro, give it a go.

It seems as though installing or removing certain programs can corrupt a section of Windows which leaves your system with erroneous Window’s registry settings. This little app puts things back as they should be and seems to restore wi-fi stability.