Easy similar Italian words - and an update on using Duolingo leagues on basic and upgrading to Premium

The words in Italian are in bold so you can re-read and learn them. Mano of the words simply add o to create the masculine in Italian, for bambino, mano, medico, parco, telefono, vino.  Add the feminine ending e (like our English word feminine) to aprile, credere, impossibile, and simile. Watch out for the double letters in infatti, in fact the letter t appears twice, like in the words letter and fatter.

EASY WORDS

aprile - April (No capital letters starting months in Italian)

bambino - baby

credere - believable

durata - duration 

infatti - in fact

impossibile (im-poss-ee-bill-ay) - impossible

mano - hand (like manual labor, hand work)

medico - doctor

parco - park

(il - the masculine) progetto - project

simile - similar

telefono - telephone

televisione - television

(il) trena - (the, masculine) train

vino - wine

CONFUSING WORDS

ragioni - not regions but reasons, rationality. The i at the end is a plural, like the word spaghetti.

These are todays words from my Duolingo exercises. I used Duolingo for free for a year learning Spanish. 

Now I am doing Italian. This was for a proposed holiday in Spain which has now been cancelled. Never mind. My project for the year is to learn Italian. 

Advertising On Duloingo and Websites

Duolingo is no longer the same as before. It has turned more commercial, like Facebook and the Daily Mail, everything on the internet seems to be bombarding me with advertising. I can't afford to buy another garment from Shein every hour. No point sending me cat food ads when I don't have a cat. I already have installed Grammarly.

Leaderboards On Dulingo

I am addicted to the Leaderboards on Duolingo. You can't be bored with the Leaderboard. It gives you points for every exercise completed. You compete with up to thirty others on your level. If you are in the top half dozen (the exact number varies from fewer in the lowest to more the hightest leaague) you go up. Conversely, if you are in the lowest of your league you slip back to compete with those who spend less time and effert. 

Competing For Position

You do an exercise and add points. Go away for an hour or two, to do something useful, cleaning and tidaying the house, calling a friend, calling family, writing a book, answering mail, paying bills. You come back and somebody else has been busy and caught up right behind you in points or overtaken you. 

Blocked By Duolingo

Then, last week, March 2025, I kept getting signs that I had run out of hearts and could not do any more exercises. Maybe, last year, I had not reached this limit. Maybe, this year, they have changed their system.

Resisting Paying

At first I resisted paying. I am in a system which advertises itself as free. I have been promoting it in my blogs as free. I am a loyal long term member.

I was afraid of being sucked into paying a big sum later, or small sums forever, even after I die. (I am in my seventies.) 

The system promised that I would start getting hearts again if I came back after three hours. Two hours, one hour.

Agreeing To Pay

I thought again. Let's at least check the prices. I have had a year's worth of value from them. I get hours a day from them. I owe them something. I'd pay for food, clothes, entertainment. 

Comparative Costs

The amount asked was less than UK one hundred pounds. (Some of my travel websites are quoting hotels in NZ currency because of my February trip to New Zealand when I set my laptop to the local currency.) If you are being quoted in another currency, or in your own currency and you want to tell a friend or readers another currency, you can look for the flag or currency abbreviation on the website page, click on it and change it, instead of having to go into another website to get the day's currency exchange rate and echange table column.) The answer was sixty pounds.

Family Budget

I thought, that's doable. I told all the family in a whatsapp group chat. They did not objects. They were all spending far more on other activities overseas.

Commitment and Cancelling

I now have two weeks to cancel. Then I will be committed to sign up to premium for the year. 

Any Advantage To Premium?

I must admit I am a bit disappointed because don't find that premium is doing me much extra good. 

I was expecting to be given the grammar clues about what I had done wrong. But I am getting most answers right. I am writing down the correct answers in an A6 notebook labelled Italian. 

Self-Checking Translation Answers

My hand-written pages listings are no longer in alphabetical order, dictionary style  That used to delay me in writing, while I looked for a page which still had an empty line for that letter of the alphabet. Instead, I write down in the running order of the day's words and sentences learned. 

Some of the exercises are timed. I keep Google translate open to check the spelling. 

Mistakes Allowed

f I am tired from not enough sleep, or over-confident, I get impatent and make a silly mistake. Sometimes if I mistype, or use a spelling closer to the English sound, a instead of e, or vice versa, the system just warns me of a typo. 

No time is lost on Duo. 

But I take time to check and if necessary correct that spelling in my hand-written list, or underline the vowel or double letter as a memory aid.

Time Lost On Mis-Translation

However, if I am hasty and careless, I might miss out the word not, or only, having grasped the subject object and verb. So I slow down and check both all the words in the Duolingo suggestions. Then I re-read all the words I have typed, to see if I am missing any extra word. 

Word Order And Alternative Words

I use Google to select the word order. 

Sometimes google translate gives me another similar word which is not acccenpted by the Duolingo system. Is that unreasonable? I can flag this in the choice of comments as 'my answer should be accepted'. 

But I now realised that there is a good reason for me to be using the suggested word in the Duolingo exercise. The reason is because it was teaching me a particular word and I have not learned it.

Conclusion - For You

So, hey, ho, off to study I go. I hope this has helped you, or at least entertained you.

Useful Website

duolingo.com

Please follow my blogs. Here on blogspot you can find my blogs on travel, languages, dress of the day, and comic poetry, and wine and dine. The first three are the most active with new blog daily. 

If you want to make a suggestion for a subject, you can contact me through here or another medium. I am on Facebook, linkedIn when I can recall my password after changing my email, but that's another story. Meanwhile, I'm off back to Duolingo. 

Have a nice day. In Italian that's buona giornata.!

Please, share links to your favourite posts, with your friends.

Per favore, condividi i link ai tuoi post preferiti, con i tuoi amici.

See you again, soon.

Ci rivedremo, presto.


Maybe tomorrow.

Forse domani.


I hope so!

lo spero!

Why Write A Travel Blog?

Statue of Poet and Priest in Ljublijana, capital of Slovenia.

Slovenian National Poet Frances Preseren.
 

I am currently giving speeches on languages. A side issue is placenames and sightseeing in the countries. One reason for learning languages is to help you get around. Not get lost. Find your way to major sights. Check opening times on the doors of closed restaurants. Read signposts. Now I am putting my researches on languages on my travel blog. I tried running a sparate language blog, but I got more readers for eactly the same post on a travel blog. More people are interested in travel than in learning languages. 

But is the number of readers relevant? Yes it is. Both for the satisfaction and as a commercial undertaking. 

Why would you start to write a blog?.

I started my travel blog primarily to maintain my reputation as a travel writer. 

Secondly as a record of my travels. A way to organize my trips into specific subjects. Later I used drafts as a wishlist or planning device for forthcoming trips.

A blog is written log on the web, a daily record of thouhts, actions, descriptions or instructions. The two extremes are the business blogs, which tells you nothing about the writer but praises a product which the writer wants you to buy (such as a destination and a package holiday.  They want the maximum number of readers, and buyers, The more readers, the more potential buyers. The more blog readers, the more the writer will be paid by advertisers. 

The extreme opposite is the writer who has nothing to sell, no readers, writing to record their own thought,s a diary, such as a record of their summer holiday, so they can re-read later. 

You can use a blog for all sorts of things. You could write family recipes, recipes you collected from aroud the world, record your hobby or sport, your holidays hiking, at music festivals, wine tours, show your children growing up at beaches around the world, or write the first draft of a novel set in foreign countries (or Murder on the Epress Train). 

Order of Reading Posts

Your most recent post comes at the top of the list. I wrote a novel inclduing Ukraine, the USA, and UK, and found the problem with using a blog for it is that you have to follow the chapter or scene every day fom when the first post is released to to get the flow when writing, but also when reading to read it in the right order. This is confusing for a new reader, or yourself if you come back to it a year later. If you start by reading today, and then look at yesterday, and so on, you are reading the novel in reverse order. 

You might start a blog as a hobby, an account of travels or life in another country, then when you gather readers, or gain confidence, you ahcnge the style or improve it and turn it into a business. Or use it confidently to write another blog for a business.

If you had a blog with only two posts, yas on Facebook, you might be able to pin the earlier post. Alternatively you could change the dates of the posts.

Why Choose Blogger?

If you are writing a personal blog, for yourself, your family, or a hobby, I suggest you start with blogger.com which is easy to use. They have a template. You just need to decide on a title, picke the layout, start writing and if you have one, add a picture. You could take your theme or favourite post from Facebook as a starting point.

If you are selling products, running a business, you might be better off using a more complicated system which lets youselect the shapes of pages, and fonts and do more complicated things, and add buy now and sign here and so on. (You can also get commercial firms to run a blog for you) For example, if you were selling cosmetics, you could run a blog on look more beautiful. Every blog post would end with a product, such as buy this cream for your skin, or this fruit for your health. 

If you already have a miling list you might have readers straight away, or a sign about your blog in your shop or on your products. 

However, if you are just starting your first blog as a fun experiment, your first blog has no readers in the first five minutes, unless you have mentioned something imortant, such as your eye witness account of a g into a plane crashing into a train or giving birth to ten children in ten minutes.

You can go onto the statistics page and see how many readers you have. When you write your blog post first thing in the morning obviously the first secodn after you have finished writing it the number is zero. Your thought is, how can I make this popular and attract readers.

At this point you have to consider, two people, the writer and the reader. What do you want to get out of? What will the reader get out of it. Where I had dinner last night might interest your children or your mother. Where to eat the best Italian food in the world, and get free drinsk at weekend, will attract more readers. So you might want to change your title, or change the whole subject matter or emphasis. 

My son is in Search Engine Optimisation. I started writing my first blog on travel to tell eidotrs and people promoting destinations what I could say about destinations, resorts, and individual museums, hotels and restaurants.

Photos

I asked my son for advice. He said, one photo at the top is not enough. Look at the top selling blogs. They have two or three pictures, sometimes a picture to illustate the idea in each paragraph. So your title Spain for sun, sesa and sand, has to have a map of Spain, a sunset picture, a view of the sea, and a sandy beach picture, ending with a buy now or link now to the package tour of airline, or several. You should be plannin your whole, year, as a committee might to for a year of Toastmasters meetings. Plan for people taking holidays Christmas, Easter, and summer February is Valentine's day, roamtic destinations. Easter might be skiing, midnight mass, tours to the Vatican, and chocolate musuems and factory visits. Through the year you have national days New Year's Eve around the world. Events like boat races, horse races, car races, football and tennis, and animal shows. 

How will you find enough subjects to write a blog on clothes or travel every day. I just need to walk along my own high street to see restaurants, shops selling suitcases, parking restrictions, bus routes, taxi services. The supermarket has food and drinks from around the world., seasonal decorations and seasonal products. I did a blog post when the clocks changed to British summer time.

What about clothes. How do I find 365 subjects without spending a fortune.I can take a photo of myself in what I am wearing now. I have red sandals. I can write about sandals for travelling. On my travel blog. Wearing a red outfit on my clothes blog. What about my navy jacket with pockets? I can write about clothes with pockets for travelling. I can write about different colours of jacket on my dress outfits blog. dressof the dayyangelablogspot.com

Copying Posts

I could copy my entire blog post from one website to another. But my son warned me that Google might not pick up the second website. It thinks its the same website, or that I have copied another website. Even if its not plagiarism, Google reckons a reader doens't want to read the same thing twice. So I need different phtos. Soe everywhere I go I take two photo. From two differnet angles. One close up, another from a distance. That wasy I can do post with different picures. I can change the title. One post is on Seasides in Span. ANother is the best Spanish sandy beaches.  

Statistics

I look at my blog statistics throughout the day. I had 7,000 readers of my blog post in my travel yesterday. If it gets to lunch time and I have fewer than 3,500 readers, I either change the title or write another blog post.

Links

A friend of mine from another Toastmasters club in the UK, Harrovians, told me I should put links on other media. So I put a link to my blog on Facebook. Then on LinkedIn. Than on Pinterest. Then on Instagram. My readership shot up. Of course, you ought to be doing that every time. But even when I forgot or was too busy, I still seemed to benefit from a permanent increase in numbers. Either I ahd acuired regular readers, or people kep reading the links in my profile on LinkedIn and other places.

If you are starting a new blog, take a look at my blogs. If you have any questions come back to me. I can write a blog post for you with the answers.

CHINESE: Chain Ideas For Learning Chinese, learning to speak without pauses, learning number four

Problem
How do you remember sounds, words, phrases and sentences in another language?

Let's look at how I remember the numbers one to four in Chinese.

Don't Translate Every Word
I am always saying and thinking that advanced speakers of English should not be translating word for word from their own languages because the sentence construction is different.

Pausing - Positive or Negative?
One friend of mine pauses constantly mid-sentence. Yet I am always telling people to slow down and pause.

You should pause because you want listeners to grasp an idea. You don't pause because you are seeking the translation for the next half of the sentence.

There's no good way to pause when you merely look and sound lost. If your voice lifts anxiously and hesitantly, ending like a question, the listeners think you have finished the sentence. Too many high note question-like ending make you sound confused, anxious, nervous.

You don't know where you are going. The listener doesn't know either. If I, as an English speaker find it difficult to piece together all the fragments to make whole sentences, another listener whose first language is not English will find it even harder to decipher the meaning.

On the other hand, if you come to the end, apparently, by lowering your voice, at the end of incomplete sentences, the listener has the same trouble with lots of disconnected bits. It's like a series of sentences in a traffic jam. You keep putting on the brakes. Just as the listener thinks you have finished, maybe the speech is over, you launch off again.

Following a pause with the word and does not help, but hinders. The listener doesn't know whether the 'and' clause is attached to the previous sentence, cuddling up, twinned, on the same theme.

Or is it an additional point, a different point, a more important point, like a sentence starting 'Furthermore ...!", an idea like a police car driving up behind in a slow convoy on the same theme, trying to overtake the previous idea?

The reader or listener gets tired. Otherwise the series of sentences with so many mid-sentence pauses that you cannot identify the ends of sentences is just a series of fragments.

A speech should be like a page, neatly divided up into three sections with sub-headings.

Now let's go back to learning.

When you start to learn, you hear lots of unidentifiable sounds and see lots of symbols on a page.
First, you want to learn some letters, or words, easy ones, which can link to ideas you already know.

The Chinese are good at linking sounds to objects. They links words with high tones and low tones to different words. A bit like Pitmans shorthand, where a dot in the air has a different meanting to one on the line of below it.

After you have learned two or three words, a couple of nouns, or names of people, or animals or objects, you can create a simple sentence.

Learning Vocabulary, one word at a time
Yet when I am learning a foreign language I am learning each word with its translation, one by one, seeking a link.

Is my first idea wrong? Is my second idea wrong? Or is there a time when one should transition and make the great leap forward into thinking whole phrases and sentences in another language?

Some words are 'false friends. The word for four is so similar to death in Chinese that you don't use the written number four as a house number or in a motorbike numberplate or in a gift because it is unlucky.

I used to have trouble remembering the number four in Chinese. The first three numbers were easy.

The written symbols for one and two and three are easy. They are parallel horizontal lines, like Roman numerals on their side. The same number as the numbers they describe. One two three. A single is in one, and part of the word for Monday. Two lines for two; three lines for three, like a pile of three pieces of paper, or books.

Then I remembered 'four' sounds like death. The symbol for four looks like a curtained hospital bed. The symbolic meaning is: Dying and death in hospital. The sound is similar to: Will you sue? Yes, sir. The number? The four sides of a square. Sentence to remember the four numbers, (w)e err, san(itorium), (sue), Sir. The Japanese numbers for one to four or five sound similar.

• 1: 一 (壹) yī
• 2: 二 (Traditional:貳) èr
• 3: 三 (Traditional:參) sān
• 4: 四 (肆) sì

Author
Angela Lansbury

Colours in Welsh to see and recognize, hear and repeat | Beginner Welsh Lessons

More posts on colour and other Welsh words and learning Welsh. Please link to your favourite posts.

English - Welsh
orange - o r e n
blue - glas (think of blue glass)
pink - pinc
brown - brown (yes, the same word)

This simple video shows you each word three times, and makes it larger. and repeats sounds slowly three times. At the end are links to other videos for learning Welsh and about Wales.

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. I teach languages.

Learning languages by initials, middle and final letters

Do you need a memory aid for learning Russian? Ne nado - no need! Learning Russian through DuoLingo, I noticed these initial, middle and last letter links:

Brat - Brother B-T  - B-Th
My brother is a brat. Do you have a brat? I mean brother!

EM - Eat yuMmy / Eat theM / like the German essen
eTo - is iT (think of the French il E s T - it is)
koFe - coFEe
Moi - My (If you think that our language alphabet comes from Greek which turns the letter i into a final Y you can see that Moi in Russian is like my in English as well as the French moi which means my.
Molokai - MiLK
Ne - No
NaDo - NeeD
OK - Khorosho
SeSTRa - SiSTeR
sTol - TabLe under which you put a STOoL
tarelka - plate - TArELkA - pLATE
Telefon - Telephone
ThankS - Spasibo /
thankS I aPpreciate the t- SPaSIBO (Or thankS for the tiP I appreCIate it 0 in fact I am BO wled Over by your tip in my Bowl
cHTo? - wHaT?
yABLoki - ApPLes
yaItSO - egg (O) shape of an egg yolk or boiled egg, IO as in bOIled egg, SO the soldiers or strips of toast you dip in the soft boiled egg

The work cat uses K in Russian, like the English words kettle and kiwi.

A he-cat is simple, almost the same as English KoT.

A she-cat is a longer word, - k o s h k a (I had to insert spaces because the spell check chooses kosher).
The best and most memorable illustrated explanations on wiki
http://www.wikihow.com/Say-Cat-in-Russian

Please share with your friends or classmates who are learning languages.

Angela Lansbury, English and languages teacher, tutor, workshop leader.