This morning I got up and went to Café Margot all grubby. I have been trying not to do that so much anymore. Go out in the world grubby, I mean. It is only marginally acceptable in Starbucks, which is…
Today, for only the second time in my life, I won a road race: the Arthritis Foundation’s Jingle Bell Run/Walk in Prospect Park. Yeah, it was a really small race. Yeah, it was held the same day as…
I am grumpy today because none of the books I own help much with syllable stress in Italian verb conjugations, so I am constantly getting hung up trying to figure out how to pronounce them. It’s as though the…
The Italian plural of the word “the” shows up in various forms in Italian: le (plural feminine), i (plural masculine), and gli (too complicated to explain right now, but it is pronounced more or less as lyee). I find the…
I woke up early, and went running, and found myself confronting a mind-versus-body kind of challenge: now that I am running faster, I don’t really feel like listening to VocabuLearn on my Central Park circuit. Here’s the thing.…
This afternoon I devoted quite a bit of time to cleaning and errands. Things are chaotic around here, because I’ve done so much Italian in recent weeks and so little of anything else. Tonight I went to a holiday…
An appointment with the gynecologist—one of my least favorite life events, even though my doctor is lovely—was made much more agreeable today by the Barron’s book Mastering Italian Grammar. I found it soothing to read up…
On Sunday I met a runner at my Van Cortlandt Park race who happens to work for an Italian company. I told him I was looking for unpaid, short-term work where I would get exposure to Italian. He was kind…
I have been continuing with flashcards and my vocabulary book, McGraw-Hill’s Italian Vocabulary, by Daniela Gobetti. I love this book. It is idiosyncratic, modern, and also sometimes wicked and dark. Today, I learned how to say, “Madam, do you…
Italian has borrowed numerous words from English—for example, il computer, il leader, and il nylon. Initially, as a native English speaker trying to learn Italian, I thought this seemed like a great thing, but it is actually kind of…
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