Learning Italian Using Duolingo

Feb/March 2015

     In the summer of 2014, I traveled to the Mediterranean to visit Italy, Spain and France on a Costa Cruise.  My parents, son and daughter accompanied me on this trip.  Little did I know how out of my element I would be.  The Costa Cruise Lines primary language was Italian.  English speaking passengers were few and far between and prepaid, planned excursions were cancelled because there weren't enough English speakers to make the trips worthwhile.  Although my son had taken two years of college Italian, he didn't have enough experience with native speakers to help out, so I found our party in Rome alone.  It was a challenging, but wonderful day including a family walking tour of famous sites and a lovely pizza at a family run trattoria.  However, I vowed, before I travel abroad again, I'd learn the language of the country I'd be visiting.
     Right now, I am working on Italian and Swedish.  I took two years of Swedish in college, so some of that is a refresher.  I am going to focus on learning Italian with the app Duolingo.  Duolingo is a free app.  The program begins with the basics: one, boy, girl, man, woman, I am, and the.  The second basic set includes apple, eat, he, she, you.  The third basic set is drink, eat, water, sugar and bread.  To study the words the program speaks phrases in Italian and you must translate in English or it gives you an English phrase and you must select the correct Italian.  It also has a microphone that you hold down; you speak the correct Italian phrase into the mike and it detects accuracy of your pronunciation.  Sometimes it shows pictures and you must identify the correct modifier and then type the correct noun.
   I find the feminine and masculine words as well as the tenses quite challenging.  Right now I am doing pretty well with Basic 1, and I am working on Level 2 it's about reading and writing, so it is right up my alley and the some of the words relate to Latin Root study. I've done 20 lessons in 5 days. It's quite fun, so I'm going to get back to practicing.