bitful

I'm not really one for new year resolutions. I believe that if you want to change something, there's no better time than the present to do so. I guess I have learnt the hard way (many a diet/stopping smoking/workout regime were started on a Monday and failed hours/days/weeks later).

Improving myself is now a constant process, carefully monitored to avoid losing track of my own goals.

There is one thing that I still have not managed to do, after almost five years with Dr B., and that's helping him to learn Italian. He's got a collection of grammars and language courses with different approaches (many given to him by me) but when it comes to teach I am possibly the worst: impatient, incapable of simplifying concepts, and really really bad at explaining language without using grammar terms (to him incomprehensible).

Every year on New Year's Day I give him a little present for him to keep on his desk at work: the Living Language Italian Daily Phrases & Culture 2007 Day-to-Day Calendar (tip: buy it after Christmas, you will find it in the bargain bins in every bookshop).

This year I am also going to teach my beloved one useful phrase every day, and I will post it on this website. This way he can access it from anywhere, ask questions and receive my answers in the comment box so that they are all kept together. And you can learn too, should you wish to do so.

Today's phrase is Buon anno (Happy new year). Literally: 'Good year'.

And this is where I'll stop. I would normally go on about some peculiarities of adjectives when they precede nouns, but I will not. I'm more than happy to answer questions, fire away in the comments for this post.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 1st, 2008 at 6:04 pm and last modified on January 4th, 2008 at 7:42 pm, and is filed under italian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.