To be honest, though, while I knew the classes were important if I wanted to learn anything, I was slightly terrified of going to level 1 classes.  What if everyone else was way better at the language than me?  What if I just couldn’t understand the teacher?  What if I physically couldn’t say certain words?  Millions of questions circled through my mind.

My greatest concern though was that I would feel like a complete idiot while sitting in class.  I thought the tendency for teaching elementary level students would be to talk to you like you are a baby in that annoying high pitched voice and kind of wiggle fingers in your face.  Fortunately, my teacher Laura was much more sensitive than that.  The teacher understands that while you can’t speak Italian, you can speak other languages and are a generally competent person.  Therefore, each member in the class was given respect and treated like an adult.  Also, to make everyone forget how silly they sounded trying to say certain words, we played lots of games and when someone made a mistake, Laura would politely correct it but would never single out a certain student.

Class started with the basics: “Hello, my name is”, “Where are you from?”, “How old are you?” and how to respond to those questions.  By forming a circle and passing a bouncy ball between students, a simple Q&A game was facilitated.  The exercise allowed students to repeat the phrases and get used to hearing and speaking Italian in a dynamic way.

Each day, the teacher built on what we had previously learned and by the end of week one, I was able to communicate with my flat mates and landlady in Italian and with a significant amount of hand gesturing (getting pretty good at that, must admit!), I was able to get my general point across to people in stores.

The most important thing about the class for me was that the teacher spoke in Italian the entire time.  While it seemed kind of daunting at first – how could she teach us, with just the Italian language, how to conjugate a verb? – it worked quite well, and we managed to cover a wide variety of grammar topics.  Also, through this full immersion, we were all subconsciously absorbing how to create sentences and picking up the odd word here and there.  It has been a great experience so far and after two weeks, my entire class moved up to level two and are building on the foundation created in the initial level.

After consulting the students at Torre di Babele, we decided to begin with one of the topics that cause them the most trouble, reflexive verbs. In Italian the use of reflexive verbs is rather common when it comes to daily actions. Reflexive verbs require the use of reflexive pronouns for instance, “mi”, “ti”, and “si”. Ok… ok…! I’ll shut up, at let Alvise explain it to you.

I hope you like it. We look forward to reading lots of comments on this blog post. We will need your input to meet your needs, so don’t hesitate to add your suggestion for new topics or improvements to be developed on these videos. For suggestions you can also use the form on the index of Italian Online Resources.

P.S. I almost forgot… the videos show a hint of our teaching method, a direct approach to Italian, no translations!

Are you ready to learn Italian?

Enjoy the Lesson!

You can download the exercise and solution file for this video with the following link:

Reflexive Verbs
Exercise and Key