It is ever easier to learn Italian by nourishing ones creativity, enjoying oneself and putting oneself to the test, but with that light-hearted spirit for learning, which at times is useful to meet life’s challenges!
From enigmatography to quizzes, to nursery rhymes, which, thanks to their phonetic features help memorize, many are the tools available to the student getting ready to learn a foreign language. The study of Italian includes also moments of play.
When studying Italian, a series of these instruments can be of help; in fact, their playful nature helps maintain high levels of attention and reinforces the learning and memorizing processes. Integrating the theoretical study with more carefree moments and sharing with others, becomes a useful element for enhancing motivation, which plays an important role in learning in general.
How many times, while intent on studying a subject, we seem to immediately forget what we had just read in the books? Well, when studying a language we must be even more receptive and exercise not only the theoretical aspects of the language, the syntactic, grammatical and morphological ones, but also delve deeper into the dimension of the use of the language.
For the study of Italian there are indeed a number of online resources that can be used in this sense, such as certain tabs, which help improve the pronunciation, or games designed for all ages and learning levels, such as those that focus on verbal tenses, on synonyms and antonyms, on the vocabulary and the grammatical structures.
Some exercises use the riddle formula, others to the “memory” one, a sort of game that consists in recognizing phonetic similarities, like in the traditional game where similar images are juxtaposed in pairs.
It must be clear, however, that resorting to the “play” factor in the study of Italian does not mean reducing the study of the language to a moment of entertainment that is an end in itself, but to give it a playful perspective. This learning approach is increasingly appreciated and supported in various studies on the matter.
In particular, thanks to this repetitiveness, certain compositional forms like nursery rhymes or riddles successfully secure in the memory of those who learn them certain linguistic aspects, thus facilitating the process of learning.
Similarly, memorizing poems, rhymes and songs is also part of this approach, alongside with motion games such as mime, exercises games such as the completion of sentences, word chains, dialogues and even dramatizations with puppets, masks and simulations of various types.
An example?
‘Fu, tre, re, me, no, so, va, sta, fa, vo, sto, fo, io mai accenterò!‘ (…I will never put an accent on!) It is a refrain that can help you remember that these Italian words are never accented.
Even board games like scrabble, dominoes, memory, tombola let you dwell on the most interactive and creative aspects of a language, together with crossword puzzles and riddles of various types, which prove suitable for this purpose.
In addition, as is easy to imagine, using a nursery rhyme or a song that is part of the tradition of the studied language is also an opportunity to discover curiosities and learn about important aspects of the country’s cultural life where the language in question is spoken.
