Ciao, Mondo!

What is this all about?

What follows is my own guide to learning Italian. I'm working my way through an Italian Grammar A Level textbook and it got to the point where I started to forget what I had previous read. This blog is an attempt to document everything in my own way, work through all the exercises in the book and provide all the links which are necessary to make learning A Level Italian actually possible.

Who am I?

All the other posts will be about the Italian language. But first I'll take the opportunity to introduce myself and let people know where I'm coming from. My name is Michele Memoli and I live in London, UK. My family are Italian but I grew up in the UK. Naturally, my parents tried to teach me Italian when I was young, but as a child I just didn't want to know – why would any child need to be able to speak Italian at school?

We visited Italy every summer. Usually to see family. Although my spoken Italian was limited I learnt a lot of nouns this way and as a result, there won't be many lists of them on this blog except for in examples. Not unless I need to remember something. Anyway, as I grew up, I realised speaking a second language would be an amazing thing to do, and so I set myself the task of learning it properly.

That's where I'm at. I hope this will be useful to other people as well as myself. I'm always open to suggestions on how I can improve the experience of using this site so please contact if you have anything you want to say.

How is this going to work?

Learning a language by yourself is quite a difficult thing. You need someone to talk to, and try things out with. I can't do that with my parents because we're too used to English. Instead, I'm going to use this site.

As mentioned above I'll mostly be working through an Italian grammar textbook, but I'm planning to work through all the exercises and provide as many translations as I can. I'm not going to just take things from the book, rather I'm going to write things in a way I understand and I hope this will make it easier for other people too. I'm sure I'll have a lot of questions along the way and I might decide to pull these out/highlight them in some way so that we can get a good discussion going on in the comments. If I'm doing something that works well, or could work better, let me know – I'll change it.

That said, I think I'm done. Stay tuned and we'll try to learn Italian, properly, together.