“My Word!” (Or iPhone Apps)

by Ken Zindle

I’m studying Italian. Why? Because I want to!  I travelled to Rome in both 2006 and 2007, and found Italy one of the most wonderful travel destination. (It joins the ranks in my mind of places like Vienna; Warsaw, Poland, the Rhine River, Hong Kong, and the Gulf Coast of Florida!) When I’m going to a place like that, I always want to be able to do some communicating in the local language. So, last year I started an informal Italian class and worked on the language on my own. That worked well, and I was able to get along remarkable well. (It helps that the Italians are pleased, when you try to speak their language, instead of insisting that they use your English. They are also very forgiving about your mistakes.)

Along comes the Declan Software application for the iPhone: “Italian Word of the Day.”  Great app!!!  It not only provides the daily word, for the enormous fee of $.99 but what is remarkable is the kind of Word of the Day that you receive. They are phrases that are designed to get you into a conversation mode with the language immediately. I mean phrases like:  “on the left,” “ on the floor,” “on the table,” “instead of”. They are conversation blocks, not just words.

Of course they also have a similar application for words in other languages.  That’s cool but right now it’s Italian that I want, and they’re coming through.  Look them over.

Comments

[David]

You might enjoy the language learning software at http://language101.com We have the Italian section all ready to load lessons but we are still looking for the right Italian with the right accent etc. to load the lessons.

Would you like lessons from Italian movie clips, Italian songs and things like that? If so let us know what are your favorite Italian movies and we will see if we can make some lessons.

If you know an Italian who would be a good person to help with recording lessons please let us know.

We also think we can get this running on your iphone by Christmas. The problem right now is that Apple does not yet support flash on the iphone.