News in Slow Italian
News in Slow Italian is a website that offers Italian audio stories about Italy and Italian culture.
The platform mainly focuses on audio lessons, and the learning material is divided into three main sections:
- Dialogues and short stories. A collection of stories about various aspects of Italian culture. This section also provides additional resources, such as grammar lessons, flashcards, and quizzes.
- Italian news. The news section is structured in a weekly podcast and introduces the main news about Italian society.
- Series. A collection of fictional and non-fictional stories structured in chapters.
The audio material is divided according to the proficiency level (from beginner to advanced) and includes a transcript to help you understand what you hear.
What’s wrong with News in Slow Italian
News in Slow Italian is an excellent tool to improve your listening comprehension and expand your vocabulary: the audios are clear and engaging, and you have access to a lot of material to exercise.
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However, the website doesn’t cover the speaking part.
You need to speak a lot if you want to become fluent in Italian, and there’s little chance to practice your speaking skills only by listening to the audio.
The platform offers a Pronunciation section, in which you can listen to a sentence and record yourself trying to reproduce it.
But it may be not enough if you want to get more speaking confidence.
A News in Slow Italian alternative for the Italian language
Think in Italian courses are a valid alternative if you want to practice your Italian speaking skills.
The website offers a broad set of audio lessons (Ripeti con me) focused on Italy and its culture.
The lessons are designed to make you speak Italian from day one: you won’t only listen to random Italian sentences, but you’ll also have the chance to repeat the words you hear.
This approach is based on speech shadowing, which is an interesting technique developed in the late 1950s.
The speech shadowing works in the following way: you hear a sentence and reproduce what you hear with a little delay.
Not only do you use the same words, but you will also imitate the pronunciation and the intonation.
This allows the brain to process new syntax, words, and sounds.
It is something similar to what happens to babies, who learn how to speak by mimicking their parents and the words they hear.
Think in Italian courses are designed to improve your spoken Italian naturally, without the stress of thinking in your language and then translating it into Italian.
In this way, retain useful vocabulary, learn new grammar naturally, and improve your Italian pronunciation by mimicking a native Italian speaker.
Are you ready to speak like an Italian? Learn more about Think in Italian courses.
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